TNW 2018 Conference recap 🔄
I mostly knew TNW (The Next Web) from their Website where they feature stories and news about technology and startups. If I had to describe them I would say they are a bit like a mix between the verge and wired, but from Europe, and less douchey than the verge. However, I was quite surprised when I learned that TNW is also hosting a big technology conference in Amsterdam. After researching a bit I decided to give it a shot, the announced speakers sounded great, TNW is cool and Amsterdam is dope anyway. In this blog post, I am going to share some general impressions as well as my favorite talks.
Impressions:
The event took place over the course of two days and had around 15.000 attendees. While this might sound like a lot, it actually never felt overcrowded and the conference was the exact opposite of stressful. As a comparison, Berlin’s “re:publica“ with roughly half the amount of attendees feels way more hectic and packed. I tried to figure out why that and boiled it down to two things:
– Location
The TNW conference took place in a part of a public park with exactly the right size: there was always enough space to relax and sit down and you could spend time outside and get a breath of fresh air every now and then.
– Organization
TNWs event organization was top notch. It started with multiple ticket pickup locations (even at the airport) down to too small things like clean toilets and friendly personnel. I was also quite impressed with the quality of the stage setups they had. Overall the organization of the event was highly professional and contributed to the enjoyable experience.
Another aspect I really enjoyed was the whole idea of having „tracks“ — it took me a minute to understand this system, but it was basically a sorting arrangement for all the talks. Each track consisted of a 60-minute time block under an umbrella topic. This block was made up of three, different 20-minute talks all related to the common topic. So in a best-case scenario, the three talks formed a deep dive into one subject — or track as they called it. The tracks covered the topics of Startups, Crypto Coins, Machine Learning, Design, Future Generations, Mixed Reality and much more. This helped the attendees chose topics of interest over celebrity names. Of course, there were still „big name speakers“ that people watched without being a part of the whole track, but this wasn’t the norm. This also contributed towards the relaxed atmosphere as it meant the participants weren’t constantly running from one stage to the next.
What the Zuck?
One thing I didn’t really like was the whole „startup area“. This hall consisted of many very small startups trying to get your attention and show off „the next big thing“. Unfortunately, most of it was rather useless stuff and the atmosphere a bit desperate. The National Police Corps of the Netherlands were also there and only made everything worse. The entire team presented themselves with „I love police“ T-shirts and had a „🆒“ VR simulation where you could shoot down suspects in VR.
I really struggle to understand how you could seriously present something like this and I also think it was completely out of place at such an event. (Shoutout to Re: Publica again who had kind of a similar situation but made the better decision).
Other notes
– I also really liked that the conference was rather diverse(speakers as attendees.)
– the food was pricey but great with lots of vegan and healthy options
– Amsterdam (as I already knew) is a super nice city and riding around on Bicycles is so much fun here.
– I got accompanied by my good friend Vivien Schnelle (Designer at eBay) and she told me that she also really liked the conference
– even the biggest names (like speakers from Reddit) had rather ugly slides, maybe there should be a talk on “the power of sexy slides” next time?
– Amsterdam has Tesla taxis chauffeuring people around
Favorite Talks:
Ray Chan (9GAG) on How to win China & make $$$ | TNW Conference 2018
Nir Eyal (Hooked) on Mastering the skill of the century
Che-Wei Wang (CW&T) on The new role of the designer in generative design
Purna Virji (Microsoft) On the 4 C’s of designing conversational AI
Chris Slowe (Reddit) on How Reddit designs for the internet’s most vocal users
Rich Pierson (Headspace) & Ciara Byrne on How two people made mindfulness mainstream
I am pretty sure there are more diamonds that i simply missed so check out all the talks over here.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed my time at the conference, it was nicely organized, had interesting speakers and a great location. If there is one thing I did not like (besides the Police VR stuff) than that there was no way to see all the stuff I was actually interested in as it was simply too much. But of course, this is only whining as the other way around would have been way more problematic. Thx you for a great time The Next Web and Vivien Schnelle and also a big thank you to my company Goodpatch who gave me the possibility to go there.
