Wrapping up Pioneers Festival
This year I’ve headed once again to Vienna for the great Festival that celebrates entrepreneurship and future technologies.
It’s impossible to talk about Pioneers without mentioning its fantastic Venue. Hofburg Palace is an unbelievable venue and the experience starts as you step in the front door. It’s still hard for me to believe that someone allowed them to do a Festival inside the imperial residence.
The opening session started with the founders explaining the evolution of Pioneers, from the Startup Week in 2011 to the Festival as we know it today. Inspire, educate and connect were the goals mentioned on stage.
Just like last year, they managed to have a great lineup of speakers, but this year they’ve added one more room to deliver great content:
The Arena where the keynote speakers addressed relevant topics from some of the fastest growing industries, included topics like trends, robotics, the future of payments, big data, AI, among others;
The Academy that worked as the perfect stage for Startups, opportunities to pitch and good content were always there;
A third room for Workshops.
The attention to detail is always there with great production, from the whole environment to the show on stage, from great videos to cool performances (break dance, beatboxing…).
Besides the whole content provided by the Festival, what was most valuable for me this year were the networking opportunities. Of course it depends on how you prepare it and how you behave during the event, but on my case it allowed to get to know amazing people with awesome projects. Most probably, new partnerships will come from Vienna.
After the first day the Festival already had an article on Forbes with the following tittle “Pioneers Festival: A Smarter SXSW Takes Its Place In Europe”. It can only mean they are doing it right!
The Startup Competition plays a really important role during the whole Festival. The team works very hard to make it a huge celebration. More than 800 applications from startups around the world, but only one winner! I would like to congratulate BabyWatch for getting the big prize! It’s a startup from Croatia with a system that connects a home ultrasound device with a smartphone, enabling pregnant women to hear, visualize and share their unborn baby’s heartbeat.
At last, I would like to say thank you to Tim Röhrich for inviting me to be part of this great family, as he called it on stage while talking about the Pioneers community. It was a pleasure to be a Pioneers Ambassador and spread the word around my network!
See you next year!
