LONDON - Let's say you have a smart business idea. How would you like to run it past digital heavyweights such as the YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, or Skype's Niklas Zennstrom -- all on the same afternoon? And then, once you've incorporated the digital A-list's useful suggestions, what about spending the evening over cocktails pitching the world's top venture capitalists -- senior partners from Accel, Index and Balderton -- before heading to a nightclub to celebrate with your new friends, a global bunch of multi-millionaires who arrived on their private jets?
Every budding entrepreneur's fantasy, right? Except… in today's new world of international power conferences, it's suddenly a very real possibility.
Over the past few years, an all-year-long circuit of tech events has evolved to provide networking opportunities as well as inspirational speakers for the people who run the digital economy. Typically for two to four days, a few hundred business founders, investors and "thought leaders" take over hotels and conference centres in Monaco or Munich or Hampshire, and anyone who can afford the entry fee — or can wangle a coveted invitation — is welcomed into a temporary community whose GDP competes with sub-Saharan Africa's.
From South by Southwest to DLD to LeWeb, these events are the new powerhouses where deals are struck and connections forged. Yet with hundreds of them now crammed into the calendar, how do you know which ones are worth your time?
I've conducted a straw poll among a bunch of high-level entrepreneurs and investors, and many of them put TED at the top of their list. If you want to hang out with Al Gore, Bill Gates, assorted Nobel prize-winners and inventors from Malawi, the annual five-day Long Beach event, which was held last week, is the place to upgrade your Facebook friends. But it'll set you back: even if you get past the approval process, TED costs $6,000 a ticket this year, and its UK sibling, TEDGlobal, is only marginally cheaper at $5,200 for a week in July.
Still, the quality of speakers and the impressively curated audience is hard to beat: while covering TEDGlobal in Oxford for Wired two summers ago, I chatted to Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos over lunch and later that day met Cameron Diaz in a nightclub -- while also getting to know architects, designers and African musicians. Where else could that happen?
More business-focused is DLD, the Munich by-invitation conference organised by Hubert Burda Media each January. Those letters stand for Digital, Life, Design, and the 800 or so "thought leaders, creators, entrepreneurs and investors" who come together talk about digital innovation, science and culture, but mostly just network frantically. It's chaired by Hubert Burda, owner of Hubert Burda Media, and the Israeli tech investor Yossi Vardi, and attracts a consistently impressive roster of A-list speakers -- from Craig Venter and Rem Koolhaas to Mark Zuckerberg.
Vardi's involvement in a conference is a reliable marker of quality: he helps program Stream, WPP's excellent "unconference" at a Club Med outside Athens each autumn, which last year brought together executives from Google and Microsoft as well as startups such as Spotify and Soundcloud.
For Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and an early investor in Facebook, the must-go event is Allen & Company's Sun Valley Conference in Idaho each July, where you're as likely to run into Bill and Melinda Gates or Sergey Brin as you are to get chatting to Rupert Murdoch or Tony Blair. Josh Williams, the founder of "check-in" social-networking service Gowalla, insists that South by Southwest in March, in his hometown of Austin, Texas, is the most useful conference -- and not just because it's where cool startups such as Twitter tend to launch.
Or if you don't want to roam so far, there's LeWeb in Paris in December, PICNIC in Amsterdam in September, and the Monaco Media Forum in November. Not forgetting the Dublin-based Founders conference, where I ran into Jack Dorsey, Chad Hurley and all the other stars mentioned in the first paragraph above.
"You can fill your entire year with conferences," says Alex Hoye, serial entrepreneur, investor and active figure in the London startup scene. "That's great if you're an investor getting your name out and vetting new talent, or if you've made it and are keynoting and feeling good about that. And when you're head-down in the challenges of building a company, it's good to catch up with a globalising community. But you do have to prioritise."
For Hoye -- whose ventures have ranged from GoIndustry to MyBuilder.com and a ski business -- the must-go events include DLD, Google's Zeitgeist ("invite only, but real value"), and TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco ("the epicentre of the Silicon Valley echo chamber"). Not forgetting South by Southwest, The Next Web, LeWeb, Geek n Rolla, Web 2.0, All Things D...
"The conference circuit is a real double-edged sword," he says. "Good ones are great opportunities to meet many of the standard bearers, thought leaders and a get a feel for the zeitgeist of what's working, what's disruptive, and what's flagging. But you do have to 'conference responsibly'. Especially if you have a day job that does not entail covering events, investing in new companies or being personas at the events."
This is David Rowan's 'The Digital Life' life column from the* March issue of GQ.*
See Also: Full coverage of TED 2011
