Global 2021: Our First Virtual Conference
What worked, what didn’t, what’s next
This year, things looked very different compared to before as we hosted our first-ever virtual Global Conference. More than 12,000 worldwide attendees tuned in for four days of content, education, and connection in the name of startups and the future of technology.
As a team of community builders, event producers, content creators, and marketers, our skills were put to the test. We know there is no true way to replace the feeling of human interaction in a virtual environment, but we saw this as an opportunity to reach people we may not have had the chance to meet otherwise. As a result, we were able to connect more people around the world than ever before.
While Startup Grind runs hundreds of virtual events a year (sometimes per month), Global 2021 was our first-ever conference and we plan to do many more. Here’s a bit of what we found:
Global 2021 by the #’s
Startups, attendees, SG members and Chapter Directors from over 159 countries represented this year, illustrating the magnitude & reach of what our community members are accomplishing globally. We held 3,500 minutes of content across 18 time zones (that was a doozy!) — something we would never have been able to do with a live event.
More Startups than Ever Before
Since May 2020, we’ve been hard at work building our Startup Membership: an application-based virtual community designed to provide the best startups from across the world the education, opportunities, and access they need to build, grow, and scale. As a result, we had our biggest showcase of startups yet. 1,300 of our members joined us for our annual Startup Summit where we hosted conversations with seasoned founders, tactical workshops, and engaging roundtables. If you’d like to learn more about being part of our membership programs, apply to join our community here and learn more about our membership journey thus far.
Read more about the journey we’ve been on building the world’s most interconnected startup community, written by our VP of Sales and Startups, Alex Gordon-Furse.
Insights from the Experts
A cornerstone of Global is bringing the best & brightest to stage to share stories and educate the community. This year, with over 100+ unique sessions, speakers conference’d in from Silicon Valley to South Africa sharing on topics including venture capital, the hybrid reality, future of work, growth marketing, diversity and inclusion, and more.
Here are just a few quotes that resonated with our audience:
Áine Kerr, Co-Founder + COO at Kinzen, in “Solving the Wicked Problem of F%&e News”: “You need both machine learning and humans to confront this wicked problem. Core to our vision of content moderation is the design of algorithms that empower editors and fact-checkers rather than the other way around. Humans have a critical role in improving the accuracy and precision of natural language processing classification.”
Benoit Dageville, Co-founder + President of Product at Snowflake, in “From Idea to IPO: Building the Data Cloud”: “Building the right team and getting the right people is critical. In a startup that does only the most important aspects, how you sell your vision initially and how you convince someone is critical. If you cannot convince someone, it’s probably that you don’t have a great idea. So learning that and learning to be confident is a great skill for startups.”
Hayley Barna, Partner at First Round Capital, in “Everything you Need to Know About Early Stage Investing in 2021”: “Ideally, the people that you are taking out as investors are aligned both with the long term vision of what you’re building, and also the path that you want to take there. And it’s important to be able to know what your goals are and make sure they match.”
Henry Ward, CEO at Carta, in “The Art of Being a Founder: How to Crystalize Your Vision and Share it with the World”: “The CEO job is the only job that the better you get at it, the harder it gets. Because the better you get at it, the bigger the businesses, the more complexities and actually your learning curve continues to get steeper.”
Alexa Hall, Startup Program Manager, Google Cloud at Google, in “Investing in Underestimated Founders”: “Outlying founders are the way to go. We should bet on the founders that are a little weird and different. I want the founders who are creative, the ones that solved a problem that only they could with their life. That’s who I’m looking for.”
Albrey Brown, Diversity, Equity, + Inclusion at Airtable, in “How-to Build + Market Products for Next Generation of Consumers”: “There’s this big number that in 2040, America itself is going to be a minority majority. And what that means is that the majority of consumers, customers and available talent will be folks who are people of color, folks who are immigrants, folks who are different from the America that we’ve seen in the past. If we want to really serve those folks, especially as neighbors, we need to start to build the products for those folks.” — Albrey Brown, Airtable
Rebecca Kaden, Partner at Union Square Ventures, in “What Sets Series A+ Founders Apart from the Rest”: ”One of the top qualities I’ve seen in the founders I invest in is prioritization. It’s helpful for the customer, team, when raising money, and in that moment of understanding product market fit. Especially early on, it’s absolutely critical.”
Melissa Alvarado, CMO at Chime, in “What Sets Series A+ Founders Apart from the Rest”: ”Define the values, the culture, who you want to be and how you execute. There’s no perfect culture, there’s the right culture for you. And that is just such an important step if you’re in a startup. Any company really, but primarily a startup. It’s the same formula. You prioritize, you decide what your non-negotiables are, you set goals, and then you put in the hard work.” — Melissa Alvarado, Chime (edited)
Memorable Moments
An unexpected bonus we felt while hosting a virtual event was real-time feedback and engagement received by the audience. This feature was in full-force when Nobel Peace Prize nominee Stacey Abrams took the stage. People shouted from the virtual rooftops in support of her momentous conversation with Gary Stewart. It was great to see.
The Support of our Incredible Sponsors
Global would not exist without our incredible sponsors. This year more than ever we’re thankful to the individuals and organizations who have continued to support us over the years just as well as those who joined us at Global for the first time. We took the virtual leap together and together we learned a lot. We found it is very possible to be successful in a digital world and we hope to continue to find ways to make our partners shine throughout the year. We are so grateful to work with brands we stand behind and products we support.
Thank you to all of the partners who made it possible, like newcomers Snowflake, Blackstone Launchpad, American Express and especially those who have shown us support for many years including Oracle for Startups, EO, Dell, Toptal, and.COM, to name a few.
Learn more about how we were able to get our partners as many leads in a digital environment as they would have seen live by reaching out to our team here.
The Do’s and Don’ts
The best part of trying something new is what you learn and take with you on the next journey. Every person on our team walked away with a new set of skills. We were wrong about some things, surprised by others. Our team rallied together with the same tenacity as we would have at a live event — across 6 different time zones (a global team really helps!). At a high level, here are a few of our do’s and don’ts:
- DO realize you can’t charge the same amount for a different experience. We decided to do a one-time free tickets year for Global 2021. We tested a “Choose-what-you-pay” model so those who could pay (ie on a company expense or a venture capitalist, etc) would…or at least would consider it. We didn’t feel charging for tickets was right this year given that most of our audience is early-stage startups who have had a rough year, to say the least. In the end, our ticket sales revenue dropped but as a business, we found other ways to compensate for that.
- DO adjust your marketing to start later than you’d like. It’s a virtual world we live in right now, everyone is used to pre-planning less (and people have more open schedules than usual). Signing up for an event just a week — or even days — before is now the norm. If you have a great event, people will come. But don’t start your marketing too soon.
- DO mix up session formats and remember attention spans are at an all-time low. We did 50% 15-minute keynotes and 50% 40-minute fireside chats, knowing that people have a hard time sitting through a long conversation (unless it’s really engaging) via video conference. This allowed us to incorporate more themes and topics into the agenda and people seemed to appreciate the variety. We also tried to integrate Q+A as much as possible which was easily doable via the chat/Q+A feature in our platform, Bevy.
- DO require tech-checks for your speakers. We fought this in the beginning, thinking speakers didn’t have time to do a prep call. But we decided to incorporate the tech-checks into pre-existing prep meetings and we’re so glad we did. A blurry video or poor lighting can really impact the experience of a session.
- DO hire a professional production team. There are no two ways around it…let the pros work their magic. The audio, video and design of your stages will always be superior if you work with a great team who knows what they’re doing. DM us on twitter to learn about the production team and platform we used.
- DON’T do sponsor booths. We hadn’t planned to do this, then we sortof did it and in the end our team, our sponsors, and attendees had a similar experience: it’s just awkward. Come up with engaging ways for sponsors to meet attendees and get leads otherwise. Learn more about how we were able to get our partners as many leads in a digital environment as they would have seen live by reaching out to our team here.
- DON’T expect attendees are going to facilitate their own networking. We’re all about making friends, but networking can be awkward — live and virtual alike. People need hand-holding here and that includes some guidance and encouragement to start conversations. Assign someone from your team to lead focused (topic-driven) networking sessions to help kick off the conversation and keep it moving.
- DO get yourself a kickass team. Don’t underestimate the hard work required to run a multi-day, multi-time-zone, thousands+ person event, even if you’re doing so from your kitchen.We are a team that thrives off of live-interaction — when we’re together, we can handle anything. This year we weren’t sure how everyone would show up when they’re hidden behind a screen and we were more than impressed with the outcome. We made an effort to assign people in all departments to specific tasks just as we would at the live event (recommend). This resulted in some people working until 2am and others waking up at 4am, but it’s what we’re used to during Conference week. It was exhausting in a new kind of way — staring at your screen versus running around on your feet all day — but when you’re all in it together it really bonds a team together.See you next year + How you can get involved today.
There is a lot we still don’t know, but one thing is clear: Hybrid is the future.
Based on feedback we collected, 47% of respondents said they would prefer a hybrid model, only 22.6% said they would prefer back to the all-in person and 29.6% said they would prefer strictly online.
We hope to be back in Redwood City next year in February with a hybrid model of our standard Global Conference. We will absolutely be online and we hope to be live, albeit smaller and more curated than usual.
We learned a lot and we’re so thankful for everyone who came out to attend Global 2021 this year.
We will be hosting our annual Europe Conference online June 29–30, 2021. Get updates here.
Startups, apply to join our community here!
— The Startup Grind Team
