Back in Person Momentum

Attendees at Collision embrace getting together again, face to face, ready for the next big thing

Many years ago, when I was a relative newcomer to Canada, I dreaded the networking aspects of public events. I did not know a soul at the tech events I frequented and was reluctant to approach people and say “Hi I am Pieter and I am really interested in getting involved in tech”. But things evolved and today in Toronto I had people coming up to me in the street as we made our way to one of the world’s largest tech events, Collision. Even the long line-up was not an issue, it enabled me to not only catch up with old and familiar faces, but was even able to connect a great start-up we recently invested in with some local investors. And then there was a student who I had never seen but was pleased to shake my hand saying he had seen one of my talks on Zoom. If it had stayed on Zoom we would never had a great a follow-up chat and now we did. The icing on the cake was a student on the streetcar back who hurried to pull out his notebook asking me to give him one central piece of advice before I got off at my station. In other words: even before Collision got really underway things turned out to be great and delivering exactly what people had been yearning for: meet in person. Connect, chat, learn, negotiate, whatever, as long as you can see and feel someone’s physical presence and the rapidly changing expressions on their faces. Zoom does not suck, it just has its limitations.

The Collision drill is not new, the organizers put on the famed WebSummit event in Lisbon that I attended last year during the short break between Covid waves. The model for these conferences works: over the span of three and a half days a full assault on the senses takes place with an insane number of engaging and often well-known speakers - last night Margaret Atwood was on stage for instance - , matchmaking with attendees, food and drinks and deep into the night partying all over the host city, in this case Toronto. It is not even just a tech or investment conference, it is a deep social bash where all trends that are shaping the direction of our world are coming together in one big exuberant celebration with the core theme: where to next? And saying the crowd is diverse is an understatement, it feels like the whole world is represented.

It helps of course that the event takes place in a dynamic environment. If you are based in Vancouver like I am, you cannot help but notice and be somewhat jealous of the energy of Canada’s pre-eminent metropolis. There is a sense of urgency in the air, people are on their way to accomplish something and have come from all over the world to roll up their sleeves. The city’s mayor, John Tory, was on stage on opening night highlighting jus that. Staying in an AirBnB in the Kensington Market area gives you access to endless and unprecedented food options. I used qualify Hong Kong as turbo-cultural, well Toronto comes quite close.

And despite the current turn of economic events it feels that deals are being done and that the appetite to support emerging tech founders remains as potent as it was last November when the markets peaked. This by the way was also the case in 2008 during the last big market collapse. I keep telling founders not to despair, it may take longer, valuations will be tweaked but the show will go on. The start of Collision this week is evidence of exactly that and it may even give you a false sense that everything is fine and we will all just boom along onto the next IPO and unicorn. We’ll see. I will spend the next few days enjoying it, but also take the real temperature and update you accordingly.