What is going to be The “Next Web” in 2017?

OtherMay 24, 2017

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“And it is official!“, such words came out of Bo’s mouth (he is the COO 🙂 ) when he learnt we were going to The Next Web Conference 2017 in Amsterdam.

The ultimate purpose of our trip was to present Kontentino in the start-up area of the conference. However, being at such conference implies us attending all the talks for inspiration and new learnings.

Kontentino, being a spin-off or from the business point of view, a start-up or a bootstrap (which by the way are the buzz-words we do not like using) got interested mainly in the talks aiming at the touched topic 🙂 .

“It is not skimming your knees, it is like being run over by a car”

Brian Halliga, CEO of HubSpot introduced a topic, how easy it is to start a company; actually never has it been easier to start your own company, while on the flip side, scaling up the company has never been harder.
Nowadays, the biggest challenge is to stay ahead of our competitors, i.e. other start-ups or “the big players”, for example Google or Facebook.

Brian talked extensively about a transition from a start-up mindset into a scale-up mindset and introduced a couple of concepts seemingly insignificant at first, but possible stumbling-blocks in the end.

Sailing the ship

According to Brian, decision-making process varies heavily in start-ups and in scale-ups, i.e. in a start-up company changing your mind is cheap, whereas changing your mind a scale-up can be compared to sailing a ship, meaning once you decide to go on a cruise, going back is an expensive decision having an impact on all the other people, processes and so on…

As he recalls: “…there is no lobbying after…people who lost their argument in the meeting would go to me and started lobbying and lobbying… and in the end, I would change my mind, that started driving everybody crazy as we scaled.”

“…that actually made me listen to people, for example, there are 4 people on the right, there are 4 people on the left, that means there are winners and there are losers” – there is no lobbying after.

An uninspired compromise

Imagine yourself at the meeting with 2 groups of people, a team A with 3 people and a team B with 5 people arguing and arguing… and in the end, taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that, mixing it together into some kind of compromise.

Worst scenario ever.

Such decisions are not bold, but conservative preventing us from moving forward.
I am sure you’ve been there, we have 😉 .

Start-up people are not scale-up people

A lot more concepts were introduced by Brian, but the most important one, as far as I am concerned are the people. They are the ones, who make your product, they are the ones, who improve your product.
And in case they line-up with company’s mission, you have 0.5% of success in your pocket.

But how do you differentiate these people? They look the same! 😀 In HubSpot, they used to ask two simple questions:

- on a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you recommend your friend to work here

and why 🙂

Simple questions telling you a lot about employee’s motivation. Once score drops, it is nearly impossible to recover it.

Snapchat is starting over

Embarrassing crappy story from Snap #TNW2017

— Jeroen Jonker Roelants (@roelants) May 19, 2017

…or unfortunately, maybe not.

Imran Khan may have put up some interesting information about snapchat statistics during his talk Storytelling in the Age of Snapchat, however, that has not been enough in a duel with Facebook storycopylikestuff.

The first rule of robotics: “bring the freakin’ microphone”

Imagine you are at the conference, the day is going by, you go from one talk to another, everything’s great. But what could be an unforgettable element making you more engaged by creating a little bit of “spicy” atmosphere? ?

Yes, I am talking about hosts, the guys introducing the talks to you.

In The Domme, Emily Hinks, being as charming as she could possibly be, as far as I am concerned, could not outperform Pop Rosenfeld in the Gashouder, throwing witty remarks every once in a while.

“AI, VR, AR, blah, blah…”

Yes, we’re going to hear a lot more about those shiny words.

Even though these technologies have been around for a couple of years, I think Facebook was the one who got the business going at F8.

The same goes for the chatbots. They’ve been around for a couple of years as well, however, who’ve got the best platform available to make a fortune out of it? Yep, if you are saying a word starting with “F”, you got that right 😎 .

Time for something sweet. Come and stop by to get your #cottoncandy by @Kontentino #TNW2017 pic.twitter.com/00fizMZo4W

— Kontentino (@Kontentino) May 19, 2017

Unfortunately for us, we could not participate even on half of the talks, for Kontentino was at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam having its own booth!