Web Summit swaps Guinness for 'Gothic grit and glamour'
The Web Summit, held in Dublin since its founding in 2010, opens in Lisbon on Monday and runs through Thursday. Often described as a "Davos for Geeks," the brainchild of Irish entrepreneurs Paddy Cosgrave, David Kelly and Daire Hickey will bring 50,000 people from 165 countries to the Portuguese capital. They'll network and listen to speakers including the actor Joseph Gordon Levitt and Sean Rad of Tinder. About 15,000 companies will be represented and 7,000 CEOs and business leaders will attend including Cisco Systems' John Chambers and Renault-Nissan's Carlos Ghosn.
Web Summit has grown from an event with just 400 people when it launched in a hotel outside Dublin to be the largest non-trade technology event in the world. Cosgrave is fine with that. "Thankfully, I don't think our character has changed much. ... Web Summit is still about attendees of all types making connections with others that are going to make a big difference, whether it is investors and startups, speakers and media or chief information officers with their peer group."
If Dublin is famous for its cozy public houses, horizontal rain and literary-infused streets, Lisbon's Mediterranean climate, the Lonely Planet travel guide says, is a "postcard-perfect panorama of cobbled alleyways, ancient ruins and white-domed cathedrals." Its medieval architecture is within reach of a string of Atlantic beaches.
Web Summit runs a number of other events around the world including Collision in New Orleans, RISE in Hong Kong and MoneyConf in Madrid.
A major theme at year's event in Lisbon will be technology in the automobile sector, Cosgrave says. "Autonomous cars are now on the streets of the world and on this stage leaders of the auto industry will speak on topics relating to self-driving vehicles, connected cars, shared mobility and regulation."
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Nicolas Brusson, CEO of BlaBlaCar, a France-based ride-sharing company, says that cars and how consumers use them are being reinvented.
"Mobility platforms are optimizing their use, be it through car-pooling (shared trip & costs), ride-sharing (on-demand services) or car-sharing (peer-to-peer rental). They are addressing idle car capacity to make travel more affordable, efficient and environmentally-friendly."
Web Summit's move from Dublin to Lisbon is not accidental.
It's partly because the organizers felt the scale of the event had outgrown the infrastructure — available hotel rooms, traffic delays, poor WiFi at the conference center — authorities in Dublin were able to provide, although Web Summit's headquarters is still in the Irish capital where the firm employs 150 people.
The decision to relocate its marquee event was nevertheless a blow to Ireland. Web Summit in 2015 brought in an estimated $38 million in revenue to the local economy. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other U.S. technology firms have European bases in Ireland and the industry helped the nation emerge from a financial-crisis-era bailout.
"It is a hugely embarrassing development for this city and indeed for the country," Micheál Martin, the leader of Ireland's opposition political party Fianna Fáil said last year when it was announced that the relocation to Lisbon would be for at least the next three years.
As a technology ecosystem, Lisbon's is young compared to London's or Berlin's — two major European centers for technology start-ups in recent times — but it's growing fast, according to a report by Startup Europe Partnership, a European Union-funded organization that tries to nurture business partnerships.
It found that while Portugal is still lagging the United Kingdom and Germany in terms of "scaleups" and "exits" — the former is when a start-up grows its market access, revenue and employees and the latter is when a founder or investor sells a stake in a company — its GDP is 12 times smaller than the U.K.'s and 16 times smaller than Germany's.
In 2014, Portugal's $230 billion GDP enabled 40 "scaleups" and 9 "exits." The U.K.'s $2.9 trillion GDP over the same period led to 399 "scaleups" and 97 "exits. Germany's $3.9 trillion GDP allowed 208 "scaleups" and 126 "exits." Factor in the smaller size of Portugal's economy, the report concludes, and the differences narrow — in other words, the number of "scaleups" and "exits" produced in the U.K. and Germany do not match, on proportional basis, their correspondingly higher GDPs.
So there's hope Web Summit will give Lisbon the technology stamp sought by governments looking for fast-growth industries.
Pedro Quartin Graça, an economics and business professor at the University Institute of Lisbon, says Lisbon's advantages as a place for start-ups include its low living costs compared to other European cities and quick turnaround times for the legal work needed to establish a business. English is widely spoken.
"If you add to that to a good public transportation system, competitive talent from top management, technical and design universities, and the quality of life — weather, cultural life and food — you will certainly agree Lisbon's a pretty good place to be," he said.
COVERAGE FROM 2015's WEB SUMMIT IN DUBLIN