Take 1/3: Web Summit, does size matter?
By Cuckuu’s CEO
Last year I wrote my opinion about web summit of 2016, check it out here.
This year before it even started I felt that I had a few opinions to give, and to be clear it’s my personal opinion and point of view.
To all that don’t know me, my name is João Jesus, and I am Cuckuu CEO, Cuckuu is a startup that is part of the Portuguese and United Kingdom Startup Ecosystem.
As stated by Forbes, “For your content to resonate and attract followers, you need a powerful delivery mechanism.” Cuckuu does just that by using alarm clocks and allowing social communities full control over what content is shared and when it is received we change the way people consume content.
Cuckuu is going to be at this year’s web summit for the 3rd time. In 2015 we went to Dublin, and we were amazed by how big it was, and every year it is growing and growing, why?
In my opinion, this growth is just a reflection of the world around us, 500 hours of video, 3.3 million posts status updates and almost 66 thousand photos are uploaded to Youtube, Facebook and Instagram respectively, every 60 seconds.
People want content. Thus we will have over 60.000 people, more than 1000 speakers and more than 2000 journalists and all this from more than 160 countries in this year’s event.
As Web Summit is growing, so are the global issues related with;
Equality of Gender, race, sexual orientation and religion.
We are discussing it more openly, but this are issues that I feel should be pillars of all our companies cultures, and should not even be a discussion anymore; they should be a given right for everyone.
But that is a perfect world, and we don’t live in that world, yet.
We live in a world where Women still need to fight more than men to get to the same place, that she has to think twice how to dress because men could have the wrong idea.
We live in a world that people cant be open about religion and their sexual preferences because they are afraid.
We live in a world that everyone at some point felt they were not treated in a fair way, we live in a world that people want to build walls and not bridges.
This year I am already listening to new issues;
“web summit is becoming less and less about tech”,
“It´s all about the famous people.”
“It’s becoming a big networking event, and everything in the talks I can find on Google.”
So my question is simple, who decides what knowledge is worth to be shared?
Why are there people deciding that some speakers have nothing to teach us without knowing their stories?
Is that not discrimination?
Can’t a Model teach me to have a dream and fight for it? Can’t a YouTuber show me how to use creativity and create content watched by billions?
So that is why I believe that more then ever we should talk about our stories, share the knowledge and our points of views, inspire others and make them see that we all have something to share with the world.
That is what makes us equal, all the other stuff makes us unique and exciting, so this web summit I suggest we listen to their stories, really listen.
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t” like Bill Nye said, the science guy.
The magic of the Web Summit resides in precisely that;
In one place we will have technology gurus, Nobel, Oscar and Grammy winners, influencers of millions, artists, robots, models, sports stars, investors, poets, journalists, and politicians, people that are trying to change the world and even people that walked in space!
Oh Yeah, and don’t forget the 60.000 people that you don’t know yet, perhaps their experience of life can teach you something.
When I was young, there was a story that always made me believe that even the tiniest voice could have the strongest thing to say, it made me realise that anyone can have the answer to your problem, so listen.
The story was about a truck that got stuck in a tunnel, and it was carrying materials that were time sensitive and also didn’t allow for the truck to be removed by force or in the most common ways.
Several engineers were brainstorming very complicated ideas, some of them involved a lot of time and effort and time was ticking away. Then a kid that was near all this with his parents asked, ‘’why don’t you just take the air out of the tyres?’’ Sometimes we cant see the easy solution right in front of our eyes, and we need someone with a clear set of ideas, maybe someone that is not an expert and doesn’t even understands a lot of the complicated concepts of what we are doing.
There is a scientific explanation for this; it’s called functional fixedness; this limits us to look at an object or even a problem that is not in the traditional way.
An excellent example of this was in 1912 when the Titanic hit a giant Iceberg, it took 2h and 40 minutes to sink, out of 2200 passenger’s and crew only 705 survived.
But maybe and just maybe the iceberg could have been the problem and the solution at the same time, the iceberg was 122 meters wide, so could it have been used for people to be kept out of the water?
The same situation had happened 60 years before the Titanic, 127 of 176 passengers, immigrants traveling from Ireland to Canada survived by climbing into an iceberg.
This solution that most of our minds have possibly overlooked would be evident to others, perhaps a child whose mind is still innocent and not as formatted to how things are supposed to work and nothing is impossible in his mind.
But how many of us would ask a child an opinion about our business?
Well, every day there are more and more examples that age should not be a factor to discriminate;
Fraser Doherty at the age of 14 had over 1 million dollars of annual sales selling his Jam from home.
At the age of 10, Juliette Brindak drew pictures of “cool girls” this young person’s work was latterly used by her at the age of 16 to create a social networking site called “Miss O and friends” today it is valued at 15 million dollars.
Sean Belnicks at the age of 14 started Bizchair.com, and at the time he turned 20 he was selling 24 million dollars of office chairs.
And how many of us that are creating apps would love to sell it for 30 million dollars? Nick D’Aloisio did it at the age of 17.
So is Web Summit too big? Yes.
Is there too much going on? Yes.
Can we see it all? No.
Is it all relevant to me? No.
And that is the point, it’s not all relevant for me, but it will be for someone, that is why Web Summit is not one conference anymore, its 25 inside one.
From robots to sports, from surf to SAS and much more.
We can’t see it all, but we can choose to see what we want and maybe go out of our comfort zone and talk with someone that we never thought we would.
So who is coming to web summit? What have they done to make me listen? Why should I care about what they say?
I will now show you some of the cool people coming to Web Summit 2017 this year, in the following article;
Take 2/3: “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t”
