To say that the past week had a lot happening would be an understatement. Not only was Startup Boston Week on tap, but after opting to go virtual because of the coronavirus, INBOUND moved their conference from August to September 22 and 23. It meant that there was a lot to digest – and fortunately, a lot of it was great, especially Startup Boston Week.
Virtual events are nothing new by now, but for Startup Boston Week, this presented a particular challenge. A big part of the event is networking, not only because of the obvious point of many people coming together and with events like their opening night and closing night parties, but also because before each talk someone from the team specifically gets people going to connect. How do you pull that off?
Well, they did it. They did it exceedingly well.
The preparation for going virtual was tremendous, and it showed. The events I was able to check out were excellent, as is typically the case, whether it was Candidates, Collaboration and Code: How to Build a Winning Engineering Team, You Talkin’ to Me?: Maintaining a Conversation Between Product and Engineering, or Ready for Startup Life? What to Look For When Joining a Company. A couple of times each day, 15-minute networking sessions were held, and they were very well-done, putting some of the best elements of LinkedInLocal into play. A Slack channel for the event as was opened up before it started, and the organizers put together a spreadsheet with all kinds of contact information on speakers and event staff.
In other words, they pulled out all the stops to allow for attendees to get as much out of this experience as they might when held in person. With 70 events on tap featuring over 200 speakers, over 3,000 people signed up for and took in the events.
The Slack channel was very active and helped many people connect and relay thoughts from the events. Whether or not something like this succeeds depends upon its usage, and this one got plenty of it. The organizing team was active there, using it among other things to rally people to some of the 15-minute networking sessions. It was active even before the event got started, as attendees, speakers and the event team all jumped right in.
Over time, the team working with founder Stephanie Roulic has grown, and it showed this year. It was certainly needed, and you could even see it in Roulic, who didn’t seem worn down by all the work involved and was active in a number of the sessions.
INBOUND took place over just two of the five days, and I don’t come in with the same base of past experience to compare this to the in-person experiences. However, I came away impressed overall with the sessions and the overall design of the technical interface used, and have likewise made many connections from it both before the event (thanks largely to an active Facebook group for it) as well as during and after the event, and already signed up for next year. The big downer from the event having to go virtual was not being able to hold a big LinkedInLocal networking event in connection with it like last year, as that was an amazing experience that will also hopefully return in 2021.
It will be wonderful when events like these can be held in person again. For now, at least, we can see events like this being delivered in fine fashion.