Europe’s fastest-growing and most celebrated technology conference, the Dublin Web Summit, which takes place this week, has quickly become a fixture on the international calendar
AT FIRST GLANCE, the offices are almost a caricature of what a start-up is supposed to look like – there are clean white walls, frosted glass partitions and stylish black chairs. One wall is covered in post-it notes, a fluttering yellow plan of action. The open-plan upstairs office space is buzzing with a startlingly youthful group of staff, arrayed in front of monitors and laptops, and on every couch and in every corner, people are projecting a sense of purpose.
Instead of building an app or developing a social network, however, this young team is in the final stages of organising Europe’s fastest growing and most celebrated technology conference, the Dublin Web Summit.
“It absolutely is a start-up culture here,” says 29-year-old founder Paddy Cosgrave. “We didn’t take time to plan out the culture, it just grew this way – it’s just the nature of the beast.”
Daire Hickey, the web summit’s co-organiser and director of communications, agrees. “I don’t know if we cultivate , but it is something that happened,” he says. “If you think about it, the ‘management’ are all under 30. The average age of the people in here is probably about 24 or 25.”
It is, of course, somewhat appropriate that a conference devoted to tech should develop as if it was itself an early-stage tech company – there is a hint of amazement in Cosgrave’s voice as he describes how his vision has rapidly developed in the three years since the conference premiered in 2010, when 600 people crammed into Chartered Accountants House to see speeches by entrepreneurs such as Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Chad Hurley of YouTube and Niklas Zennström of Skype.
This Wednesday and Thursday, 3,000 attendees are expected to fill the RDS for a packed schedule of events, including talks by Kevin Rose of Digg, writer Robert Scoble, Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim and Hollywood director Barry Sonnenfeld.
“The speed we’ve grown at has been incredible,” says Cosgrave. “In March of this year, we had an argument about whether we should take this office, because we thought it would take two years to fill it. Six months later, we’re in two buildings. That’s how fast it’s gone. We never thought it would grow so fast, because the only other conferences in Europe that are about the same size are a decade old.”
Alongside its smaller, more exclusive sibling, F.ounders, which is attended by an invited coterie of 150 tech entrepreneurs, the web summit has quickly become a fixture on the international tech calendar, keenly anticipated by developers, investors and tech journalists from across the US and Europe.
Bloomberg described F.ounders as "Davos for geeks", and there has been no shortage of attendees willing to call it the best technology event they've ever been to. And Cosgrave and his team have big plans for expansion, earlier this year hosting a web summit in London and a F.ounders event at the Nasdaq building in New York's Time Square.
It’s a long way to come in a relatively short time, but Cosgrave seems far too restless to waste even a second. Tall and lanky, with angular features set off by a bouncing head of curly hair, he is possessed of a precocious energy and big ambitions. Self-doubt, you get the impression, is not a feeling he is too familiar with, which is just as well, given the audacious scale of what he set out to do.
"It was total chutzpah on Paddy's part," admits Hickey, explaining how Cosgrave managed to get such illustrious founders as Dorsey and Zennström to grace his inaugural conference. "And then on the first night of F.ounders, Chad Hurley decided to announce his resignation from YouTube – the attention from that meant that F.ounders was immediately known all over the world."
Back then, Cosgrave, Hickey and another senior colleague, David Kelly, were effectively organising the conference from Cosgrave’s bedroom, but now the company has grown to a team of 30 or so full-time staff and about a dozen part-timers. The headquarters have improved substantially too.
“These are great offices that we could never have afforded during the boom,” says Hickey. They have had to expand into an adjacent building to accommodate all the new staff, who are lined up at long desks, liaising with speakers, contacting venues, ticking off items on never-ending to-do lists.
Cosgrave and Hickey sit at the same desks as everybody else, causing a visitor to marvel as Cosgrave points out his seat – “That’s your desk?” he asks, bemused at the informality of it all.
When I visit, with a few weeks to go, there is a sense of nervous excitement rather than nervous exhaustion. Come evening time, the team gathers for sushi and noodles in the ground-floor conference room, but for many the day is not over yet. That dedication is a small measure of the belief that they are building something special.
"We see ourselves as a group who are disrupting conferences, disrupting networking if you will," says Hickey. "We never really saw this beforehand, but people kept telling us, after F.ounders in particular, that it was such a great event. Maybe it's just the natural Irish understanding of hospitality that we've got . . . but it has all turned out much better than we expected."
“Long-term, we see it as a really important global tech summit – and for that to be in Dublin is very important,” says Cosgrave, putting his creation in perspective.
The conference is not just a good networking opportunity or a social event for developers, but it can play a very real role in establishing Dublin’s position as a tech capital, and indeed shaping its development. Cosgrave is an enthusiastic evangelist for Ireland’s indigenous technology scene, but it’s not for nothing that they get such strong support from the IDA and Enterprise Ireland.
“We will have 350 tech companies’ CEOs in Dublin for the summit, and if even one of them opens an office here and creates 10 jobs, then that will be amazing,” says Cosgrave. “In the event, many more than that have already opened offices here. The summit is where the conversation with the IDA starts. If you were to compare the IDA’s ability to deliver, compared to any other organisation, they’re ranked towards the very top. The IDA are like the Barcelona of foreign direct investment.”
Hickey emphasises the point. “A majority of people coming to our conference from abroad, this is their first time coming to Dublin,” he says. “They don’t know that Dublin has nine of the top 10 tech companies here, they don’t know how well disposed the IDA and Enterprise Ireland are to foreign companies coming in. For a lot of them, it’s their first real experience with Ireland as a tech destination or a tech capital, and we provide that platform. And the international media attention we get certainly projects a positive image of Ireland.”
The company has its eye on international expansion, with more plans for conferences in London and New York, as well as exploring options in Berlin and maybe even San Francisco, the "Holy Grail" as Hickey describes it. Earlier in the year, Cosgrave even admitted that the long-term future of F.ounders might be in New York rather than Dublin. But despite all that, they have an evident and sincere pride in showcasing Dublin and its tech scene.
“There’s nothing quite like Dublin,” says Cosgrave, attempting to pinpoint the city’s charm. “Everybody thinks they know what it’s like until they come here. But you’ve got to come to Ireland to experience it, and they love it when they come. Not just the city, but the whole country if they want to – some of the web guys are going surfing after the conference. It’s a fun city, it’s a great country.”
Ultimately, Cosgrave and Hickey are quick to credit the city and its vibrant tech scene for making the web summit and F.ounders so remarkably successful. And with salesmen as skilled as these entrepreneurs championing the place, it is rather easier to be optimistic about our long-term prospects, too.
See websummit.net
