Getting Back in the Game

A startup event strategy needs the same discipline. Spend enough time around (deep-tech) startups and you start noticing a familiar pattern. The same founders appear at event after event: a composites conference this week, a startup competition the next, followed by an investor summit, a sustainability conference and another pitching session. The logic is understandable. Young companies need visibility, customers and investors, and there is always the hope that the next event will provide the breakthrough introduction. The problem is that events can very quickly become an activity rather than a strategy. Teams return with business cards, LinkedIn connections and a sense of having had many interesting conversations, yet surprisingly little changes in the months that follow. For startups, where both cash and management attention are scarce resources, this is an expensive habit. I prefer to think about events through the lens of sport. A serious athlete does not try to peak every weekend. A season is built around a small number of A-events: the competitions where performance really matters. Everything around them is preparation. Startups should approach their event calendars in much the same way: select a limited number of events, understand exactly why they matter, prepare for them months in advance and then execute with intensity. Building your brand versus going where your customers are There are, in my view, two main reasons for a startup to attend events. The first is to build a brand, which for a young industrial company is largely about building trust. An established supplier enters the market with years or decades of history, references and relationships behind its name. A startup has none of that. Particularly in composites, where qualification cycles are long and customers are understandably cautious about introducing new materials and manufacturing technologies, familiarity matters. For a startup, brand building is ultimately trust building. This is why a composites startup should establish itself visibly within the composites ecosystem. JEC World in Paris is the reference. This is where I experimented a lot to master the game when I was leading the marketing and business development activities at 9T Labs – see picture above. Depending on geographic priorities, CAMX may play a similar role in North America, alongside relevant events in China and regional events in markets such as DACH, India or Southeast Asia. At these industry events, I would encourage startups to be relatively broad. Speak with suppliers, potential customers, competitors, investors and people from applications you may not yet have considered. Explain the technology in depth. The objective is not only to generate immediate leads, but to anchor the company in people’s minds as a serious part of the composites industry. This is also where I believe having your own booth matters. If brand building is one of the objectives, visibility cannot be an afterthought. Many manufacturing and materials companies still take a fairly conservative approach to exhibition design, which actually creates an opportunity for startups. Make the company visible from a distance. Bring parts, samples and, where practical, machinery. Demonstrate the technology rather than covering the walls with paragraphs explaining it. Give visitors something they want to touch, discuss or photograph. You are a startup. You do not have to look like everybody else. And at the events where you are building your brand, you probably should not. The second reason for attending events is much more targeted: meeting the people who can move the business forward. Once a startup has selected its beachhead markets, its event strategy should follow those customers. If aerospace is a priority, composite events alone are not sufficient; you should also consider events such as the Paris Air Show or Farnborough. If aircraft interiors are specifically relevant, Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg may be far more valuable than another general innovation conference. Find the reference events in the markets you have decided to win. And go where your customers go. The physical presence can be different there. You are not necessarily trying to build a major aerospace brand; you are trying to become a trusted supplier to aerospace companies. A smaller booth, a national pavilion, a startup zone or an association stand may therefore be entirely sufficient as a base for demonstrations and meetings. As customer relationships mature, an even stronger form of presence becomes possible: being represented on the booth of a customer or partner. If an established customer displays a component incorporating your technology and identifies you as the supplier, the credibility effect is difficult to replicate with your own marketing. You are no longer telling the market that the customer trusts you; the customer is demonstrating it publicly. Four A-events, prepared like campaigns Once the industry and end-market calendars have been mapped, prioritization becomes critical. My recommendation for most startups would be to identify no more than four genuine A-events per year. This does not mean attending only four events. There will always be smaller conferences, investor meetings and local gatherings worth visiting. But an A-event is different: it is an event around which a significant part of the organization aligns and for which the company is prepared to go all in. Four such events already mean running roughly one major campaign every quarter, because the event does not begin when the exhibition doors open. A-level events should be approached as two- to three-month campaigns, with the exhibition days at the heart of a much broader engagement effort. Proper preparation starts months earlier and should be reverse-planned from the event date. Four to six weeks before the event, for example, a startup could organize a webinar around a topic closely related to the problem it solves. Better still, where appropriate, it could host a small event at its own facility. The purpose should not be to spend 45 minutes explaining why the startup is wonderful. Bring in an external expert, a customer or a research partner. Share useful data or discuss an industry challenge. The aim is to aggregate a community around the problem where the company has something

The AI industry runs on GPUs, APIs and Discord servers. So why is an AI insurance startup valued at $4 billion signing a lease for a 24/7 café in Shoreditch? Corgi, the San Francisco insurtech that raised three rounds in eight weeks this summer (TechCrunch, July 2026), already runs two 24-hour cafés in San Francisco and Atlanta. Its London location on Great Eastern Street opens this month, with five more planned including New York (Sifted, July 2026). The pitch: give founders a place to work at 3am, and sell them AI liability insurance while they sip a “Brexspresso.” Is it working? The Mercury News reported in April that the San Francisco café was running at a loss with zero conversions to the insurance business (via Wikipedia). Investors funded three more rounds anyway. That tells you something about what the market believes physical presence is worth right now. AI companies are becoming event organizers Corgi is the extreme case. The pattern is everywhere. Anthropic held its first Code with Claude conference in May 2025 as a single-day event in San Francisco. One year later, it became an international tour: San Francisco on May 6, London on May 19, Tokyo on June 10, with a second SF day added because demand from independent developers exceeded capacity (Anthropic). OpenAI’s DevDay returns to San Francisco on September 29. ElevenLabs ran its Global Hackathon across 30 cities simultaneously last December and launched its own Summit. Lovable’s community events page lists hackathons from Barcelona to Bradford to Tbilisi, funded with credits and swag. Stripe, the company that made online payments invisible, now runs two event franchises: Stripe Sessions at Moscone Center in April, plus Stripe Tour, a global one-day roadshow hitting Paris, New York and other major cities. Even the investors backing these companies have become organizers. a16z presents Tech Week, a decentralized conference series across New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles that reached more than 740 events in New York alone in 2024 (Tech:NYC). The firm also runs a16z Build, an invite-only program of private dinners and retreats designed to connect early builders. A venture firm operating a citywide event franchise and a curated dinner circuit is a firm that treats community as an asset class. These are field marketing budgets that would have gone to paid social five years ago. When every feed is flooded with AI-generated content, a room full of verified humans becomes the scarce asset. The companies building the flood know this better than anyone. The money agrees While AI companies build community from scratch, institutional capital is buying live events at scale. Liberty Media completed its €4.2 billion acquisition of MotoGP in July 2025, adding it to a Formula One Group that also includes F1 and hospitality business Quint (Liberty Media). KKR acquired Superstruct Entertainment, operator of more than 80 festivals including Sziget, Sónar and Wacken Open Air, in a deal reported at €1.3 billion (Music Business Worldwide, June 2024). CVC joined as co-investor a few months later. And Ari Emanuel raised more than $2 billion from Apollo, RedBird and the Qatar Investment Authority to launch Mari, a holding company built to buy events: the Miami Open, the Madrid Open, Frieze, Barrett-Jackson (Bloomberg, October 2025). This week, Mari agreed to acquire ATG Entertainment, owner of 70 theaters across Broadway and the West End, in a deal reported at $6 billion (Axios, August 2026). “Live has only grown more powerful,” Emanuel said in the announcement. Read that list again. Sports, festivals, art fairs, theater. The smartest money in media is converging on one thesis: attention earned in person compounds in a way digital attention no longer does. What this means for founders Here is the contradiction worth sitting with. The companies automating knowledge work are the ones investing hardest in rooms, coffee and handshakes. They understand that when intelligence becomes a commodity, trust becomes the product. And trust still gets built face to face. For startup founders, the lesson is practical. Your customers, your investors and your future hires are recalibrating where they spend their scarce in-person time. The events that win their calendar slots will be smaller, more curated and more expensive to ignore. Where the two worlds meet If you work at an AI company or a scale-up that just discovered field marketing, here is the uncomfortable truth: the event industry has been perfecting this craft for decades. The people who run Web Summit, VivaTech or MWC have solved problems you are about to encounter, from audience acquisition costs to sponsor ROI to the logistics of moving 100,000 people through a venue. That is the room Sesame Summit puts you in. It is the conference of conferences: our annual gathering in Biarritz where leaders from Europe’s top event organizers meet the startups, investors and tech companies betting on IRL. Disclosure: I organize it, so read this with that in mind. But if the smartest money in media is paying billions for audiences that show up in person, spending two days with the people who build those audiences seems like a reasonable shortcut. If your company is doubling down on events this year, what would you want to learn from the organizers who have been doing this for 20 years?

Picture this. A strategy director at a major exhibition calls with six weeks to go before the show. The brand new startup area has sold exactly one booth. The show runs on a multi-year cycle, so a failed launch means the whole concept probably gets cancelled before it gets a second chance. This is a composite of several conversations I’ve had this year, and the pattern is always the same. The organizer builds a startup area, assigns it to the existing sales team, waits, panics, then calls for help when the calendar has already decided the outcome. The diagnosis is simple: startup acquisition is a different business than exhibitor sales. Most organizers discover this too late. Here are the five reasons why. 1. They sell square meters to companies that buy outcomes A corporate exhibitor renews a booth the way it renews an insurance policy. There’s a budget line, a history, a floor plan discussion. The sales conversation is about location and dimensions. Startups have none of that. They buy pipeline, investor meetings, and proof that the show is worth their time. And their time is expensive: my rule of thumb is two full prep days for every event day, more if the team is small or the show is far. A founder deciding between your startup area and a customer roadshow is running an ROI calculation, and a rate card doesn’t answer it. A sales team trained on renewals and floor plans doesn’t speak this language. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s a different job. 2. They start the clock six months too late Startup areas usually get scoped after the main floor is sold. The launch lands a few months, sometimes a few weeks, before the show. Founders don’t work like that. They lock their event strategy two or three quarters ahead, because attending well requires prep: outreach, meeting scheduling, demo logistics, travel. A six-week sprint is competing against decisions that were made in the spring. The paradox is that organizers know this about their corporate exhibitors, who book 12 to 18 months out. Somehow the assumption becomes that startups, the most resource-constrained companies on the floor, can be converted on short notice. 3. They design the offer around what they can administer Here’s a real example, anonymized. One show’s main startup offer was a 60 percent discount, funded by a national grant. Great deal. One catch: only domestic startups qualified for it, at an international show. The offer wasn’t designed around the buyer. It was designed around available paperwork. The addressable pool shrank to a fraction of the relevant ecosystem, and everyone else got a full-price booth with no story attached. Startup offers that work are built the other way around: define which companies belong on that floor, then engineer the package (price, format, visibility, matchmaking) that makes their decision easy. Administration comes second. 4. They confuse margin kept with money made This one stings, because I’ve watched it happen twice this year. An organizer works with a partner on startup acquisition, hits targets, then decides to insource the next edition to keep the full margin. On a spreadsheet, it’s savings. In reality, the target gets missed, the area sits half-empty, and the organizer comes back mid-campaign asking for rescue. Some results are still possible at that point. The results a proper campaign would have delivered are gone. The full cost of insourcing shows up later: lost booth revenue, a weaker visitor experience in that zone, and a startup program that gets cancelled for “lack of demand.” Against that, the partner commission was the cheapest line on the P&L. 5. They run a program where they need a pipeline Startup acquisition compounds. Alumni come back. Competition applicants become exhibitors. Founders talk to each other, and a good experience at one edition sells the next one. None of that happens inside a one-off project. It requires a multi-year cadence: scouting, competitions, curated programs, follow-up between editions. Shows on two or four year cycles feel this the hardest, because a standalone approach means restarting from zero every single time, with a new team and no institutional memory. What compounding looks like JEC World, the composites industry show in Paris, is the counter-example, and yes, they’re our client, which is exactly the point. The startup work there is a bundle, built over multiple editions: a startup competition that lowers the barrier for first-time startup exhibitors, an Investor Day that brings capital to the floor and gives founders a concrete ROI reason to attend, and a startup village that gives them a curated home inside a very large show. Each piece feeds the others. Startups apply because clients & investors are there. Investors come because the startups are curated. And the ones that grow don’t disappear: they graduate into regular exhibitors. That’s the part most organizers miss. A startup exhibitor is just a first-time exhibitor. Treated well, they’re the cheapest exhibitor acquisition channel you’ll ever have. Treated as filler for a leftover corner of the floor plan, they don’t come back, and neither do the ones watching. The question for organizers If you run a show with a startup area, ask yourself one thing: is it a strategy or a floor plan decision? If the honest answer is the second one, here’s my prediction. The area launches late, gets staffed by a team hired to sell something else, underperforms, and quietly disappears from the next edition. The internal conclusion will be “startups don’t work for our show.” The real conclusion is that the approach didn’t. Startups work fine. They’re just customers who need to be sold to like startups. Disclosure: Sesamers sells startup acquisition and curation services to event organizers. JEC World is a client. Read accordingly.