Take 2/3: In Web Summit, “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t”

By Cuckuu’s CEO

In my previous article Take 1/3: “Does size matter” I asked;
Who is coming to web summit? What have they done to make me listen? Why should I care about what they say?

Who is coming to this years Web Summit? That is easy to find on the Web Summit page.

What have they done to make me listen? This is also not hard to find with some research.

Why should I care about what they say? That is the question that we all should be asking ourselves.

With over 63 million subscribers only in the USA and 74% market share of all e-commerce on July 12, 2016, A.k.a Prime day Amazon is now one of the biggest companies in the world. Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, someone that has been named the “Clouds most influential Executive is heading to the Web summit this year. We can all learn something from him, right?

By January 2014 Tinder had more than 10 million users, and by December 2014 it had been downloaded more than 40 million times with users swiping more the 1 billion times a day.
I really want to know how they grow this fast, and Sean Rad, Tinder is the right person to tell me.

After the release of Slack in February of 2014, the tool was growing 5 to 10% a week and by August 2014 more than 120.000 people were using it every day.
But did you know Daniel Butterfield, Founder of Slack is also the founder of Flickr?
How many of us will have two startups in their resume that are so embedded in popular culture. We all have something to gain from listening to this founder.

Ranked #9 of the most visited website in the world with 243 million unique monthly visitors, Reddit is valued at 1.8 billion dollars.
Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit has been the dominant force on growing their community, I guess the question we all want to know is, how did he do it?

With over 1 billion files being transferred by 100 million users every month there is for sure a lot to learn with Gordon Willoughby, Wetransfer CEO

On August 2017 Tumblr hosts over 359 million blogs.
David Karp, founder, and CEO of Tumblr can tell us his story, from starting off as an intern at an animation company, creating their blog and following his dream, making him more than 200 million dollars to date.

In 2011 when Lars Silberbauer joined Lego, the company had no Facebook page or youtube channel. However, Lego now has a facebook page with over 11.5 million fans, and their youtube channel gets more than 1 billion views a year.
In 2015 for the first time, Lego group became the largest toy company by revenue with sales of about 2.1 billion.
So what changed? Was it all because of the vision of one man?

How many times will we have the opportunity to meet a Nobel, prize winner?
In Web Summit you will be able to meet several. Including the following;

Al Gore, 45th Vice President of the USA, environmentalist, climate change activist, public speaker, author of the book “An inconvenient truth” that was also given a Grammy, a Primetime Emmy and became an Oscar-winning documentary.
Also Mohan Munasinghe, physicist and economist with a focus on sustainable development, that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. He also got involved with the Portuguese startup, Planetiers.
Planetiers is a platform that aggregates all the environmentally conscious solutions in the market and makes them available to the public, check it out it’s pretty cool.

And Tawakkol Karman, the first Arab woman and second youngest Nobel Peace Laureate to date.

This year we have several models, actors, and artists that will be part of the Web Summit, what can they teach me?

If we look at the likes of Ashton Kutcher who invested in companies like Spotify, Airbnb, Foursquare, and Uber. It highlights, that it is not only the money that helps support the projects, their fame and exposure can help to create big success stories too.
But is that the only reason for them to be at the Web Summit? I believe there is more to it.

Much as been said about our own Sara Sampaio, is she on Web Summit because she is Portuguese? Or is she just eye candy to glamourise the event?
Well, you tell me, since an early age, she had one dream, that dream was to become a Victoria Secret’s Angel.
Several times she got NO as an answer, however, not being defeated and sticking to her dream, she got to walk for the first time on a single segment in 2013. In 2014 she walked in two segments and in 2015 her dream became a reality and she was successfully chosen as one of the newest angels.
Doesn’t this sound familiar to all of us entrepreneurs who are repeatedly getting No’s and knock backs?
As from August 2017, Sara is the 19th most popular model on social media in the world, with over 10 million followers.

Girl project is an initiative created by Sophia Bush with big goals and a bold vision, she wants to help 50 million girls around the world that are not in secondary school to have a chance to go.

Would you go to jail for what you believe?
Rosario Dawson, actress, producer, singer, comic book writer, political activist, and entrepreneur did it twice, once for protesting against Bush and once against Trump.
And that is not all, after visiting several African countries in 2011 she created Studio one Eighty-Nine, a fashion brand to promote African-inspired fashion.

Others attending the Web Summit who have been brave and spoken out include;

In 1972 at the Olympic trials, Bruce Jenner was in fifth place needing to make up a 19-second gap to qualify, something that looked very unlike, he qualified finishing 22 seconds ahead of all the other runners.
After the event he took the American flag and carried it during the victory lap, starting a tradition that is now common among winning athletes.
In 2015 Jenner changed his name to Caitlyn Jenner, came out as a trans woman and had been called the most famous openly transgender women in the world.

People involved with sports have allotted of the same qualities as entrepreneurs, they never give up, they motivate others to achieve a goal and they like to win, so it’s not a surprise we will have several speakers and one that is very close to Cuckuu;
Domingos de Oliveira, Benfica CEO that is one of Cuckuus partners.
Benfica is ranked ninth in the “Europe’s clubs of the century” and has over 14 million supporters making it one of the most innovative clubs in the world with their communication, and we are very proud of being part of that strategy.

How about the dreamers?

Walking in space, what can be more incredible achievement than that?
Michael Massimino did just that, with two spacewalks totalling 14h and 46 minutes and also being the first person ever to use Twitter from space.

Even a Robot is allowed to dream in Web Summit, Sophia the Robot was designed to look like Audrey Hepburn.
Created by Hanson Robotics, Sophia is their most advanced robot generating billions of views in social media.
It’s incredible to have a robot on stage defending why robotics and AI are the future and why we should embrace it.

And if anyone can turn dreams in reality, these two speakers can.
Marketing is something that can change the world for better and for worst, and in Web Summit we have two great examples of that, just kidding, hmm kind of;
Marketing and design guru Yiying Lu has made her mark on everything related to tech startups.
Her piece called “lifting a dreamer” is used by Twitter when their servers reach overcapacity, it is known today (by 332 million users) as the twitter fail whale.
Brad Parscale could be the man responsible for Donald Trump being the President of the United States.
He is the digital media and political strategist and was the digital media director for the Donald Trump campaign; we will try and not take that personally against him.

We could not talk about Web Summit in Lisbon without mentioning the Portuguese Armada, the startups from Portugal that are growing and becoming significant players internationally and inspiring a whole nation to believe.

Farfetch, the first Portuguese unicorn that in June of 2017 received an investment of 397 million dollars from JD.com Inc.
This online fashion retail platform founded in 2007 by José Neves, the idea came to his mind when he was in Paris fashion week with his previous business, SWEAR a shoe design brand.

Codacy and Jaime Jorge, in 2014 by winning the pitch competition of Web Summit he showed the world that Portugal had good ideas and good teams behind them.
Codacy has raised over 5 million dollars and is working with clients like Paypal, Adobe, and Deliveroo.

Talkdesk, a cloud-based contact center, created in 2011 when co-founders Cristina Fonseca and Tiago Paiva noticed how outdated and sloppy call center software was, they build the first version of talkdesk in 10 days.
Talkdesk as raised more than 24 million dollars.

Unbabel started during a Surf trip, during that trip Vasco Pedro and João Graça realised that machine translation had potential, but needed help, translation mistakes that machines did were simple for humans so why not combine both to help machines to learn.
With over 50.000 crowdsourced translators across 45 languages, the company raised over 8 million dollars.

Feedzai co-founders Paulo e Pedro met in university in Coimbra, and they realised that both had parts of a solution that together was feedzai.
A data science company that can detect fraud in real time, with a total of over 80 million dollars invested in the company it makes feedzai one of the most significant success cases of Portugal.

And what can we learn with the ones that influence millions? The ones that write, talk and create contents that inspire others.

Mike Butcher the editor-at-large of TechCrunch that is very well known in Portugal because of his coverage of several Portuguese startups, TechCrunch has over 2 million people accessing their site every month and over 50.000 active contributors.

In 2010, Dominic Smales caught on to a trend: Youtubers.
He saw in the youtubers a new kind of celebrity and signed some of the biggest names in British youtubing.
He now represents 31 of vloggers under his company Gleam futures, all together they have millions and millions of views on their videos.
“Alfie” is one of this youtubers represented by gleam futures, with his “pointlessblog” Youtube channel he reached 5.5 million subscribers and over half of billion views on his video, and all his channels together he has over 1.5 billion views.
In 2013 he was named by Yahoo! News one of the “12 web-savvy entrepreneurs to watch”.

So this is some of the who’s and some of the why’s we should be excited to be part of web summit, but how about the how? How can we make this experience work for me?

Check out Take 3/3: “Art of War” that i will release soon and get some tips to get the most out of your time in Web Summit.

And one more thing;

would you like to go to Web Summit for free with Cuckuu?

We want to take someone with us that as something cool to share with the world, so tell us why we should pick you.

All you have to do is use your favorite social media and tell us why we should pick you and use the #Cuckuu & #MyBestBuddy

Then you go with us to create cool content about Web Summit, check the rules at www.cuckuu.news/bestbuddy