Several days after October 7 2023, Paddy Cosgrave angered Israel's tech community, which was still licking its wounds, with a series of tweets criticizing Israel's response in Gaza, which seemed to leave no viable options for responding to the cruel attack. After years in which Cosgrave, as CEO of the Web Summit conference, would court Israeli startups, CEO and entrepreneurs to pay for pavilions and address the conference, the Israeli tech community was surprised at the unexpected cold shoulder from the Irish entrepreneur.
The protests by senior Israeli tech figures last year led to the mass cancellation of Israeli participation in the conference as Cosgrave continued to criticize Israel. The protests snowballed and led to sponsorship cancellations by Intel, Google, Amazon and Siemens. The severe crisis of confidence led Cosgrave to resign shortly before the conference, although he remained the main shareholder behind the scenes. In April, after the storm had died down, he resumed his position and is currently in the midst of marketing efforts and recruiting customers and partners for next month's conference.
It seems that the global tech community has forgotten last year's events, except perhaps for Israel's tech community. Many senior tech figures are scheduled to speak at Web Summit including Microsoft CEO Brad Smith, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, Dutch AI company Hugging Face CEO Thomas Wolf.
According to Cosgrave, while last year was, "The worst in the history of the conference, this year is the best ever," with a rise of 30% in revenue. According to him the number of American startups is already more than 150 and should reach 250. "The number of startups representing Spain and Italy will rise by more than 50% compared with 2023, and even from non-traditional markets like Serbia an increase to 50 has been recorded, double last year." And what about Israeli startups? There are none. Cosgrave has quickly moved on but Israeli tech will probably never forget.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 9, 2024.
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