WebSummit And The Start-up Life Style
Two weeks ago WebSummit 2017 took place in Lisbon, Portugal. As it is one of the bigger “tech” events in Europe, our company, ARQS, made its debut there last year. Beside the traction we received back then, we were also pretty impressed with the entire setup and the atmosphere around it. We were instantly sold on the concept and decided to return this year. And so we did…, only to find out that WebSummit and its whole Tech Startup scene has lost its mojo.
In this article, we would like to share with you some of our take-aways, personal experiences and opinions.
The Start-up Lifestyle Is Real
During our stay, we talked to hundreds of attendees, interested in their story, their ideas and products. At ARQS we maintain an open mind and respect the occasional out of the box thinking, and we would never judge a book by its cover.
However, during our talks with some start-up Founders, CEOs, CMOs, CIO’s or whatever other job titles they label themselves with these days, we couldn’t help but wonder what their real value proposition was. We know that a lot of people are working on great and amazing products that will one day change the way we do things in ways never imaginable. However, some just seem to be in it because they want to own and sell a start-up.
Let’s start with the amount of funding these people allegedly needed to realise their ideas, which in most cases were limited to some slides in PowerPoint or a mocked up website they didn’t even build themselves.
To be completely honest, it was absolutely bonkers! We’ve seen founders asking millions of dollars / Euros for a product that presumably had some “AI Technology” behind it, or whatever other buzzword that could sway a potentially investor to putting some money down.. It was obvious, many people were there only to raise capital, not to actually solve a problem.
They are living the Startup Lifestyle. Bootstrapping, pitching, doing seed and capital rounds to raise as much as they can to hopefully one day be able to sell out. At one point raising capital could become a necessity, but such ludacris amounts are by far never needed if your MVP is nothing more then a Powerpoint Presentation!
In fact, out of all people we talked to, maybe one or two of them were real entrepreneurs. Individuals with an idea who had already a developed product with a foreseeable amount of their own capital sitting behind it, creating a solution for a problem many people face today. They exhausted their own means to create a Minimum Valuable Product and need capital to scale or push this further to market. These people are the true MVPs! (Most Valuable Players)
What did we get out of WebSummit 2017?
It’s highly commercialised, introduced misleading speaker topic titles, had bad communication around side activities simply put, it wasn’t meeting our expectations by a long shot. Yet, there are a few points which still made the trip worth our while.
The first one being self-retrospection, it’s amazing how much a person can change over the course of a year. If we look back how mind blown we were last year, compared to how we feel this year, it’s staggering.
It makes you ask yourself the question; whether WebSummit has changed so much, or we did?
Based on our results, we’re strongly inclined to go with the latter. We are strong believers of self-development, and this was proof the efforts we put into ARQS during the year payed off and that’s an absolute satisfying feeling!
We strongly hope that “tech” conferences are not evolving into a place where the majority of the people are there to either find an investor, or are looking to invest.
Trust us when we say that this makes networking feel like a one man show. Try having a meaningful conversation with someone who’s out to find an investor, only for him or her to realize they’re “wasting” time on someone that isn’t there to invest. At least not in a product, but in a worthwhile network and fun knowledge sharing.
It’s just too bad that after you take time to hear someone’s story, they’re not even slightly interested in hearing yours. It’s a missed opportunity for both, and we sure hope that any future conferences will not leave us with the same feeling.
Either way, we strongly encourage everyone out there to create products of great value for today, tomorrow and beyond infinity. Those that start-out with the wrong intentions or just want to “play startup” will not be around for long anyway.
We’re ARQS, and if you like what you read, feel free to let us know! Did you go to WebSummit? How did you experience it?
Small footnote, If you are a startup, an investor, an SME or even a full scale enterprise that is serious about maximising every last penny of an investment, feel free to reach out, we’ll help you do just that! Visit us at arqs.be
