What was Web Summit 2021 like?

Reading: 3 mins

Filip Koubek survived it and has filed his report from the bleeding edge event of the tech business world.

Photo by Filip Koubek

After a one-year covid hiatus, Europe's largest tech conference, Web Summit, has returned to Lisbon in Portugal, and is almost back to its original strength. Although the seaside metropolis attracted ‘only’ 40,000 participants this year due to pandemic restrictions (30,000 fewer than in 2019), the average visitor didn’t notice the difference too much. 

Web Summit dominates all aspects of city life for the whole week. Each person’s experience will probably vary substantially, depending on what they have chosen to participate in from the wide programme on offer.  
Do you want to listen to the stars of the various tech fields? No problem, there are hundreds of them to choose from.  
Do you want to sell your product or service? No problem! you can organize a stand, carry out some offline networking or arrange meetings via the app.  
Or do you want a taste of Lisbon and its nightlife? Every night you can choose from a seemingly endless list of parties around the city.  
You really shouldn’t try to do all these in one week but if you are brave enough to do so, there will be a price to pay afterwards.  

Photo by Lisa from Pexels

Since I attended the conference for business, I’ll focus mainly on the first two of the above  goals. The programme of the main conference is traditionally composed of a mix of well-known businessmen and celebrities. For example, football star Thierry Henry, Apple’s senior VP Craig Federighi, boxer Vladimir Klitschko and Black Lives Matter founder Ayo Tometi all appeared on the podium at different points. In addition to the main themes of business and technology, the topics of the events followed the hot trends of the global public arena. Most of the talk was about facebook's misuse of data, minority rights, the pandemic, the lack of women in corporate boardrooms or the climate crisis. If you want to get into these subjects in depth however, this isn’t really the place for it as there simply isn’t enough time. But as a taster, overview or introduction to a new subject, it’s ideal.  

 We were very happy that two of our compatriots appeared on the central stage this year.   EU Commissioner Vera Jourova spoke about technology security and privacy, whom I also had the opportunity to listen to in 2018. Hubert Palan, CEO of Productboard and one of the fastest growing companies in the region, also took the floor.  

 In addition to the main conference in four huge halls, there are several startups, field conferences, competitions, meetings with mentors and many other activities every day. If you didn't have your programme planned in advance, you could easily get lost in it. 

 Czech faces also appeared during the professional conferences, at which Jan Rezab from Time Is Ltd. and his wife Bozena  Rezabova  from the Gamee game studio spoke. Lukas Cypra  with Confer-O-Matic and my colleague Jan Sekerka from Motionlab were given the opportunity to present their start-ups.   

CEO Jan Sekerka presents Motionlab photo by Filip Koubek

Presenting our video personalization platform to potential partners, customers and investors was the main goal of our visit to Lisbon. And for this purpose, I can highly recommend Web Summit. In fact, it felt like our most successful and rewarding year there, as the subject of personalization is such a relevant topic right now and people were genuinely interested. Thanks to the opportunity to exhibit, present and connect offline and online (thanks to the working application), there are a lot of great opportunities for expanding startups. 
You definitely won’t find such a high number of top managers and execs per square meter from virtually every segment of the industry, including advertising companies and global agencies, in any event elsewhere in the world.  

So whether you want to learn more about the topics at the forefront of technology, sample Lisbon's nightlife or grow your business, you can do all these in a matter of days at Web Summit. If only those mornings weren’t so challenging…

Danny Holman, Motionlab