GO Youth Conference – A Hell of a Ride Ends
Time to Move On
3 March 2012. 6:52 a.m. It was early on a Saturday morning and I was taking a train from Porto to Lisbon. I was going to spend the day in the capital of Portugal. It wasn’t to spend a vacation weekend with friends, to go to a football match or to watch a live concert. It was to spend an entire day at a conference about youth entrepreneurship. That conference was GO Youth Conference and it was its first edition.
At that time, I was working at my first company ever, doing a valuable internship for my future. But it was also boring. I knew that working at that kind of company, huge and bureaucratic, would never be a fit for me. And so I was already trying to find new paths for my professional future. One of the things that I did regularly was go to conferences and meet new people, especially conferences about entrepreneurship and startups. I started seeing that the people participating in those kinds of conferences were different from the rest of the world – ambitious, fearless and full of dreams. And I felt connected to those people.
I had seen something about GO Youth Conference two or three weeks before while browsing randomly on Facebook, and it captured my attention immediately. It had a good concept, some interesting speakers and the promise of a lot of young people gathered, eager to change things and create impact in Portugal and in the world. My decision was easy: I bought a ticket for the conference.
The day was fantastic, but not because of the reasons I pointed out before. Yes, I met new people and I learnt from many of the speakers. But the most important moment for me was when I met the organizing team for the first time. I remember it like it was yesterday: I was between surprised and shocked. Why? Because they did an awesome job organizing everything and there were just five of them, aged between 17 and 21. I thought that those guys must have something special and I started building a relationship with them that has lasted until today.
Months later, Tiago Vidal, the lead organizer, went to Porto where I was living and we had the opportunity to know each other better. We had a lot of ideas in common and I knew that, one day, I would do something with him. A few weeks later he invited me to join the team of GO Youth Conference and the rest is history.
GO Youth Conference became a huge annual event about youth entrepreneurship where we connected young founders and CEOs of American and European startups, investors and journalists with a young audience, mainly college students and recent graduates. I have been part of the last two editions, being an active member of the team as the community and partnerships manager (but doing a lot more things, as does everyone on the team).
GO Youth Conference grew massively, reaching outstanding results:
- We competed with the speaker’s lineups of the biggest startup and technology conferences in the world, conferences with incomparable budgets and reach. Only those who organize conferences of this kind know how difficult is to reach and convince many of these people to speak – it’s months of hundreds of emails and phone calls and dozens of hacks. In two years we brought to Portugal the founders of Siri, Kiip, Rap Genius (now Genius), Branch, Hotel Tonight, Huddle, Scan, Poptip, CloudFlare, Paymill, Podio and Adeven (now Adjust); we also brought the founders of organizations that are supporting entrepreneurship all over the world such as MassChallenge, Sandbox or UnCollege. Heads of companies such as Prezi, SoundCloud, Groupon or BlaBlaCar also came, as did investors from Hoxton Ventures and New Enterprise Associates and managing editors from The Huffington Post and Mashable; and, at last, we gave the stage to some of the best Portuguese startups as Uniplaces, Talkdesk, Hole19, Codacy and Seedrs.
- We attracted around 400 people, mainly young people, to each edition of GYC. With lots of things happening outside during those weekends, many chose to be at GO Youth Conference instead and proved that young people really want to change the way of doing things in the world.
- In 2013, we did a startup competition, giving the winner the chance to pitch at Startupbootcamp in Berlin. In 2014 we tested a new concept – a bootcamp. We joined Portuguese startups with many of the speakers to discuss the particular problems and opportunities of their businesses. These startups probably will never again have such a private meeting with some of those speakers, as it was their first time in Portugal and maybe the last.
- We sold Lisbon to the speakers, people that travel all over the world every week. And I must say, they left Portugal completely delighted! We showed off the best of the city – the great monuments, the old streets and the amazing view to the river. We dined out with them in some of the most beautiful places in Lisbon. We went out with them to bars and discos, we played football and we took them to watch a live football match, a “clássico” Sporting-FC Porto. Since day one we were always with them, always thinking of giving them the best experience ever! And this makes all the difference – we didn’t only organize a conference, we promoted a country, doing a better job with that than many organizations out there and with a very small budget. These people will remember Portugal forever and only God knows what it will bring in the future – whether it will bring business to Portugal, have Portuguese startups as customers or providers, hire Portuguese talent, awesome PR about Portugal all over the world, etc.. I’m sure that this all will happen (actually, it is already happening).
- We had lots of good PR, in Portugal and abroad. With that, we helped to promote many of the Portuguese entrepreneurs and showed the best of the Portuguese startup ecosystem.
- We have succeeded in creating a unique environment during the GO Youth Conference. The participants, many of them young students, can interact with the speakers like at no other conference. People really like to ask questions of the speakers (we never had those awkward moments of silence). And we had loads of really interesting content during the talks. The best achievement is definitely to hear from some participants saying that those days at GYC were worth more than a year in college.
- We had dozens of sponsors and partners in the two editions: big companies, small companies, entrepreneurship clubs, universities, incubators, accelerators, etc. I want to specially thank each sponsor that believed in us and allowed us to build such a big thing – they are: Explorer Investments, Lunacloud, Paymill, Vodafone and Teleperformance. By the way, do you think your organization is a good fit and can help GO Youth Conference grow in the future? Tweet me @filipecmatos and I’ll be more than happy to introduce you to the organization!
But more than numbers, what makes me grateful for being part of this adventure is all the good things that have happened in my life. GO Youth Conference literally changed my life forever, and for the better. Thanks to GO Youth Conference I dropped out of a master’s course that I didn’t like. Thanks to GYC I worked for two awesome companies (Vertty and GetSocial), places where I developed my skills as never before, where I worked with some of the most talented people I have ever met and where I found my inner talent and how I could sell it to the market (interesting fact: I met the founders of GetSocial, at that time Wishareit, for the first time during the Startup Competition organized by us at GO Youth Conference. I ended up working with them for eight months a few months later). Thanks to GYC I met a lot more people from the startup scene in Portugal, especially in Lisbon, and that was crucial to be working now at Startup Lisboa. Basically, many of my future working experiences and the loads of new people that I met along the way, many of them who I consider my friends today, are thanks being part of GO Youth Conference. Can I imagine my life without all these good things? NOT AT ALL!
I’m also very happy for the friendships I’ve created with each of the members of our team. It was almost two years working with them and many moments will remain forever. We had bad moments, of course, but also a lot of incredible moments. Telma, André, Gonçalo, Hugo and Sílvia (the last three from the 2013 edition), thank you for everything, I’m sure all of you will have a brilliant future ahead of you. And especially Tiago, thank you very much. Thank you for trusting in me to join the team and for changing my life. I really hope to work with you again one day. And please, continue doing the best conference about youth entrepreneurship this world has ever seen!
Doing something like GO Youth Conference is terribly grievous. You have to renounce many things and dedicate much of your time. And after this, you also have to know how to organize such a thing because, I guarantee you, this is far from being easy. Because of this, I always say that I’m really proud of us organizing GYC and not others, because others would never do so well as we did.
GYC offered me a feeling that I’ve never felt before: the feeling of changing many people’s lives. If you’ve felt this before, you understand what I’m saying. If you’ve never felt it, please try it at least once in your life. It’s the best feeling in the world and pays literally everything!
However, today I’m announcing one of the most difficult decisions of my life. I’m leaving the organization of GO Youth Conference. But why?
1. We have not been able to manage to find ways to make GO Youth Conference sustainable enough to pay all the team to be completely dedicated. I believe that this will be possible one day, but in Europe, especially in Portugal, this process is very slow and the dimension and distance to the big markets of the country doesn’t help. So, all the team always were working or studying at the same time. For me it was always possible (and desirable) to do several things at the same time. But now I believe that, in order to deliver the best job I can do, I must be completely focused on one project. That project is now something else, and it’s what pays me nowadays to live.
2. Moreover, the commitment of the team to the project must be 100% in order for everything run well. Organizing an annual event obliges preparation of months before and, consequently, your commitment must also be on the long term. My life at this moment doesn’t allow me to commit to something that will only happen months after.
3. I confess, I insanely love and hate, at the same time, to organize events. I hate the weeks before where everything is still to be done and everything is wrong. And I just love when everything is happening and receiving all the feedback in the days after. Probably I’ll organize more conferences in the future, as big or even bigger than GO Youth Conference. But now I need a little rest from it.
For the record, if money wasn’t part of the equation, I’d love to be part of GO Youth Conference 100% of the time and help it grow every day. Having direct impact on hundreds of people’s lives, filling at the same time an empty space on the educational path of some countries regarding teaching entrepreneurship to young generations, seems to me a great plan of a fulfilling career.
Today, I say goodbye to GO Youth Conference. It was a hell of ride which I’m really proud of and I’ll never regret it. But now it’s time to move on and dedicate myself to other challenges.
Today I can say: it was my way, and that feels fuckin’ awesome! ☺
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