Warsaw Young & Innovative Forum
What I heard and what I missed
A month ago I attended Warsaw Young & Innovative Forum. I’ve got an invite from my friend Paulina Braun who was pitching her offbeat idea there. Her idea deserves a whole another post. I’ll write about it some other time.
The talks at the Forum were all in Polish but I’ll offer my thoughts in English so international people can find out what’s going on in Poland.
Normally, I avoid going to events with too much of an authority and government feel to them. From Forum’s website:
The high level of the event is guaranteed by an honorary patronage of Ministry of Administration and Digitalization and Warsaw’s City Hall.
I think the organizers meant “they high quality level”. Whether an event is a high quality, successful gathering of people depends solely on organizers. Patronage of authorities rarely helps unless a specific organization has a know-how that can share and make the event better. Despite this red flag I decided to attend. While covering what has been said during the event I’d like to offer some tips to the organizers and speakers. I think those tips apply well to many other events organized in Poland. They are ultimately about building events where great doers want to come, share their experiences and learn from others.
European Funds for 2014-2020
I was particularly excited about this part. To explain why, let me share my opinion on european funds in tech.
EU money in tech is a lie.
European money for innovation let a founder delude herself that she’s building a potentially successful business whereas she is merely a cog in the bureaucratic machine. The people giving out european money ask wrong questions. The easy money cripples the market by creating a lot of noise and little value. Lastly, by artificially keeping bad companies alive European Funds lock-in talented people in the wrong corners of the market.
We’ve started with Neelie Kroes. Actually, with the generic Hello Startups video projected on a screen. I thought it would be an intro to some discussion but it wasn’t. It added no value and we’d be better off leaving it out.
We’ve moved on to real speakers on stage. There were people from different government branches responsible for spending 82,5 billion Euro of EU transfers. That’s a ton of money and people speaking about it rightfully bragged that large chunks (e.g. 4,5 billion) is going to be spent on tech, research and innovation. However, the rest of those talks went really bad. Slides were bogged down in details and failed to convey any useful takeaways. I was interested in learning speaker’s thoughts on failure of EU money in tech. None of the speakers even blinked their eye on this subject.
What was even more striking to me was the lack of time and interest in taking questions. This is something I totally didn’t expect coming from my tech/startup background where Q&A is often the most interesting part of the talk.
Speaking well is hard. However, it’s a skill you learn. If you don’t know how to start, ask Zach. There are also local people like Dorota Kostkowska that would be thrilled to help out. I’m sure government representatives could and should learn how to communicate effectively with people outside of their closest professional circle.
I hope we’ll have a better venue to talk about the role of European funds in tech some time soon.
The middle (of the day)
After the first part I decided I’d be better off spending my time hanging out with Codility folks and hacking at their office. My friends who stayed told me I haven’t missed much.
I came back after lunch.
Crowd funding
That was a good session. I liked the story of Misia Furtak. She talked about her experience with crowd funding campaign raising money to record and release a music album.
Misia emphasized on the importance of making the people feel really engaged. For the crowd funding campaign to work you need a crowd. The easiest way to have an attention from the crowd is to go viral. For that you need to make people care by showing that you really care. This has to be manifested through a good website, answering all e-mails very quickly and keeping people updated all the time.
Venture capital
That was also a good session, probably the best. There was the general talk about startups that you can hear dozen times a week in Silicon Valley or San Francisco.
What I found interesting is the remark that polish market is large enough for founders to think that if they succeed in Poland that’s good enough. Obviously that’s a problem for VCs that want to have big bets. Peter Thiel, legendary VC, says that in tech you’ve got to be the best on the planet to succeed. If you’re running a restaurant you don’t need to worry about some other restaurant across the globe. It’s not your potential competitor. If you are running a tech business you are competing against the whole world. You either grow to be a global player or you get eaten at some point.
I would like to highlight the appearance of Marek Kapturkiewicz from Innovation Nest. He literally restored some of my faith in polish VCs. He’s clearly passionate about what’s he is doing and he’s good at it. Marek had the most thoughtful points during the discussion. He seems like a guy I’d get some funding if I was looking for one. If the whole Innovation Nest has people like Marek then I’d like to congratulate Kraków for having a great VC!
At the very end, the audience was given a chance to pitch their startup ideas. We started by inviting Paulina Braun on stage. As I mentioned at the beginning, her idea deserves a separate post.
The other presentations were more of a standard startup pitches. My friend Filip from Appsilon, was talking about deploying Estimote’s iBeaceons in retail. He admitted this is the most obvious application of iBeacons but he wants to do it instead of just talking about it. I’d love to see how this story unfolds.
There were some other presentations that didn’t strike me as interesting.
I liked the questions all VCs asked. They properly grilled people on the stage with questions about the addressable market, privacy concerns or business models. I wish there was somebody pitching something truly crazy. I know from numerous stories that the more creative the idea the more VCs become lost. I’d love to see how polish VCs perform in situation like this.
Improvements
Let me point out a few more things that could be improved.
Projector must work. Slides appeared to be blurry to the point that I couldn’t read them. This is something organizers have to get right.
Provide WiFi. When the talk is going south wifi lets the audience to zone out and do some work. This way you don’t force busy people to choose between staying longer for some other talks and doing something productive with their time. It also enables Twitter activity.
Embrace Twitter. There was no Twitter coverage during the conference. I found Twitter to be the best tool to find interesting people to talk at conferences. It’s much more effective than bumping into people in a hallway or a toilet.
Be more selective. Invite people that have something interesting to share instead of people that have authority or a title. I’d rather listen to somebody from the bottom of the government that really has some insights and wants to share them. I realize that finding such people is hard. That’s the job of conference organizer, though. If you don’t find anyone just don’t invite anybody.
Moderate questions. At the end of VC session there was somebody with a title that decided to hijack Q&A. He told his story instead of asking a question. This is something that happens at conferences very often. The best way I’ve seen organizers rescuing the situation is to interrupt immediately and ask Do you have an actual question? Obviously, it would help if the audience was asking good questions. I avoid being the guy who gets interrupted by writing down my question on a paper before asking it. If it doesn’t fit 1/3 of a A4 page I know I’ve got to think longer on my question. It means I might not ask any question at all. That’s ok. It’s better than wasting over an hour of audience’s collective time (200 people * 0,5 minute = 100 minutes).
Recap
To recap I’d like to say that I think the selection of topics was pretty good. It’s definitively important for entrepreneurs and government employees to meet and talk. However, I’d love to see a format that encourages more discussion and tries to crack down difficult subjects like EU spending effectiveness.
I’ve heard that the next day of the conference (WARP) was better. I didn’t attend because I had get back to hacking Scala compiler which is my job. My tip to organizers: have one-day event if you want busy people to attend. I found that busy people are the most interesting to talk. They have a ton of experience to share. You want them at your conference.