Web Summit’s Paddy Cosgrave: “Throwing virtual tomatoes”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Paddy Cosgrave, founder of Web Summit, to talk about the big virtual conference experiment (3:00), random online meetings (6:00), why 24 hours a day is too much (8:10), when the check-in tech failed (10:15), whether virtual conferences are viable (12:35), his plans for Web Summit (15:30), spinning up micro-conferences (18:15), why he insisted on making software (20:00), on how the pandemic may be an opportunity (22:10), the sheer size of the business conference industry (26:30), the surprises (30:20), the business case of online conferences (32:35), and Siyabulela Mandela’s message on social justice (34:15).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.5	Sweden has a forestry show with more than 100,000 people.
0:08.2	Vegas has a carpet show with more than 100,000 people.
0:11.1	Vegas has a chair convention with more than 100,000 people.
0:13.7	And you think chairs.
0:14.6	A chair convention?
0:15.6	And you think chairs.
0:16.5	Is it standing room only?
0:18.0	Oh, sorry.
0:19.3	So I was... Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley.
0:29.4	Thank you for tuning in.
0:30.6	Hope you're having a stupendous week.
0:33.6	We have a great episode for you this week.
0:36.2	And it is something that I'd like to try to start to do more of, which is an update with a past guest.
0:42.6	So a couple of weeks ago, listeners will recall, we had on Patty Cosgrave, who's the founder of Web Summit, which is the biggest tech conference in Europe.
0:51.9	It has about 75,000 people show up every year.
0:55.1	In Lisbon, it's a very big to do. And anyhow, when I interviewed Patty, he was about to
1:00.2	attempt a big experiment. His company's other conference, collision, was scheduled for Toronto.
1:07.5	And it was going to be about 30,000 people of course because of COVID it got
1:12.4	cancelled and so instead he decided to push ahead with a virtual conference
1:17.4	30,000 people online from all over the world kind of logging in and he said at
	...

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