Red Herring Canada: Post Mortem (2)
September 8th, 2007 · by Mat · startups
To wrap up my coverage of Red Herring’s Innovation Illuminated conference, I’d like to examine what went right and what could be improved for next year.
The Good:
- The Breakout Room presentations: These were insightful and a lot of fun; it’s always inspiring to see the passion of entrepreneurs and to be exposed to new ideas.
- The Networking: There was lots of opportunity for this to happen, and it did. Well done. Given the relatively small size of the conference, it was rather easy to corner someone you wanted to talk to; something not always easy to accomplish.
- The lunch, particularly the soup: both yesterday’s minestrone and today’s cream of potato were outstanding, though the bowl size could have been larger.
To be Improved:
- The Price Tag: Cut this by a factor of 10 (if only for startups) — they need to find a way to encourage more startups, especially early stage ones, to come out. Conveniently, they also need a way to fill more seats (the conference was about 50% full, to be generous) so there seems to be an obvious opportunity here.
- Kill the main stage stuff. As much as it may pain Alex Vieux to hear it, he has about as much stage presence as Al Gore on depressants. Moreover, the conversation/presentation topics were uniformly bland and uninteresting, with the exception of today’s brilliant talk by SAT Director Rene Barsolo on the intersection of culture and technology. Put together material that is more cutting edge (like Rene’s) and put it in front of smaller groups, where the discussion will be more intimate. Encourage more conversation with the crowd. Take some lessons from BarCamps and go with less rigidity — keep in mind that informal and relaxed is good when you want people to share with one another. Overall, the traditional main stage stuff is staid and impersonal. Really, give this some serious thought.
- Scheduling: The Dragon’s Den style “Meet the Money” event sounded like fun, but since it was at 6PM I was unable to attend; put this kind of event at a more convenient time. Also, don’t end the conference late on a Friday — don’t they teach this in conference organizing 101?
- Discussion: Set aside more time for questions in breakout room presentations; it would be nice to get in more than half a question.
All in all, I have to say that this was a decent first attempt for Red Herring in Montreal, though not a resounding success. I am grateful for the opportunity to have participated, and sincerely hope they return to Montreal next year, with my advice heeded of course ;)
Mat Balez directs Business Development at Karabunga Inc. and blogs regularly at web1979.com.
Hi Mat,
Can you tell more about the breakout Room presentations? Are those like democamps? or more like discussions?
and great to hear about the soup :-)
Also I believe the “main stage stuff” can be very good, if you see for instance the TED videos. But of course, this boils down to content, presenting a kick-ass presentation, with cutting-edge information — which doesn’t seem it was there at the conference, apart from René Barsolo.
By the way, are you inviting them to do it again in Montreal, or they have already confirmed for next year?
The Breakout Room presentations were 12 minute slots where small companies, mostly startups, would pitch their products and if they were looking for funding. It was not like democamp in that the presentations rarely centered around demos, although there were a few; most presentations were your typical PPT slide based deal — and mostly very well done.
Your right in pointing out that I may have been a little hasty in saying that the main stage stuff needs to be “killed”. If they moved toward making the presentations much more interest, like TED as you mention, this would be a great thing.
I’m not sure that they’ve decided to hold the conference in Montreal again next year, but I am inviting them to do so. This city is a good host, I believe :)
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