Web Summit 2021 highlights
Two weeks ago I had the luck to attend to the Web Summit 2021 in Lisbon. Was my first time in such a big tech event. I have to admit that before preparing the trip with my colleagues I know little about the event but it seems is a major blast, and I have to admit it’s size surprised me.
The event is located in the FIL (Feira Internacional de Lisboa), a place specially dedicated to this kind of fairs. Four big pavillions plus an extra venue/stadium used for the opening and closing events and some important talks.
What the event can offer you differs a lot depending on your situation, are you an investor? or the other way around, are you the founder of a small start up looking for funding? There’s talks, presentations and stands for everyone, but I would like to focus on what Web Summit can offer to a regular employee as me.
Let’s first focus on the Web Summit app before going into the content. Once you buy your ticket, you can download the Web Summit app, what is a quite interesting app. It helps you to register and get your identification badge at the airport (big positive point, being able to register yourself in the airport when you just landed), it also offers you the possibility of organise your own schedule, selecting all the events you want to attend, and the most interesting feature, at least in principle, the connecting functionality. You can use the app to scans other’s badges and get the contact automatically stored in your app, so you can connect later or send a message to schedule an appointment. But… aside the tons of bugs, at the end of the day the app is super annoying, sending constant notifications and getting connection requests from people that only wants to sell you their products or offering outsourcing development power to your company. So you just uninstall it if you want to get some peace of mind along the event.
Continuing with the summit, as I mentioned, theres different activities depending on your target and/or situation. Me as a regular employee, I can leave out all the investors events or start up meetings, so I find three fundamental types of events or activities to attend or do: Regular talks, masterclasses and networking.
Regular talks are basically brainwashing sessions where many companies try to show how nice they are, or how confused is the people when they think they are evil. Example, in the opening event they interviewed Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistlerblower, a woman that is just reporting to the world how Facebook doesn’t care about the psycological impact of the social network on people’s life, even having reports on their tables, they basically ignore them and continue the business as nothing really happens. Ok, cool interview, but… next day you have Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, doing a image cleaning about Meta (of course, let’s not use Facebook dirty name), and how awesome the world is going to be thanks to Meta’s new ideas. Contradiction or just putting all the facts on the table? For me is just marketing, we have the same with Shell. One of the main topics of the summit is the sustainability, make the world move in a cleaner way for the environment, and you bring some blabbermouths from Shell, a company, that for sure put a lot of efforts and obstacles in the past to shift for cleaner energies, to talk about how Shell can help you now to keep the environment clean, thanks to the green and renewable energies they were always blocking. Is this only suspicious to me?. In any case, we have a lot of talks about some other topics, like how face recogition and AI can help to entertainment industry, but the chat turns into the CEO just talking about his company and how cool their customers are, or the Wells Fargo CTO telling you that fintech is bullshit and legacy should stay, because they are still making money thanks to their legacy systems. In summary, regular talks are a waste of time, just some executives saying fancy words and trying to clean their company’s image and do some marketing. Conclusion, worthless talks.
Masterclasses are more appealing in principle, you have to do some queues to get into these sessions, which are usually hosted in smaller rooms, more intimate, you know? you are going to attend a masterclass, where the experts are going to give you some drops of wisdom, and that wisdom is only for a selected audience. Let’s be honest, we got an improvement here, but still a scam. All the sessions follow the same structure, personal story to get your attention and make you totally engaged, so when the bullshit kicks in, you are already buying the idea. I listened how a woman got his driving license, another guy told us that their babys were born in a posh hospital of London (the same where Boris Johnson was attended when he got covid), and also we listened how a guy survived to a heart attack in a plane.
Decorated bullshit, at the end of the day, the guy promising you how to priortise the tasks on your daily life, only told us he made a lot of money founding AI companies and investing in other ones. At least these ones are telling you some nice Hollywood stories, not only a fancy guy from an oil company saying “we need data to take decisions and save the mother earth”, but are still the same, marketing. But it’s impressive to see the power of the feelings in action. People totally buy this nonsense, you can see them taking notes, asking questions, “can you please tell me the secret of success?”, man, nobody is going to tell you how to succeed, is the number one rule, when you discover something precious, don’t tell about it if you don’t want to share the benefits, but people still thinking they are going to find the key to happiness and money attending this stuff…
In any case, I found one session interesting, about how companies are always prepared for success, but never for failure, how you can design happy paths, but at the same time the unhappy ones, and how you should work upfront on the worst case scenario rather than the succeesful one. Anyway, in these talks, they ALWAYS describe your company, all the pitfalls you can see and experiment in your daily life are there, described by a sillicon valley guru. Is this a coincidence? I don’t know, in these chats, the speaker has always the audience in his pocket, he’s just telling them what they want to hear, “You are right, your manager sucks”. At some point you can think that is normal that the most of the companies struggle with the same stuff, so he presents a familiar scenario, or he’s just manipulating you, you will never know… In any case, these sessions are better than the previous ones, but not justifying the ticket price.
Networking is one of the most interesting things you can do in this summit, appearently… I’m going to be honest, I don’t understand too much the concept of networking, people like to have a network to rely on in case they need a new employment, I also have that kind of network too, it’s called LinkedIn, Glassdoor… But I like to keep my mind open and learn from my colleagues, some of them were quite up to the networking thing, and it’s normal, there’s dozens of companies and start ups advertising themsleves there, so it looks like a good opportunity to make those connections.
I was thinking that networking is just present yourself, talk about the company’s business and ask if they have job openings in case the company is interesting, and with some luck, they would refer you to their website to check out the vacancies or careers page, but I didn’t wanted to look naive and I preferred to keep my eyes open and learn how to network.
Unfortunately, my definition of networking was absolutely accurate. What happened was exactly that step by step, you present yourself, ask about the business, a guy that is bored to death answeres you with indiference (unless he’s the owner of the company, then everything is excitement), and point you to a QR code that takes you to the company careers website. And… end of the story, is not very different than browsing jobs from your home in LinkedIn. At the end of the day, people is not just there to offer you a great job, is just marketing (again). The real connections are about money, not about you getting a better job, the real networking is when you have a lot of money and a CEO invites you to a nice dinner because they need investment, and that’s out of the scope of the regular employees.
In summary, the Web Summit is just one word (again), marketing, no more no less. Is a good experience as a “tourist”, and it’s located in one of the best European capitals to visit, but if you go there with expectations of learning something useful, you only chance is to sneak into the Amazon AI sessions, but it seems all the nerdy people is camped there the whole day to get an spot, so for the normal people is almost impossible to access them, and therefore, learn something in the summit, because the rest is just fireworks and bullshit.
Ok, one good thing, among all the overpriced and overcrowded food trucks, I found a hidden gem, the argentinian empanadas truck, those saved my life!
