I signed up as a volunteer to attend Techcrunch’s Discrupt London Conference in early Dec. 2015. It was a great way to attend a conference that would have otherwise cost 120GBP ($240) for students or a jaw-dropping 1200GBP ($2,400) as a regular attendee. Plus, an added bonus of volunteering is access to backstage and getting to see all the behind the scene action (set up, logistics, scheduling, equipment, etc.) and meeting the other volunteers and organizers of TC.
Techcrunch’s event is broken up over 4 days. The first 2 days kicks off with a massive hackathon, where over 300 people form teams to develop a project within 24 hours. The winning team gets 3000GPB ($5000) and exposure to companies.
This was the venue, Copper Box Arena in London, UK.
What struck me was how prepared everyone was: people flew in from all over Europe, including Germany, France, Netherlands and more to compete. Many teams even bought hardware like Oculus. Once all the teams were settled in and the hackathon began, not a moment’s hesitation was wasted. Everyone dialed into their computers and started coding immediately. I spend over 4 hours helping during the hackathon, and noticed not a single person/team took time off to relax. Clearly everyone was gunning for the top prize.
Of course this is a free food blog, so I’ll talk about the facilities available: there were 3 stations set up throughout the floor, serving various sodas, fruits and chocolate/candy bars. Nothing very substantive, but hundreds of boxes of pizza and beer was delivered later for a midnight meal.
On Saturday and through to Sunday was the actual Disrupt conference. The floor was divided into 2 sections: one area was a theatre and the other was a tradeshow type setup for startups. The 2 days featured various speakers from all backgrounds. Some notable ones were soccer player Thierry Henry, Singer Imogen Heap, founders and members from Sequoia Capital, Rocket Internet, Farfetch, Blablacar and many more.
This was the tradeshow floor, the presentation area is behind the black curtains in the back.
Fashion Talks with CEO of Farfetch, Jose Neves
Here they are doing live interviews of various startup founders with TC TV
I was disappointed in the speeches and interviews, none of the speakers made a significant impression on me. The interviews were poorly moderated and focused too much on the narrow industry each company was a part of. I wanted more of the founder’s personal stories and struggles.
Thierry Henry interview
Imogen Heap “fireside chats”
The single best thing I took away from that weekend was JukeDeck, a 2-year-old startup from UK that allows users to generate completely new songs, given a genre and length. It utilizes machine learning to create the songs, you can check it out here. What really amazed me was one of the founders was a music major at Cambridge, with 0 programming skills. He self taught all the software skills to start this project, including very sophisticated machine-learning technology. I truly admire that work ethic and drive.
The conference ended by Sunday afternoon, where a winner from the tradeshow startup participants was announced. No doubt, JukeDeck took home the winning prize of 30,000GPB.