Announcing Our First P9 Family Virtual Summit
At P9, we believe that our community plays a crucial part in our aspiration to be the partner of choice for tech startup founders in the world. Since our inaugural SaaS Founder Summit in 2012, we have organized numerous events, such as our yearly Founder Summit, our CTO meetups, Café Hours in Paris, and our European P9 Tour where we hosted meetups in cities such as Kyiv and London.
Covid-19 has changed our approach to community building since we had to press pause on physical events. So, like many others, we were quickly introduced to the idea of hosting them virtually (check out Oana Botez post about her learnings in organizing them). So far, we have organized 24 virtual events for our portfolio — from a regular virtual sales roundtable to regular Friday finance sessions and AMAs about topics such as crisis management.
While these were usually shorter events for a smaller group of people, we kept asking ourselves: how can we scale these learnings and at the same time our networking sessions? How can we recreate our physical Founder Summit online? Enter the P9 Family Virtual Summit.
From a weekend to a week
Over this summer, we’ve decided to organize our first P9 Family Virtual Summit that will happen in the last week of October. It’s essential that we don’t merely replicate how we run our physical events online but rather rethink how we can deliver the best experience possible online. This is incredibly difficult since virtual events usually lack the “cocktail effect” and the serendipity of random meetings during lunch or at the bar. It’s much easier to get people to sign-up for a virtual event, but it’s much harder to get and keep their attention over a more extended period of time. Also, there are plenty of webinars with high-caliber speakers happening every week already, so there is no need for us to host the 999th webinar out there.
Therefore, our most important goal is to make all the virtual sessions as interactive as possible. Instead of hosting the event over a weekend that we usually do for our physical Founder Summit, we use a full week where every day is dedicated to a specific topic. We decided to use the afternoon since we think a few hours in front of the screen are already enough.
The sessions themselves are a mix of short keynotes followed by a Q&A with the speaker and roundtables led by an expert with the input from everybody who participates. We will also have virtual 1on1 office hours where people can book a 15min time slot with experts and networking sessions where we have a number of virtual rooms dedicated to a certain topic. Some of the best discussions always occur outside of the official agenda, so we want to make sure to have enough time for virtual networking every day. And without further ado, here is our agenda.
We also want to give away a few slots to founders outside the P9 Family. Just fill in this short Typeform and we’ll get back to you asap. Please note that we will prioritise people from diverse communities and underrepresented minorities which are often overlooked or excluded.
