Evans: Tech events outside Silicon Valley act like 'gay pride' for founders
Benedict Evans · Is Europe a market? · Oct 11, 2020 · at 35:38
Independent technology analyst Benedict Evans explains why major European tech conferences matter more for building regional startup ecosystems than Silicon Valley events do.
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“I sometimes describe things like web summit and four years from now, it's being like gay pride. Which is to say if you live in Stanford, you don't need an event to tell you. If you grew up in Berkeley or Stanford, you don't need an event to tell you about startups. But if you didn't, and if you grew up in a small town, and you didn't know anybody that was gay, then, you know, an event that says, no, this is a normal thing, and this is your community, and it's okay, has a lot of value. It's affirming, and it makes it feel like this is possible, and I think there's a sort of, you know, not to kind of trivialize it, but, you know, You wouldn't do four years from now in San Francisco. Cause like everyone knows about startups. You don't need to tell a seventeen-year-old that you can do a startup, but in Barcelona, there's no need to doing that because you know, you're the kid from Krakow doing computer science and actually now I can do a startup. And so it evangelizes the idea that this stuff is possible.”
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