What is it like to attend the TNW conference?
One answer: awesome!
Last week, I received a free ticket for the TNW conference. The last two days were some of the most fun and most interesting days I’ve ever had in my life. During the TNW conference I met a lot of entrepreneurs and learned a great deal on the relationship between technology and society. This blog post is a recap of my experiences during the event. I won’t bore you with all the details, just the bits that had the most impact on me 😉.
Day 1
The grand opening
Even before the event started, I had already an interesting encounter. After leaving the tram, I met a Romanian entrepreneur who briefed me about his startup and the challenges he faced. Afterwards I went to the main stage for the opening by TNW CEO Boris VvZ. I was really surprised how open and approachable mister Veldhuijzen van Zanten and his companion looked. He was very enthusiastic about the conference, even though he had been doing these openings for more than a decade.
Calm technology
The first talk I attended was from Amber Case. She stressed the fact that we are getting overwhelmed by all the notifications we are receiving from our smart devices. Her presentation was about the fact that we are getting obsessed with digitalizing and connecting everything. She gave the example of an automatic pet feeding machine that needed constant internet access to do its work.
One day during a server outage, all around the world pets were starved, because their owners thought that the feeding machine would take care of their pets.
Innovating with Adobe
After the talk of Ms. Case, Mark Rand from Adobe took the stage. Mr. Rand talked about the Adobe Kickbox. This a free package available on the Adobe website which serves as starter kit for innovating in your company.
It contains a step by step plan and paper t00ls to come up with new ideas. According to Mark, the box is especially geared towards companies that don’t have guidelines or support for employee driven innovation. Currently there has been a very high adoption rate in small business, but also in huge corporations.
I think this is a great initiative and I would like to use it someday at my workplace or school. The part I liked the most from the presentation, was the part were Rand explained how to get funds when you work at a large public company that has no budget for internal innovation.
Youth culture explained by 9GAG
After strolling around the terrain for a bit, I went to the presentation of the CEO of 9gag: Ray Chan. This was the most interactive presentation. For those who don’t know, 9gag is an online community where young people share funny images and video’s.
Mr. Chan presented the results of a survey his website undertook about the norms and values of millennials. He asked us each time to predict the results of a question. His research had some interesting conclusions. For example, millennials in Singapore would rather give up the right to vote, than to give up the right to express themselves on social media.
Rest of the day
I spent most of the afternoon of the first day hanging out with old acquaintances I encountered at the festival. We attended the presentation of Thijs Biersteker, who showed off his marvelous contraptions that you can control with your motion.
After hours session with Navot Volk
After the first day, I had (together with a handful other attendees) an exclusive drink with navot volk. Mr. Volk is an Israeli ex-entrepreneur who is currently managing the Israel branch of Microsoft Accelerator. He told us of the mistakes he made. Such as accepting (soon worthless) stocks instead of cash when he sold his first company.
I was accompanied with a lot of entrepreneurs who asked questions about networking, raising capital, common mistakes made. After the drink he advised us to invest in E-health and not in things related to ad-tech and tablets. This is what I really liked about the conference, being able to talk face to face with some of the most successful people on the world.
Day 2
Snapchat’s impressive growth
After yet another spectacular opening by Boris VvZ and his friends, the second day started with a talk from Snapchat’s chief strategist. He told us how snapchat quickly became the market leader in smartphone camera tech. This claim was solidified with impressive numbers. For example, 60% of all users post new content each day. This is a striking contrast with Facebook and Twitter where most people only consume content instead of daily creating.
I’m a huge snapchat fan, but I was impressed with all the forms of native advertising implemented in Snapchat. Nowadays advertisers can even create simple webpages and games in Snapchat. For example this small game from Oreo:
For the rest of the morning of the second day, I didn’t go to any talks. Instead I spent most of the Friday morning exploring the exhibition areas. A lot of companies such as Microsoft, Adobe and Autodesk showed off their latest tech and I received an impressive demo of the new Adobe XD software. TBH I wanted to attend more talks in the “dome area” where a lot of interesting marketing talks were held, but it was too crowded.
Financial privacy
After the break, I attended an interesting talk named: “when banks know more about you, than you do” by Chris Skinner. You would think that US companies would be the most data hoarding and privacy invading, but this is not the case. Instead Chinese giants like Alibaba and Baidu collect the most.
According to Skinner, banking will look completely different in the future. Banks will use a lot more automation and personalization. For example, JP Morgan is creating software that can do in a few seconds what an army of lawyers takes 360000 hours to do! Banking will become more invisible, because the bank will already know what you want and will take care of it for you. This also means that in 2015 1/3 of the current bank employees, will have no job.
I mostly agree with him and I think it is a good thing that banks innovate. After this talk, there was a similar presentation by Chase Jarvis who told not to fear new tech and that AI can never match the human creativity that’s needed to solve problems.
How to start a side business?
This was by far the presentation that I enjoyed the most. Chris Guillebeau talked about how to start a business while also working a full time job.
For example, driving an Uber car, is not a side business, but a glorified part-time job, because you still rely on someone else to pay you and create the rules for you.
During the presentation he told stories of people who worked fulltime, but also made thousands of dollars in supplementary income with side projects like their own candle shop. Afterwards he told that the most important thing you should do is to look for a problem that you have in your daily life and how you can monetize a solution.
I was inspired by their stories and I look forward to using this knowledge for my own plans.
T500 talent sessions
Because I’m a member of the T500, I had the right attend two exclusive talent sessions with industry leaders. These were like the discussion with Mr. Volk on day 1.
During the first round I discussed with data scientists from PwC about how to make sure you get the best insights from all your customer data. They had a lot of experience working with banks such as ABN AMRO. The overall consensus was that most large corporations have a lot of good business analysts and good data scientists, but lack people that can connect both worlds. Most of my day to day job consists of developing systems that can generate statistical and financial reports. This talk left me with a lot of insights to do my job better.
The second session was with an executive from Exact Online. He told about us about the features of the Exact platform and what difficulties they have with integrating various banking platforms with each other. I had expected that this session would have been more api/data focused, but we talked a lot about finances and banking.
Conclusion
Like I said, the TNW conference has been one of the most rewarding things I have ever experienced. In my opinion everyone interested in technology and entrepreneurship, especially young people like me, should at least attend this event once. You probably learn a thing or two or meet some people, which in turn can greatly accelerate your career or personal development.
If you have the financial means to buy a ticket and all the extra costs such as travel, by all means: go!
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