On a midday Ryanair flight from Dublin Airport to Lisbon on Monday, a voice comes over the plane’s PA system asking passengers to raise their hands for a photograph if they’re attending Web Summit. An overwhelming majority, it appears, fit the bill and dutifully put their lámha suas to have their picture snapped.
A few hours later, the reason for the little stunt becomes apparent. It transpires that Web Summit chief executive Paddy Cosgrave – back in the saddle after his six-month sojourn from the company he cofounded – had asked attendees to try it on all their respective flights. “Just a fun idea,” he posted on LinkedIn a few days before he returned to centre stage at the event in Lisbon. “For the best, most fun photo, I’ll upgrade the person who took the photo and everyone in the photo to VIP passes.”
It’s vintage Cosgrave stuff, drumming up a bit of free publicity and hype for his company’s four-day flagship event in the Portuguese capital. While Web Summit has expanded its reach to places such as Qatar in recent years, the Lisbon conference remains the jewel in the crown, bringing together more than 70,000 attendees over four days at the MEO Arena.
[ Web Summit: Cosgrave 'straight down the line' with assembled mediaOpens in new window ]
This year is a particularly interesting one from an outside perspective. It marks Cosgrave’s return since he stepped down from the top role at the company in the days before last year’s event, following corporate backlash to comments he made about Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’s October 7th attack.
Would he come out swinging on this or any of the many issues about which he has pontificated in the past? Anyone hoping for that was sorely disappointed.
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In some ways, Cosgrave’s decision to shirk his usual headline-grabbing antics was a relief. There was plenty to be getting on with at Lisbon, considering the moment that tech, particularly big tech, finds itself in following Donald Trump’s and indeed the Republican Party’s election victory earlier this month. Sickening though it might be for some to admit, Silicon Valley’s fingerprints are all over the win with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, among others, playing key parts. Some, as with Musk, have been mooted to play senior roles in the new administration.
If it seems, like the modern-day equivalent of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, that they have seized their chance to grab a firmer hold on the levers of power in the US, that’s because they have. With some of the world’s most powerful tech companies already deeply involved with the US government, the next few years could be great for big tech but bleak for almost everyone else if Trump’s policies match his increasingly authoritarian rhetoric, says William Fitzgerald, the Irish-born founder of US communications and advocacy firm the Worker Agency.
“Tech is really in bed with the bad stuff,” he told The Irish Times in Lisbon, whether that’s defence contracts or surveillance on behalf of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Opportunities for dissent within tech companies are also limited, relative to the first Trump administration.
“They’ve just done years of lay-offs,” he said. “So, the culture in 2016 was different within Microsoft and Google, where people felt confident about their jobs.” No one feels that way any more. “The software engineers making big money in Silicon Valley, they don’t know if they’re going to wake up tomorrow and they’re gone. So, the culture within the companies has also changed.”
It is these informal discussions off to the side at Web Summit that are probably its most valuable component. On Tuesday, Waterford-born Fitzgerald addressed the conference, calling on start-ups to stand up to the big tech monopolies that “are profiting while everyone else is just trying to survive in their world”. He said there will be opportunities for businesses to set themselves apart from the herd by refusing to go along with the dominant political trends over the coming years.
The energy has been incredible all week. Let’s make this final day of Web Summit 2024 unforgettable! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ pic.twitter.com/4Wt2HRuAK8
— Web Summit (@WebSummit) November 14, 2024
He reiterated the point in private. “At a time when Palmer Luckey, Sundar Pichai are all very clearly showing that they only care about profits,” Fitzgerald said. “Where’s the start-up, where’s the voice, where’s the Irish ceo [chief executive], who might say: This is what we do. We’ve decided not to do defence contracts. We’re not going to kind of work on the kind of stuff that would lead to human rights abuse.”
These big-picture discussions — and celebrity appearances from the likes of Pharrell Williams — are a key element of Web Summit’s alchemy. But the real meat of the conference, the value it provides to attendees beyond all the beard-stroking and razzle-dazzle, is for the start-ups who attend and set out their stall over the four days.
It is difficult to express to anyone who has not been to Web Summit how vast the campus is that it occupies on the MEO Arena grounds. Picture something like five individual aeroplane hangars side by side and filled with stalls, stands and stages and you have some idea. It needs to be experienced to be believed.
Amid the chaos and din, more than 75 Irish start-ups are exhibiting throughout the week, 36 of which are there on Web Summit’s dime, having been selected to showcase at the event. One of those companies is Reso Health, a Waterford business developing a personalised supplements platform. The company, in a nutshell, is building an app and a specialised vending machine that allows people to input their health data and receive a personalised multivitamin and mineral product based on their requirements at a particular time.
Exhibiting at Web Summit for the second year in a row, the company’s co-founder Dermot O’Riordan said that when all is said and done, the exposure start-ups receive from the conference is second to none. “To be quite honest, it has an intrigue about it,” he said. “The quality of investor that you get — like, there’s serious opportunities.” While Res Health is yet to launch its product, he said Web Summit has given it very strong leads on potential customers in the corporate world. “You’re not going to get that at any standard event,” said O’Riordan. “Let alone the quantity of people you meet here, the quality of people and the positions they hold, it’s just worth a fortune to start-ups.”
That Cosgrave shied away from controversy was, in hindsight, probably predictable given the trauma of last year, particularly for the people who work hard behind the scenes to keep this titanic show on the road. There may also be financial reasons for his relatively quiet week. While some sponsors like IBM and Meta returned to the Lisbon fold this year, others did not in what must be a blow of some kind to the company’s bottom line.
To what extent? It’s impossible to say. Cosgrave was sanguine about the financials. When asked about it at a press conference on Wednesday, he claimed Web Summit “probably” made €4 million or €5 million in profit this year and Ebitda [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization] of between €10 million and €11 million. “We’ve grown revenue by nearly 30 per to an all-time high,” he said. “It’s been a very profitable year.”
Those figures certainly are in the realm of possibility. Manders Terrace, the company behind the Web Summit’s events, turned a €3.8 million after-tax profit on revenues of €31.8 million in 2021. Revenues surged to €52.5 million in 2022, the last full year for which accounts are available, but so too did sales and administrative costs, leaving the company with after-tax profits of just €114,000. In other words, Cosgrave’s claim is feasible but impossible to verify from our current vantage. If the loss of sponsorship left financial scars, Cosgrave isn’t giving anything away.
Nor was he giving away much in the way of quotes. It might be argued, of course, that his original social media remarks on Israel — in which he accused the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) of war crimes and expressed his disgust at the failure of western leaders to intervene — have proven somewhat prescient, given what Israel stands accused of in South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice. Israel has specifically been accused of war crimes, including the starvation of civilians, by Human Rights Watch.
Whether he feels somewhat vindicated is also impossible to say. Curiously, Gaza was not on the table for discussion at Web Summit 2024. When asked directly whether he had raised the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, who attended the conference on Tuesday, Cosgrave did not answer the question. Instead, he said he had discussed EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles with the German Green Party politician as well as Ireland’s “unusual” decision to support the measures. Pressed for an answer, a spokeswoman for Web Summit would say only that conversations held with attendees are private.
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