By Alison Roberts - Financial Times (Special Report)
When thousands of entrepreneurs, investors and technology specialists gathered in Dublin early last month for the 2015 Web Summit, many already knew that it would be the last to be held in the Irish capital. Web Summit’s Irish founder and chief executive, Paddy Cosgrave, had in September announced at a ceremony in Lisbon that the Portuguese capital would be hosting the event from next year, in principle for three years.
This was a coup for Portugal. Since 2010 the Web Summit has emerged as an important date in the tech calendar, addressed by chief executives from companies such as Twitter, Netflix, Skype, Tesla Motors and PayPal; it will be the biggest global tech event Lisbon has hosted.
Ireland’s government has since defended its handling of the matter, after Mr Cosgrave released correspondence that he felt showed a lack of political will to underpin the event’s expansion.
But the decision, he insisted in an interview after the Lisbon ceremony, was not primarily a negative one.
As well as the proximity of Lisbon’s airport to the conference venue at Parque das Nações, former site of the 1998 Expo, he cited good public transport links, the option of traffic calming measures, and excellent WiFi facilities provided by MEO, Portugal’s largest telecoms company and the venue’s sponsor.
Even more important was what he described as an “incredible” grass roots campaign to lure Web Summit to Lisbon, after it became known that his team were looking at alternatives to Dublin.
“Out of nowhere someone created a Facebook page, and within days over a thousand people had joined the campaign and then two and then three . . . and then over 5,000,” he says. “On Twitter I couldn’t wake up any morning without somebody saying ‘hey, you should come to Lisbon, let me know if you’d like to learn more’.”
A Lisbon-based company, Codacy, also won the 2014 Web Summit Pitch competition for start-ups seeking investors, while Portugal’s embassy in Dublin was overrun by Portuguese youngsters when it held a reception during that year’s event. For whatever reason, Mr Cosgrave asserts, Lisbon has hit a sweet spot.
“It’s maybe for academics to figure out why in certain cities at a certain moment there’s just a great community spirit and real optimism about a better tomorrow,” he says. “I saw it in the incubators I visited and in the bars where I went for drinks with young entrepreneurs and investors.”
That is not to say that the government and city — represented at September’s ceremony by officials whose suits and ties were in stark contrast to Mr Cosgrave’s T-shirt and jeans — were not eager to help.
“I think when any country goes through a very challenging moment it tends to create some sort of unity: people overcome baggage that may be separating different stakeholders,” Mr Cosgrave says.
“The spirit is just let’s work together and set aside past mistakes.”
While he found the upbeat mood in Lisbon tech “overwhelming”, many in Portugal have suffered greatly in the economic crisis. “There are people that have been left behind all over the western world over the past eight years,” he says “But I hope that the optimism of entrepreneurs building new companies will help lift them out of their situation.”