What we’ve learned at the Web Summit

An unforgettable experience. That’s the simplest expression that could summarize this first visit to Lisbon for our team.

Some of us attempted to book a trip for the next year before leaving the place. The 2019 edition ended as a record-breaker with 70,469 participants from 163 countries with a strong female attendance of 46.3% — as indicated by organizers. Before you can hear how much fun we had, let’s review key themes from this year’s event:

• While still in con­struc­tion, 5G is already brand­ed as a new chap­ter for infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy because of the speed it brings to data transfer
• WeWork’s IPO shake-up brought about a renewed dis­cus­sion about start­up finan­cial accountability
• Edward Snow­den and Brit­tany Kaiser (ex Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca) push for Big Tech reg­u­la­tions that would lim­it data exploita­tion in the fields of democ­ra­cy med­dling and dig­i­tal advertising
• Web Sum­mit co-founder Pad­dy Cos­grave notices poten­tial in tech for auto­mo­tive with a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of star­tups atten­dants lean­ing in that direction
• Sam­sung is con­fi­dent that the adap­ta­tion of voice assis­tant devices will triple by 2023 into 8 bil­lion globally

Piotr Bardadyn, Head of Business at Titans24

It was an intense week to maneu­ver around 70 thou­sand peo­ple! For me as a busi­ness devel­op­er who always looks to con­nect, it was a sol­id chal­lenge to pick the right con­ver­sa­tion part­ner. I was aim­ing to reach par­tic­i­pants con­scious about dig­i­tal secu­ri­ty threats affect­ing the SMB mar­ket. My goal was to rep­re­sent Titans24 — a secu­ri­ty plat­form that coun­ters such threats, used by e‑commerce com­pa­nies and oth­er ven­tures that must pro­tect their online reputation.

A report from Marsh states that data secu­ri­ty is the fourth great­est chal­lenge to busi­ness­es right next to cli­mate cat­a­stro­phes. This point allowed me to veirfy investors and busi­ness part­ners in terms of a poten­tial part­ner­ship. Speak­ing with data (130.000 web ser­vices hacked dai­ly!), I observed their respons­es in our con­ver­sa­tions. If I were deal­ing with a pro­fes­sion­al from the dig­i­tal secu­ri­ty indus­try, our talk would glide smooth­ly into tech­ni­cal­i­ties, where I would guide them through Titants24 client pan­el. There, they would access the test envi­ron­ment that allows for secure data work in a con­tainer­ized envi­ron­ment based on CI/CD-Git­Flow method­ol­o­gy. Togeth­er, we’d assess the scale and vol­ume of cyber attacks mon­i­tored by the sys­tem as shown on visu­al charts.

With oth­er con­ver­sa­tion­al part­ners, for whom the aver­age cyber­se­cu­ri­ty dam­age costs remained an abstract fig­ure, I’d use this exam­ple. “Can you imag­ine work­ing with a com­pa­ny with no bank account?” — I’d ask. It seems an obvi­ous assump­tion that there has to be one, just as where we expect a busi­ness to have that web page, regard­less of the pro­fes­sion (may it be den­tistry or vul­can­iza­tion). If it’s a stan­dard in any devel­oped coun­try to lock the front door, then why do we neglect the secu­ri­ty of our web ser­vices that keep the mon­ey flowing?

It dawned on me that as the exchange about SME data cyber­se­cu­ri­ty moved on, the mat­ter would peak to *Super impor­tant!*. 80% of entre­pre­neurs employs stan­dard­ized tech­nolo­gies for web ser­vices (such as Word­Press) which need the utmost atten­tion as they’re attacked 90% of the time.

I returned from Lis­bon with renewed con­fi­dence, as I have seen that Titans24’s argu­ments help us enroll new mem­bers to a work group that we call The Guardians of the Cyber­galaxy (#Guardian­sOfT­he­Cy­ber­galaxy). Any­one who finds dig­i­tal cyber­se­cu­ri­ty cru­cial can be a Guardian. We passed around over 500 stick­ers as emblems of their new com­mit­ment to the secu­ri­ty of their own busi­ness and the rede­fined focus on mak­ing their WWW a space of secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion, true infor­ma­tion, and a hub for valu­able part­ner­ships in work and life.

Mateusz Romanow, CEO Titans24

These were 4 days of pure excite­ment with so many suc­cess­ful pro­fes­sion­als to see. I had to focus on what I shouldn’t skip because of the astrono­mus scale of the Web Sum­mit. While sit­ting in the audi­to­ri­um over­look­ing thou­sands of peo­ple, I realised how much I appre­ci­ate the con­fer­ence as a strong learn­ing expe­ri­ence. I tried to grasp every word com­ing my way from all the pan­els that I attend­ed to imag­ine how Titans24 can syn­er­gize with this world of estab­lished and undis­cov­ered tech­nol­o­gy. Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty was an ever present theme at the Sum­mit. No that it had that much more atten­tion than the imple­men­ta­tion of 5G, AI, and big tech pri­va­cy pol­i­cy. Pass­ing many stands on my way to anoth­er rushed meet­ing, I had seen hun­dreds of com­pa­nies on dis­play that per­haps need­ed to imple­ment a web ser­vices secu­ri­ty plat­form like Titans24, but they didn’t know I yet. In my down­time, it was my mis­sion to dis­cov­er how they’d go about it. Most of the time, I’d focus my efforts on going from the Board lev­el down, with my eyes on CEOs of any prod­uct-fit com­pa­nies I could spot. 

My Web Sum­mit race against the clock brought about 300 investor leads. With my grate­ful­ness of the many expe­ri­ences that came to me there, I’m now search­ing for the first major stake­hold­er that will help us with our mis­sion of pro­vid­ing afford­able cyber­se­cu­ri­ty to the world.

Credits for photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/websummit Web Summit 2019 (CC BY 2.0)