10 Hacks For Staying Sane At WebSummit

There are lots of survival guides for big tech conferences like Web Summit, which is taking place this week in Lisbon. Most of them largely state the obvious, are vanilla and not super helpful. After having spent the week there, here is my unvarnished, ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek but hopefully also helpful guide to not losing your sh*t at what is now the world’s biggest tech conference (and blumin heck they do not stop enjoying telling us that!).

1.??????Do actually get your pass at the airport when you land – About the only official instruction worth listening to from the organisers is this one. The queues were short at the airport and epic at the venue. If, like me, you just want to get in the taxi queue and get to your meeting / hotel it’s tempting to worry about the pass later. Don’t, you will regret it. (See more below about Web Summit attendees’ favourite pastime, queuing).

2.??????Arrive fashionably late for the opening event or better yet don’t go at all – Because Web Summit attendees are clearly children, the organisers tell you it starts at 4pm whereas in reality it really doesn’t. They also say it’s busy so arrive early. So muggins here arrived at 315pm, spent 1 hour queuing (this will be a theme, I warned you) and then realised the event – sorry “show” – didn’t actually start until 5.30pm. Cheers. I had nothing better to do. (The fact that I actually didn’t is not the point!). So, my advice is to arrive after 15 mins the real start time. You will queue a bit but by then everyone will be in so won’t be long, and ok you will miss some of the opening, but you can probably live without seeing some overly excited tech bro run around stage like Janet Jackson in 1985.

3.??????Whatever you do, 100% for sure miss the Night Summit on Day 1 - I wouldn’t have minded if they had told us this was aimed at a cheap p*ss up for Portuguese students given free passes. At least then I would have been mentally prepared for the beer-fest and maybe even joined in. But I was - rather naively, who knew!? – prepared for some networking and grown-up conversation. My bad.

4.??????Be a little Israeli in the queue for the main entrance - Actually in every queue at the event. And before you accuse me of xenophobia, I am half Israeli so I can be half-xenophobic, ok? The rest of you can’t so don’t, unless you are actually Israeli in which case go for it. The Brits reading this don’t care about my Israeli reference, they are now twisting and turning in horror that I would dare skip a queue. (That’s a “line” for the North Americans, in the UK that means something else). But yes, deal with it. I did. Otherwise I would still be queuing to get in, and when I got in, I would then have to go straight to a queue for some lunch, followed by a queue for coffee, queue for the toilet and then queue for my taxi home, which basically means the entire Web Summit would be spent in a queue. Come to think of it, now I see why there were so many Brits at the event and hardly any Israelis.

5.??????The coffee in the machines at the Summit is actually not awful - I am a coffee snob so take my words seriously. Just queue up and get it from the machine like everyone else. Don’t do a Marc and refuse to get coffee from a machine, even though it was free, and march around demanding to find a skilled Italian barista who could make me an oat milk flat white with coffee beans imported directly from Guatemala and guffaw loudly when the poor guy on the help desk looked at me like I was a pyscho.

6.??????Make sure the hotel you choose has not been teleported, Bill and Ted’s style, to 1603 - Check whether the breakfast starts before 8am, there is a desk in the room (was a little hard to explain why I was doing our Q4 Management meeting via video call lying down on a 4 poster colonial bed) and that there is not classical music playing live at all hours of the day and night.

7.??????Walk as much as you can - It’s beautiful so you keep fit, save the planet, save money and save time. The traffic in Lisbon is horrible. Like really really horrible. Just make sure you have warmed up your calf muscles as the hills are steep. Oh and don’t bother with an electric scooter – lugging them up the hills is massive effort and going down the hills beyond terrifying. Just walk.

8.??????Disable notifications on the App - The Web Summit App is pretty useful, but they seem to take some devious pleasure in spamming you with notifications at every second of the day. So many that you don’t notice if you get a DM that could actually be useful from a contact. How many times do they need to tell us that the registration at the airport is open, ffs. (Once would suffice, see Hack 1).

9.??Search up the fringe events on Eventbrite – the best events I went to were the unofficial ones organised in the city during the evenings. Some great talks, startup pitch nights, networking drinks, that kind of thing. Definitely make the most of these.

10.??????Don’t get too comfy in the airport lounge on the way home - If like me you like to get to the airport early so you can sit in a moderately uncomfortable seat, eat bad food you don’t need, complain about the coffee (see Hack 5) and feel smug that you are able to sit in an exclusive VIP area of the airport (they really should give you gold wrist bands), then get to the airport even earlier than usual. Lisbon is one of those annoying airports where you do passport control in between the lounges and the gates, and they tell you to leave an hour.

I know this has been a bit of a grump-fest, but within all the irritating stuff were some interesting talks, several cool and inspiring people, and all in one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Web Summit can be a great and valuable experience, but you really do need a strong purpose for being there, plan carefully and follow all ten of my Hacks. The queues for next year have already started. See you there. Maybe.

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