Montreal Tech Watch

I was not surprised to confirm today that Red Herring’s Innovation Illuminated conference is, for the most part, your traditional meat-and-potatoes conference aimed at, and attended by, mostly-male mostly-corporate types who are there on the company’s dime. The stratospheric price of admission sent a clear signal to startups, especially those early-stage, that they were not invited to play along. Strange decision, given that the startups of today will be the large, vibrant technology organizations of tomorrow. But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself.

It is unquestionable that hosting this conference in Montreal is a good thing for the city, and ultimately for everyone involved in the business/technology scene here. It has brought together a mix of venture capitalists and executives that might not otherwise have this part of the continent on their radar. So in that sense, this conference was destined to be a success from the outset.

However, I think the traditional conference format is starting to show its age, and irrelevance. After spending the last several months attending un-conferences (Democamps, BarCamps, meetups, etc) I’ve become accustomed to a more honest, intimate and interesting way to interact and share with a large group of peers.

I have to focus my ire on the presentations in the main hall. Imagine a large, sparsely populated room with an awkward host on stage tossing his guests questions downloaded from a How-to-Manage-Your-Company website. You can be sure that just like any movie starring Brittany Spears will be mind-shatteringly painful to watch, any question posed to a panel of execs involving the “Top 10 qualities for success” is going to generate meaningless, high-level corporate drivel suitable only for engraving on trite motivational plaques. The hard hitting questioning was so intense that at one point, a panelist was cornered into answering how he dealt with staff in different timezones! The amount of penetrating insight generated in this main hall throughout the day was obviously off the charts.

Organizationally, there were some hiccups – the most notable being the announcement, only hours before his slated appearance, that Michael Sabia, CEO of Bell Canada would not be speaking today because he was “not in Montreal”. Odd.

Allowing myself to remove my eternal-critic hat for a moment, there were plenty of positives to the day. The company presentations in the breakout rooms were a nice way to learn about a lot of products and services being built by cool tech companies from across Canada (some brief thoughts on each of these I attended will be rolled up into a separate post). The lunch was tasty and plentiful. The wifi was down only about 5% of the time. But mostly, the day was valuable because of the people I had a chance to meet. There were CEOs and founders of companies, Venture Capitalists, Deal Makers, journalists and other bloggers. I can’t stress enough that the informal networking was the best part of the day, which is the case, I suspect, for most (if not all) conferences.

I just wish a wider swath of local (even regional) budding entrepreneurs would have been able to participate in the amazing networking stew that this event presents. More tomorrow, including suggestions for improvement and company snapshots.

Mat Balez directs Business Development at Karabunga Inc. and blogs regularly at web1979.com.

Leave a comment if you wish to “contact” Mat for Day 2 of Red Herring Canada

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