25k Steps, My Websummit 2015 Day 1 Recap
This is the third Websummit I’ve attended. Unfortunately it will be the last in Dublin. It was difficult to predict how the media storm that preceded this year’s outing might change the experience. Fortunately, the squabbles don’t matter when inside the RDS bubble for three days in November. The diverse stages, great talks, halls and halls of hustling startups, free coffee, showcased Irish food, transport issues, multi-coloured sheep, wifi hiccups, soundbites and scandals; they’re all here, just bigger than last year, as we expected.
Email Is The Cockroach Of The Internet — Stewart Butterfield
The founder of Slack Stewart Butterfield gave a good interview with Laurie Segall on the centre stage talking about Slack as a product, Slack as a company and, more interestingly, the ups and downs of his entrepreneurship journey. Given how disruptive Slack is as a communication tool, describing the incumbent as a cockroach of the internet is a funny soundbite but doesn’t come as much of a surprise. It was refreshing however to hear Stewart describe how the stress and the pressures of running a successful company don’t dissipate as the company becomes more successful, scales and grows. This is a point that sometimes gets lost in the bright lights of entrepreneurship success but having it discussed on such a large stage (pun!) made the interview much more authentic.
Don’t Be Afraid To Fail — Michael Dell
Michael Dell seems like a man that radiates friendly confidence, a man that would inspire you to do good work so as not to let him down. At least that was my reading of his demeanor during his great centre stage interview. Perhaps his positive attitude is a side effect of brokering the largest IT acquisition in history (of EMC for $67 billion). Building a company with $1000 in his dorm room to a company approaching $1 trillion in revenue puts him well ahead in being crowned king of the entrepreneurs. David Rowan did a good job of getting some pearls of wisdom from Michael while at the same time ticking all the must ask questions about where Dell and EMC are going (which is IoT btw).
“If you want to innovate, if you want to do new things, you have to embrace risk”
When asked about balancing risk as an entrepreneur, Michael Dell was bullish and told us to throw ourselves into challenging situations and not to be too afraid of risk, or failing.
A Chance Encounter With Ser Davos — Liam Cunningham
I walked 17.45 km today (25,034 steps), a lot of which was between the main RDS area and the Centre stage area. This morning while walking back to the RDS among a stream of people, I noticed a guy sitting on the wall watching everyone go by. As I got closer, I recognised him as Liam Cunningham. After a period of hesitation, I decided to suck it up and go full on celebrity fan, when else would I ever get to talk to this guy? If it didn’t fly, I was ready to exit stage left and he would never see me again anyway.
My worries were misplaced, he is an absolute gent and was nice enough to chat with me for 30 seconds and take a photo. I headed over to check out his talk later on but couldn’t get in because the queue was a mile long. I got a kick out of having the chat with him earlier as everyone walked passed oblivious.
The Food Summit, A Tale of Two Tents
The main scandal inside the summit this year (so far :-p) are the food tokens, aka #Foodgate.
20 EUR for a meal barely worth 10 EUR is disappointing. The quality of the food in the main meal tents was ok, just not worth the money. Maybe we’ll see a change tomorrow.
On the other hand, the Good Food Ireland showcase tent was fantastic. Getting to meet and talk to the Irish food producers directly is a great story point and hook for the tasty culinary products on show. Richmount’s Elderflower cordial shocked me with how nice their beverage is.
Notable mentions on the ice-cream front are Linnalla from The Burren and last year’s returning stars Glastry Farm.
I absolutely recommend starting in this tent and maybe avoiding the other food tents altogether.
Next Job — Doug Howlett
My favourite thing about the websummit is the diversity of topics across all the stages. Last year, my favourite talks were on the sport and music stages. The ability to walk into any stage, sit down and learn something about an area outside of your everyday field or even better, figuring out how to apply tactics from other fields into yours, is very powerful.
Munster Rugby, the sport and the ethos it embodies, is very important to me. There was no chance of me missing Doug Howlett speak about being a franchise player at Munster, along with Joe Canning of Galway. I was surprised at how well the content of the talk complimented the themes of the entrepreneurship. Both Dougie and Joe were asked about the high expectations of being the star player on the team and how they deal with that pressure. The same can be said in many tech roles; senior dev, team lead, founder, unicorn CEO etc. The advise they both give is to be accountable to yourself for motivation but also rely on the team around you to support you. The parallels here with the countless pieces of advice about building the right team or company culture in tech are interesting. Having the right people around you is important, be they Paul O’Connell motivating you to be your best, Ronan O’Gara slapping you on the back when you fumble a high ball and telling you to get onto the next job, or your co-founder reminding you why you both are going to crush it.
Day 2 Awaits
Those are my highlights of day 1, lets see what happens tomorrow :-)
About Me
I’m a web consultant, contract web developer and technical project manager originally from Cork and now based in Swansea, South Wales. A lot of my work is done with clients in Ireland & the UK, where I offer strategy, planning and technical delivery services. I also offer freelance CTO services to companies in need of technical bootstrapping or reinvention. If you think I can help you in your business, check out my details on http://darylfeehely.com.
