This article was taken from the March 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Paddy Cosgrave organised his first conference, F.ounders, in October 2009 in Dublin: 150 people turned up. In November 2010, he ran a combination of two events, F.ounders (not to be confused with Founders Forum) and the first Dublin Web Summit, which attracted around 400 people -- including Jack Dorsey and Chad Hurley, cofounders of Twitter and YouTube. In November 2014, according to Cosgrave, more than 22,000 people attended Dublin's Web Summit, and sister events ran in New York, Hong Kong and Las Vegas.
Cosgrave, 31, studied economics and politics at Trinity College, Dublin, but "was always building things online with friends, from invites for parties to a really bad social network that nobody used," he says. Now his technology events host speakers from Peter Thiel to Eva Longoria, and employ over 100 people. Cosgrave spoke to WIRED about how he grew his event into one of Europe's biggest tech conferences.
What inspired you to create the first Web Summit?
I organised a conference when I left college [Trinity College, Dublin] and found out very quickly that the conference industry, although amazing in bringing inspiring entrepreneurs together, was very unscientific and un-technological. I think you can make conferences better by using statistics and a little bit of code.
The first conference was in October 2009 in a small hotel in Dublin. It wasn't properly organised and about 150 people turned up. I thought nothing of it; I had no interest in conferences whatsoever.
But I thought it was good for Ireland -- you have all these great tech people who would fly to London or Paris or Berlin and I was like, "Why the hell does nobody come to Ireland?" So I just invited some people. It wasn't until October 2010 that we turned it into something more meaningful. Four hundred people showed up. We had Jack Dorsey, Niklas Zennström and Chad Hurley.
What do you think attracted people to what was then an unknown event? I just said, "Come and speak and also spend some time with each other." Most of them had never been on a pub-crawl before. In 2011, Bono agreed that he would host one of the pub crawls, and that became an attraction in its own right. Every year he takes 15 other founders, from Elon Musk to Drew Houston to Reed Hastings, on a magical pub crawl of Dublin. Oddly, people in Silicon Valley who make the software that connects the world don't get a lot of time to meet each other. In Dublin there are no distractions so you can hang out for two-and-a-half days.
What role does technology play in how you organise your events? Our growth has been largely propelled by network science. All we've done over time is to expand on that approach of engineering serendipity at the scale of 20,000 attendees. There's a huge amount of randomness at events so we try to take control of some of that using algorithms for optimal outcomes. In 2010, I was putting together the table plans for the first event.
It was three days, with dinners, lunches, breakfasts and pub-crawls, with about 200 people each. I asked event organisers how to draw up a table plan. They said it's really hard, you have to be so careful and focus on the top table to begin with. I didn't want a top table; I wanted to evenly distribute everybody across these 20 tables of ten. I sat down with a friend who is an applied statistician [Kevin Cunningham, now campaigns targeting and analysis manager for Labour] and we just created a pretty basic brute-force algorithm that just created the seating plans based on a number of constraints.
How do you develop the data science behind the event? We hire applied statisticians, engineers and physicists with a background in complex systems and network analysis. With the social web, you can increasingly see the connections people have to other people, so we apply that insight to something as simple as our chat app and a networking app at the Web Summit. If you're a developer, we see the types of people that you want to connect with, so we have a recommendation system based on what we know about you and the rest of the delegates. It turns out, for example, that we hadn't realised that many of the startups that attended weren't looking for investors, but for talent -- specifically, they were looking for developers. We had never got to see that at scale, because we were never able to see in real time who was actually connecting with whom. So that allows you to think about how you improve and build the system the next year.
Does data contribute to your speaker selection? We use software called NetworkX to look at networks. So, for instance, if you want to figure out who is the single most important speaker for a given community, the algorithm helps us discover who people look to the most. It turns out that Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, is, among the hardcore bitcoin community, the person that people look to most. We use that approach to help us figure out who should come and speak on certain topics on certain stages.
Regarding how delegates interact during a conference, was there any insight from the data that surprised you? Conferences don't end at 5pm, according to our
[networking] data. In terms of people communicating with each other through the app, we found that there's a flurry in the morning, probably related to planning meetings, and then from 7pm to 10pm there's a flurry of activity again. So that's when we put on lots of small events to cater for different communities. It could be as granular as a Python meetup, so if you want to recruit a Python developer, you can go crash that party.
What else have you learned? I see a lot of mistakes at our conference. For instance, we looked at queuing. It turns out Disney has done lots of pretty compelling research on queuing and how to improve the queuing experience. One of our scientists has a background in machine vision so we have GoPros all over the venue and, just like Walmart tries to improve the flow of people through their stores, we use the footage to try to improve the flow of people through an exhibition area.
**You are expanding to other global cities, with new conferences such as Collision, held in downtown Las Vegas last May.
What is your strategy for expanding into unfamiliar territories?** Collision is growing at a faster rate than Web Summit ever grew. It'll probably go from 1,500 to 10,000 attendees in basically a single cycle, which is reasonably substantial growth. We're also expanding to Hong Kong and into verticals. We're going to do an event in the payment space and we're going to do one in the currency space and one in the enterprise space. So many of our hires out of the last six months have come from SF, London, Berlin, Milan, Moscow, Australia, Madrid, just other places around the world. I think maybe another 100 people will join the company over the next 12 months and many of those will come from abroad.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
