November 23, 2016 at 13:10Web Summit Lisbon Conference Review
2 weeks after the Web Summit in Lisbon, I finally wrote my impressions. Web Summit is an IT conference that was born in Dublin and over the past 7 years has evolved from a gathering of local bloggers and entrepreneurs to the largest conference in Europe with 50,000 audiences and speakers such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Drew Houston, Tony Hawk and even Russians Volozh and Kaspersky.
This is my fourth Web Summit, and every year I observe what work the organizers are doing to gather cool speakers and satisfy the crowd of thousands of geeks (as they call their audience). The first three years I went to gain experience and look for speakers for the MBLT and MBLTDev conferences, this year I went not from e-Legion, but from the Irish Investment Fund to look for new startups.
I hope my post will help you decide whether to go next year or not.
Details under the cut.
This year, the conference left Dublin for Lisbon. The main reason, according to the organizer of Paddy Cosgrave, was the poor infrastructure of the capital of Ireland, the lack of a conference venue (still, it was necessary to somehow accommodate 50,000 people) and the refusal of the Irish authorities to cooperate (a police escort VIP speakers haha). If you are interested, you can read an article in The Irish Times on this topic.
To understand the scope of the conference, I’ll tell you that Web Summit 2016 was held in a complex built for Expo 98, and included 4 huge pavilions and a MEO arena for 20,000 people, in which everyone from A-HA and Kiss to Madonna and Justin Bieber.
Summit posters hung on every corner, not only at the airport, but also in the city, the logo appeared on the screensaver of urban wifi, and huge signs were in the most crowded places in Lisbon.
Hand on heart, the Lisbon Summit turned out to be better than Dublin. The city easily accommodated 53,000 people, the metro (which is absent in Dublin) took 40 minutes from the venue to the city center (and the center of all parties), the Internet did not fall (not only wifi did not work in Dublin, it was also just mobile the connection was lame), there was no wild flea around the stands. In addition, for all participants, the organizers knocked out a single ticket for any type of transport for half a week cheaper than usual (25 euros against 50). Not bad, huh?
This year, the organizers made the opening on Monday evening, they increased the conference to 3.5 days. Of course, the arena, which seats 20,000 people, could not break and the rest had to stand in line in the street. In general, I heard a lot of indignation about the queues for the stage, for food, to the toilet, but these people clearly have no idea how to organize large events, or did not guess to leave the conference center and go to eat in the cafe, all of which were in bulk.
The conference will remain in Lisbon for another two years, and then leave. Maybe in Barcelona. Or Berlin. Or somewhere else. Wait and see.
I did not have time for everything that happened in the city during these 4 days, but I will try to give a small overview of what I was on.
Web Summit 2016 brought together 650+ speakers from around the world. The main ones were Harry Vaynerchuk, STO Facebook, CEO LINE, CFO Square, founder of Product Hunt, football players Ronaldinho and Luis Figo, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They even brought Miroslav Duma and the Vatican's Culture Secretary (not sure how to correctly transfer his position), which, they say, persuaded the Pope to create an account on Twitter.
By the way, he turned out to be a very good speaker, did not preach, but merely talked about how even the church has to change and adapt to the digital world.
The coolest was the Sofia robot from Hanson Robotics, which behaves and speaks almost like a person. Her facial expressions, movements and voice are simply amazing. I didn’t shoot, but I found a video , look.
It was difficult to tear between 17 streams, and it was unrealistic to run from one scene to another in 5 minutes. Well, rarely does anyone go to conferences only to listen to speakers. It was more important for me to communicate with visitors and startups, I can listen to speakers in the recording after. True, I still managed to capture a couple of performances. Sanjay Singal, partner at Canada’s 500 Startups branch, spoke very well about how startups need to communicate with investors: “Every time I am asked to sign an NDA, the most polite answer is“ f * ck off ”. "We receive hundreds of applications a day, do you really think that we will steal your ideas?" . Or“We will never invest in people who meet. If they are married, then no problem, and if they are engaged and the wedding is tomorrow, no. Such a relationship never ends well. ”
To prevent people from getting bored in front of the bars, a Sunset Summit was organized, in which the Portuguese talked about their country. It is worth saying that all heated by Portuguese wine and gin, everyone joyfully and cheerfully rode to Pink Street or Bairro Alto, where the main networking took place. I’m very interested to know how many bars have earned over these 4 days, because on Friday both areas were almost empty.
During the conference and on Friday after:
Who cares to see the scope of the Night Summit, see the map .
One and a half thousand startups were divided into three sectors: START for those who have already started, BETA for growth-stage and ALPHA for early-stage guys. One of the main trends has become AR and VR startups and various additions to them.
Walking between them and talking with the founders, I met a lot of the same ideas or the repetition of those that already exist. Maybe, of course, it makes sense to launch a local TripAdvisor in Indonesia or another travel planner, they know their market better, but this will not work in Europe and America. Working in an investment fund, every day I come across guys who decide to build a new Amazon or Uber, and are upset when they tell them that their idea is unlikely to become profitable.
Investors very much complained about the unpreparedness of alpha startups, that they not only did not make worthy presentations, but did not even conduct any basic market analysis. As a result, investors stupidly lost time on pitches on Monday night. This begs the question, how did the organizers select them?
The organizers said that participants from 166 countries came to them, which is 32 countries more than last year. One of the innovations was the free Women in Tech tickets. In Europe and America, gender equality caused a lot of noise, and the organizers decided that since women earn less, they should be given free tickets. You should see that number of tweets from men with indignation! And now stones will fly at me, but in part I agree with them, because half came there only because of a free ticket, without even understanding why they were there. For some reason, in Russia I did not feel restrained, but as soon as I moved to Europe, I immediately started. Here they hold so many events for women and shout so loudly about equality that this feeling somehow eats into you on the subconscious.But they didn’t hear about March 8th.
By the way, this year I met a lot of Russians. No wonder, you need to get either a British or an Irish visa to Ireland, and you can easily come here with a Schengen.
If you are interested in talking with entrepreneurs from all over the world, looking for investors, learning trends and saying that you saw Ilona Mask alive, you are here. Even if you are not working in a startup and are not looking for investors, Web Summit is a great place primarily for networking and collecting content. And even more so if you are thinking about creating your own company. For you, the conference will be a good place to collect feedback and hone the pitch. And I want to believe that next year the quality will not fall.
And here you can see all the performances.
This is my fourth Web Summit, and every year I observe what work the organizers are doing to gather cool speakers and satisfy the crowd of thousands of geeks (as they call their audience). The first three years I went to gain experience and look for speakers for the MBLT and MBLTDev conferences, this year I went not from e-Legion, but from the Irish Investment Fund to look for new startups.
I hope my post will help you decide whether to go next year or not.
Details under the cut.
This year, the conference left Dublin for Lisbon. The main reason, according to the organizer of Paddy Cosgrave, was the poor infrastructure of the capital of Ireland, the lack of a conference venue (still, it was necessary to somehow accommodate 50,000 people) and the refusal of the Irish authorities to cooperate (a police escort VIP speakers haha). If you are interested, you can read an article in The Irish Times on this topic.
To understand the scope of the conference, I’ll tell you that Web Summit 2016 was held in a complex built for Expo 98, and included 4 huge pavilions and a MEO arena for 20,000 people, in which everyone from A-HA and Kiss to Madonna and Justin Bieber.
Summit posters hung on every corner, not only at the airport, but also in the city, the logo appeared on the screensaver of urban wifi, and huge signs were in the most crowded places in Lisbon.
Hand on heart, the Lisbon Summit turned out to be better than Dublin. The city easily accommodated 53,000 people, the metro (which is absent in Dublin) took 40 minutes from the venue to the city center (and the center of all parties), the Internet did not fall (not only wifi did not work in Dublin, it was also just mobile the connection was lame), there was no wild flea around the stands. In addition, for all participants, the organizers knocked out a single ticket for any type of transport for half a week cheaper than usual (25 euros against 50). Not bad, huh?
This year, the organizers made the opening on Monday evening, they increased the conference to 3.5 days. Of course, the arena, which seats 20,000 people, could not break and the rest had to stand in line in the street. In general, I heard a lot of indignation about the queues for the stage, for food, to the toilet, but these people clearly have no idea how to organize large events, or did not guess to leave the conference center and go to eat in the cafe, all of which were in bulk.
The conference will remain in Lisbon for another two years, and then leave. Maybe in Barcelona. Or Berlin. Or somewhere else. Wait and see.
I did not have time for everything that happened in the city during these 4 days, but I will try to give a small overview of what I was on.
Speakers
Web Summit 2016 brought together 650+ speakers from around the world. The main ones were Harry Vaynerchuk, STO Facebook, CEO LINE, CFO Square, founder of Product Hunt, football players Ronaldinho and Luis Figo, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They even brought Miroslav Duma and the Vatican's Culture Secretary (not sure how to correctly transfer his position), which, they say, persuaded the Pope to create an account on Twitter.
By the way, he turned out to be a very good speaker, did not preach, but merely talked about how even the church has to change and adapt to the digital world.
The coolest was the Sofia robot from Hanson Robotics, which behaves and speaks almost like a person. Her facial expressions, movements and voice are simply amazing. I didn’t shoot, but I found a video , look.
Program
It was difficult to tear between 17 streams, and it was unrealistic to run from one scene to another in 5 minutes. Well, rarely does anyone go to conferences only to listen to speakers. It was more important for me to communicate with visitors and startups, I can listen to speakers in the recording after. True, I still managed to capture a couple of performances. Sanjay Singal, partner at Canada’s 500 Startups branch, spoke very well about how startups need to communicate with investors: “Every time I am asked to sign an NDA, the most polite answer is“ f * ck off ”. "We receive hundreds of applications a day, do you really think that we will steal your ideas?" . Or“We will never invest in people who meet. If they are married, then no problem, and if they are engaged and the wedding is tomorrow, no. Such a relationship never ends well. ”
To prevent people from getting bored in front of the bars, a Sunset Summit was organized, in which the Portuguese talked about their country. It is worth saying that all heated by Portuguese wine and gin, everyone joyfully and cheerfully rode to Pink Street or Bairro Alto, where the main networking took place. I’m very interested to know how many bars have earned over these 4 days, because on Friday both areas were almost empty.
During the conference and on Friday after:
Who cares to see the scope of the Night Summit, see the map .
Startups
One and a half thousand startups were divided into three sectors: START for those who have already started, BETA for growth-stage and ALPHA for early-stage guys. One of the main trends has become AR and VR startups and various additions to them.
Walking between them and talking with the founders, I met a lot of the same ideas or the repetition of those that already exist. Maybe, of course, it makes sense to launch a local TripAdvisor in Indonesia or another travel planner, they know their market better, but this will not work in Europe and America. Working in an investment fund, every day I come across guys who decide to build a new Amazon or Uber, and are upset when they tell them that their idea is unlikely to become profitable.
Investors very much complained about the unpreparedness of alpha startups, that they not only did not make worthy presentations, but did not even conduct any basic market analysis. As a result, investors stupidly lost time on pitches on Monday night. This begs the question, how did the organizers select them?
People
The organizers said that participants from 166 countries came to them, which is 32 countries more than last year. One of the innovations was the free Women in Tech tickets. In Europe and America, gender equality caused a lot of noise, and the organizers decided that since women earn less, they should be given free tickets. You should see that number of tweets from men with indignation! And now stones will fly at me, but in part I agree with them, because half came there only because of a free ticket, without even understanding why they were there. For some reason, in Russia I did not feel restrained, but as soon as I moved to Europe, I immediately started. Here they hold so many events for women and shout so loudly about equality that this feeling somehow eats into you on the subconscious.
By the way, this year I met a lot of Russians. No wonder, you need to get either a British or an Irish visa to Ireland, and you can easily come here with a Schengen.
If you are interested in talking with entrepreneurs from all over the world, looking for investors, learning trends and saying that you saw Ilona Mask alive, you are here. Even if you are not working in a startup and are not looking for investors, Web Summit is a great place primarily for networking and collecting content. And even more so if you are thinking about creating your own company. For you, the conference will be a good place to collect feedback and hone the pitch. And I want to believe that next year the quality will not fall.
And here you can see all the performances.
