Suggestions
Paddy Cosgrave
Paddy Cosgrave is an Irish entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Web Summit, one of the largest technology conferences in the world. He established the event in 2009, initially organizing it from his bedroom. Under his leadership, Web Summit has grown significantly, attracting over 70,000 attendees in recent years and becoming a prominent platform for tech innovation and networking.
In October 2023, Cosgrave resigned from his position amid controversy following a social media post in which he accused Israel of committing war crimes during the conflict with Hamas. His comments led to backlash from several major tech companies, including Google and Amazon, which withdrew from the conference. After a six-month hiatus, during which he reflected on his experiences and the future direction of Web Summit, Cosgrave returned as CEO in April 2024. He expressed a desire to focus on building community and fostering innovation at the event.1234
Highlights
Irish democracy at work.
The largest team within Web Summit is product and engineering.
Most of the software we build is not used by attendees. Instead it forms a sort of invisible hand working in the background to improve attendee, exhibitor, media etc experience.
Every week we push updates: new tools, new features. They may seem trivial, but the impact on attendees and our conferences is often significant.
As for the attendees apps we do build, we keep those as simple as possible. Why? In part because onboarding time is so short. The app has to be incredibly simple for attendees to instantly “get it”.
I think all events should, where possible, build their own custom software. But they should think both about the software attendees use, but also the Event OS your team, contractors etc might use to make your event even better.
