Earlier this year, I set myself some objectives and gave my year a theme. 2009 was to be the year of “Learning to do”. I spent previous years, thinking, pontificating, learning but not really doing much. So, I told myself that by LeWeb in 2009 I wanted to have done some stuff and go to the conference – which I had watched from a far last year – with something that I was doing. I’m not ready to share what exactly I’ve been doing (stay tuned in 2010 – where the theme is going to be “acceleration”), but I am glad to say that I was able to attend LeWeb and talk to some really smart people about what I’m working on.
So did I get all that I wanted out of LeWeb? Definitely. For me LeWeb was a lot like Biz School. When people ask me for my advice about going to business school, I always say business school is about four things, brand, education, experiences and networking. In the same way I got a lot out of the same things out of attending LeWeb.
Brand – The brand is superficial but it is a good starting point for conversations afterwards. Being able to say “I was at Leweb” or “we met at Leweb” is a nice thing. LeWeb is without a doubt the biggest internet tech conference in Europe. So having the sticker, the ticket and the ability to say “Yeah, I’ve been” is pretty cool.
Education – the speakers were great. Gary Vaynerchuck was inspiring, Chris Sacca was super smart. The panels were engaging and the debates were relevant. But like Biz school, you didn’t need to attend this to get the education (in fact, I didn’t sit through all of the speakers because I knew Loic was going to be putting the videos on line.
Experiences and networking – sitting in a room next to the head of Microsoft’s Bizspark programme who I’ve been following on Twitter. An impromptu Canadian tweetup, winning a Nespresso machine, bumping into people whose blog’s I’ve read, whose companies I admire and whose investments are in line with what I want to do, that was the real value for me out of the conference. I’m hoping that the dividends I’ll get from meeting people at LeWeb will pay out for years to come.
Now as for the conference, here are my thoughts, let’s split em up into the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good – the people. Everyone I met at LeWeb was smart, engaged, curious and a valued contact in some way or another. LeWeb attracts a lot of the best entrepreneurs, investors and people in big companies in Europe and indeed the World. I’ve never met so many smart people in such a short burst of time. Also, outlining the participants at LeWeb ahead of time was great. You could identify people, message them on Twitter and meet up. Or if you’re like me, bump into people, sit next to people and just start random conversations with people sometimes after reading their name badges and looking them up online briefly.
The Bad – I don’t think LeWeb used twitter well enough. I would have loved to see all the attendants twitter IDs in the programme, so you could message them directly. It made it too hard to figure stuff out. Sure a lot of presenters were smart enough to engage and put their twitter and other contact info up front but this wasn’t done often enough – LeWeb could have helped this.
Also bad – it was great that LeWeb had a big screen showing live twitter streams with the event hashtag #leweb, but it would have been great to have more of the Q&A run through Twitter. Having people run around with a mic or having to come down to the front in this day and age is pretty crappy if you ask me. How would I have improved this? Hash tags for every session in the programme if you have a question ask it on twitter with the specific hashtag. Can’t ask it in 140 characters? Too bad.
The ugly – Although the conference was billed to be about real-time web it did seem that it was more about Loic, his friends, French start ups, and buzz words for a large chunk. Loic was called out by Gary Vaynerchuck when he said that LeWeb was a community and Gary said something like if this is a community why are they sitting up there while everyone else is sitting in the audience. Too True. A community engages and discusses and grows together (all things that were possible at LeWeb), the plenary room – for the most part – was a bunch of presentations that you could view online before and after LeWeb.
The Ugliest – Too much talk. I’m so tired of the same old “Oh, it’s so difficult in Europe” or the Europe versus the US for starting something debate. The killer for me was the European gang chat, where a number of European entrepreneurs, investors and smart people sat up on stage and ranted about language and legislation, or pontificated on the differences between starting something in Europe versus starting something in the US. This especially pissed me off as a couple of minutes earlier (literally) Gary Vee was on stage talking about how you have to be passionate about what you do, and not be scared of some hard work.
Quit your crying people. Yes it can be more difficult to build stuff out of Europe, but at the same time it can also be far more rewarding. You have access to some of the smartest people in the world, the best education and the best communication technologies available today – 10x what your parents had when they built their businesses. If you can’t succeed it’s not because governments are holding you back, it’s because you’re not focused enough and not delivering what the market wants.
LeWeb was great, I really enjoyed it and meeting people was awesome. I think part of it was the fact that I’m no longer in London. In London you get that buzz and can have meetings with so many more people then you can here in Switzerland. However, if I can afford the time and the costs, I’ll be back next year – which has to be the best indicator of success I can think of. At the same time, I hope LeWeb next year takes my theme from this year and helps more people learn to do.
