Le Web 3 – Now an unmissable event
3rd of January 2008 by conor
We all know the story of Le Web 3 in 2006 and there is no point in going over old news. As 2007 progressed, many of us were more and more impressed with the message coming from Loic and the team regarding the follow-up. In particular, the start-up competition had a lot of effort put into it.
We were thrilled for LouderVoice to get a slot in the competition and just as excited by the list of attendees. It was great to see that Tom Raftery had a speaking slot too. It really was looking like the event of the year. They then anounced three side-by-side venues and I knew they had learned a hell of a lot from the previous year.
A small but vocal Irish contingent headed over; Nooked, PollDaddy, Segala, LouderVoice, Cubic Telecom, Tom Raftery. As ever, what we lacked in numbers, we seemed to make up for with visibility on the ground.
The overall venue was a bit of a pain to get to but the three buildings on a cross-roads was just so smart. One for the main stream, one for start-ups and one for networking. The only tiny criticism I can make (as with all events) is that there should be on-demand coffee all day long.
I didn’t catch a huge number of the talks in the main building but those I did were superb. The Marc Canter moderated one was an entertaining as expected. But to be honest, I don’t go to these events to sit and listen to people I’ve probably heard before. I want to meet new people and see new things, so I spent a lot of my time mooching around and hanging out in the start-up arena.
The quality of the start-up presentations varied from shoot-them to breath-taking. One issue I had in putting the LouderVoice one together was how to structure it. Originally it was going to be all live demo (and I spent days setting that up) but then I watched some of the companies in action and realised that they stuttered and stopped and started and there was no flow. I switched mid-morning to PPT plus small demo and that was a mistake. Too much slideware and not enough reality. In hindsight I should have just done a screen-cast lasting seven minutes and talked over it. That would have shown everything I wanted to show whilst enabling me to talk smoothly.
I liked the fact that the 33 start-ups varied from people barely out the door to VC funded ones. Whilst some might complain that it was not a level playing field, I think seeing the really slick guys in action forced everyone to raise their game. Cathy Brooks and the team did a fantastic job here and the only comment I would make might be to take a set of this years videos and highlight the best ones for next year so everyone knows what to aim for.
One big disappointment was the quality of the SeedCamp presentations. They were very poor and badly prepared. I was impressed by Saul Klein that he said exactly the same thing in the feedback session the following day.
I was particularly happy to meet some of the ex-BN people, even if it was for too short a time. They really are a great crew. I was also highly entertained when I was sitting in front of Mike Butcher from TCUK and listened to all the start-ups coming over to pitch hard to him. It didn’t strike any of them to just chat to him!
One thing I found interesting was that there seemed to be a smaller visible VC contingent than last year. Maybe they were all hiding! One simple thing impressed the socks off me – Just after our pitch in the start-up room, I noticed that Jason Calacanis was sitting alone right up the front listening intently to the pitches. It would have been nice to see more of the A-listers doing the same.
It’s now fair to say that if you are an Irish web start-up, you need to be at Le Web. As Ewan said yesterday, for 2008, same again please Loic!