I just got back from LeWeb in Paris, after having spent 2 weeks in Thailand where I proposed to my girlfriend and she said yes! It was a great holiday and Thailand is a very special place.
This blog isn’t about that trip, but I started with that because being in a relaxed frame of mind gave me incredible clarity when I landed in Paris for this tech conference.
For those of you who aren’t aware, LeWeb is probably the number 1 European technology event which draws the most influential people from Silicon Valley to come check out what’s happening in the European tech scene.
It is a mashup of the top players in the game from CEO’s and Directors of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it, and lots of new start-ups and ideas.
learning from others
The reason I attended was because I wanted to learn about this industry from the inside and see how I can get investment for the new projects I’ve been working on, that being DiaryMemo and SmartMemo.
I figured that the only way to learn is first hand, it always is. It doesn’t matter if you are learning a language, a university course or some sales training. Learning firsthand is always the best.
I really wasn’t sure what to expect, though I had heard great things about the conference. The organisation was fantastic and the overall production was spectacular. It was more like a movie production than a typical conference. The amount of effort gone into the set design and overall design of the show was second to none.
But back to the theme of this blog. Do something that changes the world.
You see, one of the topics I was looking to learn more about was the attitudes of investors into new tech start-ups. I fully expected them to be concerned mostly about numbers and business models, but actually what I found out was much more surprising.
They were much more interested in the overall social and global impact of an idea rather than the numbers. To them, if an idea could change the world in some small way, for the better, it was something worth investing in.
I couldn’t put it more simply than that.
You don’t need to write a book and publish it, you don’t need to go on some long incubation course teaching you ideas of how to become influential in your industry, you don’t even need to have a great pitch.
The only 2 things you need to work on are:
- Extreme clarity about what REAL problem you are solving
- A superfluous product or service that solves the problem well
Forget what anyone else has told you, this is all it takes. My take away from this would be those 2 things above.
The numbers people talk about during the networking events were staggering. They don’t talk in 6 figures, they talk in millions and billions when it comes to investment and valuations. This is just everyday life and normal conversation for them. It just goes to show how different perceptions work in different ways. To them, these kinds of numbers are merely fact, not some pipe dream discussion.
I think it’ll take me a bit of time to digest all the input I got from the conference, but I just wanted to share this simple understand I reached. Hopefully you can also get something from this.
For more about LeWeb you can view all the speakers at their YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/leweb– I highly recommend watching them.
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