The entrance. Quick tip: it’s faster not to register at the airport!

Web Summit Day 1 — Data, accelerators, unicorns, and Lume

Alexandre Kitching
Nov 5 · 2 min read

https://youtu.be/P3k1Km3b3yA

Three weeks ago, we took the plunge! We left our jobs with a project (now a company, Lume) that we have developed and worked on actively whilst at Imagination.

Today, here we are at Web Summit part of the Alpha Program, a program for early-stage start-ups, living our first experiences as real entrepreneurs! Here is a recap of our first day out in the wild.

Day 1 — insights:

  • Data! It is all about data. Unsurprisingly, maybe.
  • A lot of “AI-enabled” or “AI-powered” software start-ups
  • Web Summit is definitely for startups. Big companies are here too, of course, and, for heavy industry companies, the message simple: highlight how digitally focused they are like this initiative by Airbus, https://skywise.airbus.com/.
  • Interestingly, these big companies have created internal startup tracks to guide young companies to the right teams internally or even incubate them directly, to name a few: Airbus, Fujitsu, Volkswagen, and Roche. Has anyone taken part in any of these? It sounds like a great initiative as I know how long enterprise sales cycles can be but filling out a form to maybe be invited to pitch seems like screaming into a void… but then again what isn’t.
  • Here is a nugget. We assisted to a talk on UNICORNS (privately-owned companies valued at over a billion dollars). The three panelists were all founders of unicorns. Out of the three, two were not profitable companies! How incredible is that? The only company that was (Canva) had bootstrapped at the beginning. The advice: focus on users.
  • There are more unicorns today than ever before and only a few IPO. Recently, the cases of Uber (-33% since IPO on 10th May), Lyft and WeWork stand out. It seems like there is a big disconnect between what VC value and public investors value. VC value growth. Public investors value profitability. The business models don’t match.

More from us tomorrow. We will have a stand tomorrow stand A212 and would love to show you Lume.

If you are around or know anyone we should be talking to please send them my way or message me directly.

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