The 5 Biggest Lessons from Web Summit 2018
With nearly 70.000 attendees from over 160 countries, more than 1.200 speakers, over 1.800 of promising startups, Fortune 500 companies, 24 tracks to follow and over 200 employees working really hard to prepare it, Web Summit grew to be the largest technology conference in the world, and has been called the best one on the planet (Forbes), Davos for geeks (Bloomberg) and Glastonbury for geeks (The Guardian). The 2018 edition in Lisbon is over and it’s time for takeaways.
Planning is everything
It was my first time at the Web Summit and the most important lesson I took was that planning is key. One cannot stress it enough. I downloaded the official app and added items to my schedule, mainly talks and some workshops, assuming a rough guide will be nice to have. In fact, it was by far not enough. The distances between stages, the difficulty to get through the crowd at times and finding a spot to follow a talk — they all make navigating through the conference much more complicated than I expected.
Note to my future self: if there are less than 10 minutes between two interesting talks, just choose one of them, unless they are held in the same pavilion or two adjacent ones.
All of the talks are available online
Not everybody knows that all of the talks from the 24 paths become available online after the conference. At the moment there are almost 300 videos from last week accessible on the Web Summit’s youtube channel.
What does it mean in practice? That you can relax a little, shift your focus to networking or exploring the startup booths (which might be the most interesting part of the whole conference). You can also take part in workshops, which tend to be heavier on the content and more concrete than talks. And finally, you can escape the FOMO.
It’s not a very techie tech conference
The Web Summit might be the biggest technology conference in the world, but it isn’t the most techie one for sure. The idea of this conference was to bring the tech people and industries together — and this objective is being realized year after year with great success. The Summit saw an enormous growth in attendance — from 400 people in 2010 to 70.000 this year, gathering founders, CEOs of technology companies, policymakers, heads of state and startups.
It’s an amazing opportunity to get inspired, meet interesting people and ask yourself some questions about the future of the field. Is it the place to really learn new things? It depends on what you do. If your company is big and run in a rather conservative way, you belong to a slightly older generation, or you have no idea about tech but would like to learn about it — there’s plenty to learn. If you are younger, have a very technical background or are somewhat familiar with the startup ecosystem — you probably won’t be discovering new things around every corner. Does it mean you shouldn’t go? Absolutely no. Conferences like this one are a perfect opportunity to have a sneak peek into the future of the industry, discover what’s the new cool or just connect with like-minded people. Just make sure to adjust your expectations: you aren’t here to learn a new framework or master another programming language.
Woman are more and more present in tech
… but things are not all sunshine and rainbows. This year on the Web Summit 44% of attendees were female versus 24% five years ago — this is undoubtedly an impressive and very positive change. The organizers’ attempt to make women visible as speakers and moderators were also clear, which I absolutely applaud. But does it mean almost half of the people working in tech are women? Sadly, still no. As mentioned above, the Web Summit is not the most techie conference in the world. There are attendees from fields such as web and mobile development, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, but also marketing, PR, user experience, health, tourism or project management. Some of these fields are doing much better in the parity game than tech is.
The gender gap still needs to be tackled and the question who should do it — firms or governments — remains open. Just a couple days before the Web Summit kicked off in Lisbon the European Union marked the equal pay day — the moment in the year when an average woman stops earning, based on the gender pay gap, which is currently at 16% in the EU.
Women are also heavily underrepresented in tech and on leadership levels, so even though we should definitely celebrate small victories, the long lines to ladies rooms on the Web Summit should not cloud our vision. Let’s remember that only last year the organizers of the dotJS Conference, which is the largest JavaScript conference in Europe, were scoring brownie points with the attendees just for including the women’s T-shirt sizes.
There’s still room for important questions
I guess that most of large conferences are in a smaller or bigger degree affected by marketing. The Web Summit is in this regard no different. The marketing attempts are present all over the startup booths — well justified, as the main goal is to find clients and investors — but sadly a lot of talks were going off-topic in order to sell.
The good news is that there’s still room for big questions and important issues. Here are just a few that IMHO were the most vital:
- What is and do we need a contract for the web?
- It’s estimated that next year for the first time in history over 50% of the global population will be connected to the internet. What does it mean and what is our role in connecting the other half?
- Can a business do well by doing good?
- Do we need a declaration of digital human rights?
- Can we stop the rise of fake news and save the media industry from itself? How to build trust in the age of disinformation?
- Is tech killing democracy?
- What can tech do to tackle the global climate change and plastic pollution?
- How to encourage female innovation?
- What is a fair digital economy and how to achieve digital peace in the age of cyber threats?
I’ll be coming back to some of these topics in the upcoming weeks.
The Web Summit has a clear flair for bringing people together and inspiring to great things. Since it’s going to stay in Lisbon for the next 10 years, it can be a great opportunity to visit this amazing city, especially if you haven’t done that yet. The organizers’ ambition is to make it current, different and better every year. With this in mind, I’m hoping I’ll be able to check it for myself in 2019.
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