September 2nd I attended Sthlm Tech Fest at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress.
At #SthlmTechFest investor groups and startups mix together to network, pitch and make relevant new connections.
Ofcourse there are also regular tech-nerd attendees, like myself.
The event is organized by Tyler Crowley and his team. I must say that they did an amazing job putting all this together.
This was my first time attending this particular event, and I’ve heard a lot about it being male dominated.
And so was this years event.
In tech, it isn’t uncommon and I really hope we can change this male dominated tech world to become more gender diversified.
Unfortunatly I couldn’t cover both stages, so I focused on the main stage since that was the topics and panels I was interested in watching.
So I will get you my personal reflections about 3 of the topics on the main stage.
The future of investing had a really interesting panel:
Sonali De Rycker – Partner at Accel, Elizabeth Yin – Partner at 500 Startups and Hélène Barnekow from Telia Sonera.
Both Sonali and Elizabeth had very interesting inputs about investing in startups.
According to Sonali, the worst venture capitalists are the ones who don’t give a shit about neither the company nor the entrepreneur.
These two women were so inspiring that I instantly started follwing them on Twitter.
I recommend you doing the same if you are into tech, investors and startups. Brilliant women.
The future of gaming had a panel of only men, which I hope they will change for next year.
We definitly need more women in the tech-world that’s for sure.
The panel included: Peter Vesterbacka – Co-founder, Rovio (Angry Birds) + SLUSH, Tommy Palm – CEO, Resolution Games, Daniel Kaplan- Game Producer + Business, Mojang (Minecraft), Adam Schaub – VP Creative Production, King and Fredrik Wester, CEO at Paradox Interactive.
The discussion was mainly about VR (Virtual Reality) and how, if and when it would revolutionize the future of gaming. The panel had different opinions about the subject.
The future of media made me slightly disappointed.
Mike Butcher from Tech Crunch who was moderating this panel did a great job.
He was funny, engaging and made the crowd laugh more than once during this panel.
Ryan Leslie, Cofounder and CEO of Disruptive Multimedia who presented a humorous pitch about his “Superphone”, was also a highlight.
But the panel was mostly about music and that’s not what I expected. And all of them were ofcourse men.
The panel: Rikard Steiber, MTGx who attended as his clone (Robot, since he was in Palo Alto), Shiva Rajaraman, Spotify and Per Sundin, Universal Music.
The startup pitches was, overall, really good and many of them made me laugh. The best one came from Lingio and included making fun of Donald Trump in a really engaging way. The audience loved it, and so did I.
Lingio is an app who makes it fun to learn language. I’m not sure what I think of the app, but the pitch was exceptional.
Peter Carlsson at Tesla made an interesting quote that I remember:
“All cars we make today, can in theory drive by themselves.”
An interesting statement and I’m sure we will see this soon, practically.
If I remember correctly, this was at the future of retail, a panel I just watched for the latter half.
To sum it all up, I enjoyed this event and will attend again next year for sure!
