The Biggest Tech Show of the year? 42,000+ people and impressively 50.5% women across tech, finance, media, football, music + more

Don't let the lack of coverage in the some papers, or its location, undermine the importance of this global event. If you want a more detailed lowdown, check-out Bloomberg, Reuters, Tech.eu, Business Insider, CNBC, the Evening Standard, or even The Times.

Simon Freeman described the event "as at the intersection of pop culture and technology as more than 40,000 people from 128 countries descended on the ancient port city for Web Summit, one of the world’s biggest tech expos" . He wasn't wrong. Where in the world could one mingle with Lucy Clarke , Dharmesh Malam and Dave Stevinson . Or be in the same room as ex Arsenal players Sol Campbell and Gilberto Silva ; leading British tech entrepreneurs Stan Boland and Simon Segars ; rising star journalists Callum Burroughs and Ivan Livingstone ; and legends like Robin Wauters and PR expert Charles Palmer .

The Web Summit gave me an opportunity to hear important pleas from Ayo Tometi , Frances Haugen and Thierry Henry . The Tech industry must do better and a packed Altice Arena seemed to agree.

I was pleased to meet entrepreneurs such as Vicky Wilson from County Durham, Alessandra Knight from LA and Raya Al Maskari from Muscat. Seeing the sheer scale of diverse talent fills me with hope. Role models are important! We've had this in venture for a while with Reshma Sohini or Dana Settle to complement wise owls like Harry Nelis . But this year, we've had several female founder and minority-led tech & consumer internet IPOs in London as well as an increasing number from overseas. Bumping into Vin Murria , Jay Patel , Ido Erlichman and Poppy Gustafsson at the UK Tech Awards last Wednesday illustrates that we have some cool role models on our doorstep too.

Its very easy to drown ourselves in our day-to-day lives. Jumping from Zoom, to Teams, to a physical meeting and back to Webex or LoopUp; looking at the next set of earnings results; trying to stay on top of email. Even though I only made the first two days of the Web Summit, the short RyanAir flight from Stansted to Lisboa provided sufficient escape velocity to get the cognitive diversity I craved.

Here's some of my highlights. If you made it there too, I've love to hear yours.

Jan Hammer (Index Ventures) and Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp) in conversation with Robin Wauters (Tech.eu). European tech is on fire - in a good way:

Q. What's changed in Europe?

• Reshma: [Just like the Paypal mafia, we are now seeing] "the rise of angels from the mafias of UIPath, Wise and others that are buying equity. And it's not just founders but operators. We'll see more companies get founded and funded as a result and with many to help them scale. UIPath has created 50 angels!"
• Jan: "Europe has always had good tech companies but lacked cool jobs for graduates... the proliferation of tech [large & small] means graduates are more likely to stay here. But talent is also more distributed today and [the pandemic] has accelerated this. Silicon Valley is losing its secret sauce - its [hyper]local ecosystem which has gone global. Global markets can be reached from anywhere in the global and customers are more accustomed to buying from foreign vendors over Zoom [as much as investors are writing cheques!]
• Jan also added that the rise of talent isn't just engineers but "all the ingredients to build bigger companies... design, marketing, sales, business managers"

Benedict Evans - What today is telling us about tomorrow

I subscribe to Ben's weekly newsletter but am always impressed by his fast-talking presentations and thought-provoking stats. You can find more here . And if you enjoy this and want to go deeper, get in touch and I'll point you to some of my favourite blogs and podcasts.

Julian Rowe (Latitude) in conversation with Cleo Sham (Stride) and Nizar Tarhuni . SPACs to the future: The opportunity for Europe

I first came across Julian as I was listening to his podcast on Deliveroo . He's an ex-banker like me but far more impressive and I enjoyed hearing his thoughts on where SPACs made sense and where they didn't (i.e. most companies as it remains a minority sport).

This was one of my favourites: Alex Ferrara (Bessemer), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp), Tom Stafford (DST) in conversation with Callum Burroughs (Business Insider) - Euro vision: The new playing field

Alex described why Bessemer setup shop in London: "nearly all partners (including those on the West Coast) had invested here [Europe] and some had exited. We wanted to do more, and it made sense to setup an office".

Tom reassured me that we'll see ￡100B European tech and consumer internet companies by reminding the audience that Europe accounted for 20-25% of online consumption, yet the aggregate market cap of consumer internet companies was ~5% of the global total and therefore up to 5x underpenetrated. He said that we have the talent, TAMs are big enough and companies have a proven ability to scale beyond borders. It feels like just a matter of time!

In terms of changes in deal-making, while the speed at which outfits such as Tiger Global have been writing cheques is well-advertised, an acceleration is being felt broadly. Timelines to complete due diligence are being compressed, meetings are still happening over Zoom and companies are raising continuously vs. once every 18 months as needs must. The venture capitalists acknowledged that there will be some deals that go wrong (its built into their model) but these will be learning experiences and risks worth taking.

Reshma indicated that the biggest risk for hypergrowers (i.e. companies with a [40+]% revenue CAGR) was access to talent and being able to sustain their growth and Alex acknowledged that talent is a topic for every board meeting these days.

The panel acknowledged that traditionally there were not enough angels or domain experts, but the world has been virtualised and Silicon Valley's superpower isn't as strong. This democratisation is also helping Europe connect better with Asia. Alex feels that we have an opportunity to learn from the US to build and even better ecosystem.

Dana Settle (Greycroft), Michiel Kotting (Northzone) and Harry Nelis (Accel) in conversation with Kia Kokalitcheva (Axios). Finding your nearest exit option: Which option is right for you?

Key takeaways:

• It's impossible to time the market - Harry gave an excellent example where the founders of Accel Partners, Jim Swartz and Arthur Patterson, were asked this question and they thought the top was in '96 but soon gave up on trying to call time on the market
• Prepare early and well if you're planning to go public. While it's possible to do an IPO in under 12 weeks on our AIM market as both Fonix and Calnex successfully demonstrated and impressively all virtually, it's not recommended. It's much better to take your time, get your house in order if it isn't already, build the right team, structure and processes and start behaving like a public company before you are one.
• There are no silver bullets including SPACs.
• This made me smile: "Europe [still includes London the last time I checked ;-)] has had a gangbuster year of IPOs"; multi-stage is blurring private/public funding and we at London Stock Exchange are increasingly focusing on how we can help ensure that companies don't face cliff edges in the funding continuum so they can make the right choices, not just the necessary ones.

Guillaume Pousaz (Checkout.com) in conversation with Robert Hackett (Fortune) - Banking is broken. Can fintech fix it?

One of the things that impresses me most about the tech industry is the fact that not everyone is cut from the same cloth. Founder & CEO of Shopify Tobias Lütke (also an '81 baby) was born in Germany, dropped out of school and moved to Canada where he setup an online snowboard shop, stumbled across the idea for Shopify and admits he learnt to think on his feet through playing video games. More here . Guillaume's story is similar except his idea for Checkout.com was born while surfing in California.

Key highlights:

• On the topics of Brexit and the pandemic, Guillaume said that "we don't get to decide where the world is going and just need to be agile. But when the world is changing, there's always opportunities for tech companies to create value." He gave the example of his 75 year-old mother ordering online groceries for the first time - a trend that Benedict has picked up on in many of his charts.
• I've been impressed by ApplePay's rapid rise in the last 5-6 years and some of you may have caught me paying for pastel de natas with my Apple watch but it was great to see that Guillaume hadn't expected ApplePay to have risen this quickly either
• Today, Checkout.com has 1,600 employees across 19 offices and 2/3 of its staff are European. Guillaume said that they are "proud to be a European tech company" and I hope we can help them to remain so.

Simon Segars (Arm) - can we fix the global chip shortage?

This was a masterclass is story-telling with a focus on the next Christmas miracle - how do we get the consumer electronics that our children want by Christmas in the midst of a global microchip shortage. It's going to be hard so start managing those expectations down and postpone that Nintendo or Playstation until December 2022.

Simon highlighted the challenge of shifting semiconductor production to Europe was not without risk because it's not just fabs that need to be built but also the ecosystems - materials and chemicals manufacturing, testing and packaging services. While it would be helpful to be less reliant on Taiwan and China, it feels like a multi-year journey.

Dana Settle (Greycroft) - The state of the VC nation

Dana is impressive. Like many top funds these days, Greycroft is a full lifecycle (or multistage fund) investing in seed-IPO. From offices in LA and New York, she and her team invest in consumer, fintech, healthtech and enterprise software. She highlighted that US venture capitalists have deployed more capital in just 9 months this year than any other prior year, a trend that is evidenced by PitchBook here , and sees three paradigm shifts across access, governance, and diversity:

• Businesses are born global. "It's possible to disrupt any industry" which explains why so much capital is being invested. "We're solving hard problems again." We're certainly seeing that with DeepTech companies such as Oxford Nanopore in London.
• In an earlier presentation, having launched her own SPACs, she cautioned entrepreneurs that they weren't quite the panacea that some had interpreted them to be but rightly acknowledged that SPACs, direct listings, and IPOs were all innovation in capital markets and that access to capital has never been so universally available - "a sea change in our industry."

Conclusion:

It was great to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and discuss how tech might be able to solve some really hard challenges with the likes of UN human rights expert Amit Sen .

I left feeling positive about the impact the industry's having but also the opportunity Europe has to pull together to build a much better ecosystem and remain closely connected but equally self-sufficient and not overly dependent on the US. 20 years ago, to get venture capital, European companies had to set up Delaware TopCos and move staff stateside but now firms like Bessemer have moved to London to compete and collaborate with well-established local VCs. Equally, European public markets are growing up - at the time of writing this article, we've witnessed 90+ IPOs in London YTD, 34 in tech & consumer internet. I've love to see more tech bankers, analysts, and fund managers at events like this so we can build a better European ecosystem and have a better appreciate of what's coming down the pipe.

Thanks for your hospitality, Paddy Cosgrave and Keith Wallace . I encourage you to invite some successful public companies to Lisbon to share insights with the up-and-coming stars and my team and I would be delighted to help you continue to add value to the ecosystem.