I’m joining Pirate Summit to scale it globally
I am excited to announce that I have officially joined the Pirate Summit team. I will be in charge of Pirate Summit Global — series of tech events across the world. I also remain committed to Infogr.am, the SaaS company I founded in 2012, serving as it’s Chairman of the board.
Every year in Odonien, a creative scrapyard in Cologne, a selected group of tech entrepreneurs, investors and leaders come together for the Pirate Summit — one of most influential tech event on the European soil. “Why to join the navy if you can be a Pirate” tells its motto. Its unconventional environment sparks conversations and synergies among exceptional people. Its format of off-record speeches, pre-selected crowd and informal mood invites to share insights and knowledge.
My aim is to scale it globally.
The work Till and Manuel has done building Pirate Summit is marvellous. The event is great because it is small scale, it requires application and pre-screening to purchase a ticket, and speeches are rarely recorded. So how do you scale something so grass-root without screwing it’s spirit?
Meanwhile Pirate Summit has reached the physical limits of Odonien. The choice is stark, to either scale into a more mainstream conference, probably moving indoors and loosing lots of the charm or remain forever small.
Building a word’s largest de-centralised tech summit
We found another way. The event in Cologne will remain within the limit of 1500 people, we will organise Pirate Summit Global, a tech tour of unprecedented scale reaching thousands people and many startups across Europe, Middle East and Asia. As such Pirate Summit becomes the world’s largest de-centralised tech summit. This year we expect over 10,000 people in our events.
Our ambition is simple. We want to go to places where entrepreneurship flourishes, meet ambitious and exceptional people and startups around the world, link tech ecosystems, discover and bring some of most amazing influencers to our major gathering of pirates in Cologne in September. And inspire more people to join the global tech entrepreneurship community.
There will be no ‘next silicon valley’, innovation will happen in any place connected to the internet and we’ll simply never be able to bring together all those exceptional minds in one place — whether it’s Cologne, San Francisco or Tokyo. So we have to go to them. And we’ll bring Pirate Summit with us into the tech ecosystems across the world. We’ll announce the full list of events soon. Our tour will start in spring 2016.
Meanwhile I will be working from the new Pirate Summit Latvian headquarters in The Mill Riga, a creative co-working space.
What do you think of Pirate Summit? Have suggestions for me or the team? Leave your thoughts in comments.
