When asked what was the best thing that ever happened to support Irish start-ups, a successful Dublin founder used to jokingly reply “EI 147”, referring to the code for the Aer Lingus direct flight from Dublin to San Francisco. I think it was a joke, but he might have been deadly serious.  Dublin has been twinned with San Jose since 1986, but it’s the Californian city at the other end of Silicon Valley – San Francisco – that would be a much more suitable sibling for our capital. Both cities have been dominated economically, and I’d argue socially, by a…