TECHNOLOGY FOCUS WEB SUMMIT
Web Summit co-founder says tech paved way for global events success
But for Paddy Cosgrave, the
Paddy Cosgrave insists firm’s own event software lay behind “unprecedented” growth
EXCLUSIVE BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN
W
hen Web Summit started in 2009, its first event at- tracted fewer than 400 delegates; fast
forward to 2019 and the projected visitor numbers to the annual tech jamboree in Lisbon in November will exceed 70,000. By any rate that is a staggering rate of growth, where most events are lucky if they put on 20% year-on-year. Tech events argu- ably stand apart from traditional business events, hitting a sweet spot between commerce and consumer- ism, eliciting a religious-like fervour among many of their devotees.
charismatic and often outspoken Irish entrepreneur who co-founded the world’s largest tech event, from humble origins in a hotel on the outskirts of Dublin, the phenom- enal expansion has been as much to do with the company’s own technological prowess than its in- nate popularity among the young, experience-hungry crowds. “We’ve done very little different
except we build a lot of our own software and there’s a huge engi- neering team and data science team and that has been the fuel that has allowed us to grow at a maybe rela- tively unprecedented rate,” he says. “We are of course passionate about
design and all of our production values and attention to detail; I think most event organisers are. I think the big difference is that ultimately soft- ware is eating every industry, chang- ing every industry. We just happen to be a software first company and it seems to have helped us grow at a speed that has very seldom occurred and to a grow to a size that is very unusual considering our age.”
BASED ON those values, the event has created a full suite of events
10 | EVENTSBASE | SPRING 2019
software – including registration, apps, exhibitor fulfilment, scanning and event monitoring. Cosgrave says many of the market-leading event tech providers are now copy- ing “whatever we do” but adds: “Hopefully, we will be able to reach a point where we can begin to open up all of that software, an entire stack that covers every element of running an event to anybody who’s organising an event anywhere in the world for a price that I guess none of the software or hardware vendors or providers in this space will be able to compete with.” He adds: “We built it to run our
own business and it is getting to a point where we’ll soon be ready to open it up to any event organiser.” Web Summit has not long signed
a new hosting deal with the Port- guese government, which will keep it in Lisbon for the next 10 years, despite a bidding process which involved 22 other cities including London, Paris, Berlin, Milan and Madrid, as well as one exceptionally tempting bid from Valencia, which publicly offered €170m to secure the hosting rights over the period. Cosgrave insists the €110m deal to stay in Lisbon until 2028, including
Paddy Cosgrave, Co-Founder of Web Summit, on stage at Lisbon’s Altice Arena
a €3bn buyout clause, was mainly predicated on the city’s commit- ment to more than double the size of the Altice Arena and FIL (Feira Internacional de Lisboa) within the next three years. It also helped that the city has a “pronounced” downturn in seasonal occupancy for its hotel rooms at that time of year, compared to the larger cities like Paris and London, which are nearly constantly sold out of bed space.
COSGRAVE GIVES very little away when it comes to the headline speakers for this year’s event; past speakers have included everyone from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk and Tony Blair. He is none too keen, also, to reveal much
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