Not that bad of a Monday, was it?
The 2019 Techsylvania Conference started today and we enjoyed together a whole new overview of the latest trends and use-cases in technology.
The first day of the conference had a strong start with Ion Stoica telling us about how they got to Apache Spark from Databricks, moderated by John Biggs from TechCrunch. We are more than pleased to have this opportunity — to create the right context for technology professionals to discuss because this way there are always new ideas or new perspectives born.
Of course, most of us, #techsylvanians, are in love with Unicorns so what better topic to be brought into light than the successful scale-up of a Unicorn startup? Ahmed Aljunied presented the story of his organization — GO-JEK, providing both an entrepreneurial and a cultural point of view.
But speaking of Unicorns, we must return to the basics: what is a startup? In this over-competitional world, some forget to fortify the theoretical parts before getting to the practical ones. John Biggs went to the core of these problems, presenting the challenges found within a startup, how to overcome them and what are the natural steps in its development.
In this area also, we had some other interesting points of view from Matt Michelsen who presented lessons learned from successful startups and discussed within a panel between Andrei Pitiș, Mihaela Urzica, Viktoria Albrecht, Sean Kane, and Delia Iliasa a contemporary problem, that of startups and corporations working together.
How safe are we?
If you were present today, you certainly found out some unknown facts regarding your online safety, from the one and only Ethical Hacker — Ralph Echemendia. Touching the same matters, Ricardo Mendez from Samsung NEXT, told us more about identity & privacy in these times and revealed on-point insights due to his company’s expertize.
When it comes to the success of a technology team, most of the experts are uncertain, because there seem to be a lot of factors to be taken into consideration. But Aryk Grosz put forth an idea: only the odd survive. After scaling his technology teams from Mixbook, we can certainly learn from his viewpoint.
During this day we also transited many areas of technology: healthcare, aerospace, fintech. The following topics completed our agenda:
- Andrei Pitis (Fitbit)- Traits of Outstanding Consumer Products
- Panel: How Does Technology Transform the Healthcare Industry
- Jon Gruen (Starburst Ventures)- Global Aerospace and Defense Innovation Ecosystem
- Donald DeSantis- Obsession Hiring: A New Framework for Attracting Tech Talent
- Adam Jackson (Braintrust)- Raising a Seed Round: How to Win the Real Numbers Game
- Nan Zhou (Baidu Changcheng Investment Partners)- China’s New Tech Investment Outlook
- The Vision Fund with Sakshi Chhabra Mittal (Softbank Vision Fund)
- Acceleration 4.0; Big Business Disruption & Big Business Opportunity- in Conversation with Sergiu Manea (BCR)
The Workshops
Moving over to the workshop scene, we sensed some new ideas being born under the close watch of our mentors. The ice-breaker of the day was Andre Duis from Metronom, presenting modern operations approaches for microservice architectures. IT organizations are overwhelmed with demands of moving faster and faster, and abilities such as breaking up monolithic applications into smaller, independently managed and updated components seem the way forward, so Andre’s workshop was well-appreciated.
Legal matters can stand in the way of the success of your business, but can also propel it when done rightly. For these topics to be clarified, we had Achim-Sorin Răzoare from Laurenţiu, Laurențiu & Associates to present tricks & tips for venture deals.
And since we are pretty self-centered as beings, we found out that product designs should take the same shape: human-centered. Leaving the jokes behind, we had a really insightful workshop with J. Cornelius from Nine Labs putting the technical aspects of human-centered product design into the light.
We also discovered Fitbit behind the scenes with Andrei Dragomir, Scaling-up internationally with digital, alongside Anabela Luca from Adlemonade and Journey Mapping with Caroline Zenss from Macadamian.
The Q & A stage
The Q & A stages have proven to be a success at their first edition, last year, and we decided to proceed further with them this year also. People who are really interested in certain topics presented on the conference stage, seem to leave the room with questions because they don’t have the opportunity to detail the topics with the speakers.
Thus, this year, the second in the history of Techsylvania Q&A, there were a lot of questions answered and problems solved due to the interaction between the speakers and attendees. We had the pleasure to discuss with Ion Stoica, Ajey Gore, Shane Luke, Donald DeSantis, Rohan Chandran, Adam Jackson, and Sakshi Chhabra Mittal.
Thank you for your energy and curiosity and see you tomorrow for another round!