The 021Disrupt Conference
What it was about:
021Disrupt was a technology/ business conference that took place over two days at the Movenpick Hotel in Karachi. With over 60 speakers and 650 attendees, the conference had a diverse group of people in attendance. Beginning at 9am, the the two day program would finish at 8pm in the evening. The conference hashtag #021Disrupt was the number one trending hashtag on Twitter in Pakistan for both days. We beat the hashtags for a political rally which tend to dominate social media due to hundreds of thousands of followers and their updates.
My motive for attending:
I went to the conference to find out what’s new in the tech industry, what new pathways that have opened up, what market leaders will be experimenting with for the next five years in our markets. To learn more about setting up a start-up, growing and scaling it, and what I needed to keep it afloat and functional. The conference morphed into more than that as I met with some of the speakers and was able to get an insight into the way their minds work.
What I did there:
Though I walked into the event as a student I was quickly pulled into helping the hosts. The Nestio was my first employer when I worked as a summer intern. Seeing that their social media team needed help with photography I stepped forward to volunteer. I was bumped up and began helping delegate tasks to the social media volunteers which eventually turned into managing the volunteer group.
I was given an organizer card that allowed me to handle some of the minor crises that were happening inside and outside the venue. Whenever the volunteers had trouble dealing with someone at the gate they would call me to talk to the person having questions or creating difficulties.
Who attended:
The US Consul General of Karachi, alumni and faculty of universities such as Harvard, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, CEOs, Founder and Co-founders of start-ups, large venture capitalist firms such as Golden Gate Ventures, Oman Technology Fund, Abraaj Capital, and regional/ country heads of companies like Daraz, Telenor microfinance, and Google, university students, A level students, teachers, and members of the tech community in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Hyderabad.
Lessons learnt:
The conference didn’t only teach me about what’s new in the tech world, what innovating things are going on, and how to manage a start-up. It also showed me how to organise an event, how to make things flow smoothly, what to watch out for, what contingencies should be kept in mind, how to trend on twitter and what it takes to pull off a great event.
Who arranged it:
The organizer of the conference was The Nest I/O, a technology incubator in Karachi created in partnership with Google, Samsung, the US State Department and managed by P@SHA (Pakistan Software Housing Association). The partners for this specific events were the US Consulate in Karachi, Stanford Club of Pakistan, Careem, FM91, and BookItNow.Pk.
Speakers and sponsors:
With over 60 speakers attending, fourteen of those from outside of Pakistan, the event was extremely diverse in terms of thought processes as each person brought a unique perspective to the problems faced in the tech industry. From professors at Harvard, to CEOs, to editors from Dawn and Express Tribune, the event featured a wide variety of speakers with different specialties. Sponsors included HBL, Bakery, Goto, Gaditek, Gamestorm Studios and Brainchild. Organizations such as HubSpot, Golden Gate Ventures, 500 Ventures, Middle East Venture Partners, Sarmayacar, SendGrid, Wadi Accelerator, Wamda Capital and Bakery were all major participants in the conference.
Day One Highlights:
Working with the social media team to keep everyone updated of the conference’s proceedings, we trended on the first position on twitter in Pakistan for over seven consecutive hours. We had over 650 attendees and received almost a full page coverage in Dawn’s morning edition. The highest number of tweets was registered at over three hundred and fifty tweets. There was also an Investor’s round table conference where over thirty five investors sat and discussed what they’re looking forward to in this market.
The lessons I learnt are also invaluable. From understanding micro managing to delegating tasks to volunteers, to learning how exactly start-ups in the Pakistani market fare and what difficulties they face, to learning how to motivate your audience to help boost your hashtag to the number one trend. The workshops, even though I could only attend one per day, were also amazing. The one I had registered for was Creative Thinking and Collaboration by Faris Khalid. Talking about teamwork, and how to think outside the box, the workshop taught me how to use different perspectives to solve any problem that came my way.
Day Two Highlights:
The second day taught me the tips and tricks to maintain your audience on a Sunday morning. And yes it did involve offering breakfast to them, but almost six hundred participants returned the second day. Including students from A levels who were generally considered too young to appreciate the content of the conference. I knew some of the students and had played a part in inviting them to the conference. By the end they all told me how great the experience was and how they loved being there, even though two of them were medical students. I learned how to interact with media teams, how to prevent people from outside the conference from attending in a very polite and subtle manner. All in all volunteering did help me practice my people skills. And as I have an interest in User Experience, people skills mean a lot to me.
The combined tweets of the top three users of the second day exceeded 1600 tweets. At a conference that lasted twelve hours, where interaction was a must, the number of tweets people were able to take time out for to write is just phenomenal. The day ended with a volunteer dinner with the organisers and people longing that the conference has lasted just a bit more. For myself, the experience has motivated me to attend more conferences and find out more about where the industry is headed and what I need to do to understand it.
