London Tech Week 2020: digital events to attend and the challenges facing the city's start-ups

"It’s the seventh year we’re doing London Tech Week, and pandemic or no pandemic, on we go"
Russ Shaw is the founder of Tech London Advocates and one of the founding partners of London Tech Week
Steve Howse
Amelia Heathman1 September 2020

Now in its seventh year, London Tech Week is an annual event of celebration and networking for the capital’s tech scene. But like so much this year, from London Games Festival to London Fashion Week, things are looking a little different this year.

Usually held in June, the global coronavirus pandemic upended the initial plans for the festivities. But the team took it on the chin and held some taster events in that same week to gauge the interest for how a full digital LTW could look.

As far as a taster goes, it was pretty spectacular. Over 10,000 people signed up and tuned in across two main events, CogX and London Tech Week Connect, which saw the likes of UK prime minister Boris Johnson speak, as well as an In Conversation event with Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton.

“It worked really well,” explains Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates (TLA) trade body and one of the week’s founding partners. “They were two of the biggest tech events in the UK and the learnings are now what’s forming the basis of this week in September.

“It’s important for the tech community to see these mainstays in the tech calendar are continuing. LTW is happening, it’s the seventh year we’re doing it, and pandemic or no pandemic on we go.”

Here’s what to look out for at LTW 2020 and Shaw's thoughts on the new challenges facing the capital’s tech scene.

LTW 2020: the key events to attend

In fact, LTW 2020 is so big it’s taking place across two weeks, from September 1 to September 11. Key events including TechXLR8, the 5G World Summit, the London Borough Tech Spotlight and accelerateHER, which addresses the under-representation of women in the industry.

The London Borough event is key, Shaw says, to demonstrate the strength of the capital’s tech scene. Whereas the focus used to be just on Shoreditch and the Silicon Roundabout area, London’s tech reaches out to Stratford with the Here East Campus, whilst Hammersmith & Fulham is welcoming in more companies as part of the Imperial College Scale Space at the White City Campus. The event will see highlight the different tech businesses in these areas, as well as what the boroughs are doing to champion digital skills.

“We have multiple tech hubs across London. And if we can get more of our boroughs engaged in this, we’ll have tech hubs all over Greater London,” says Shaw. “It gives me optimism. It says we’re gearing up not just for start-ups, but for providing spaces and resources to scale.”

The Here East tech campus in Stratford is home to companies such as scooter start-up Bird and fitness tech app Fiit
Here East

It’s important for the tech sector to look inwards and celebrate its own, but LTW is also about reaching out to other global hubs around the world and connecting with them whether it’s for knowledge sharing or potential business deals. In particular, Shaw will be overseeing a Global Tech Advocates event which will attempt to bring together IT leaders across China, Australia, Europe, North America as well as the UK.

“We’re doing it at 3 pm so we can capture people from 10 pm at night in Shanghai and Singapore to 7 am in the Bay Area, to talk about how important it is to them to connect to London’s tech ecosystem. It reinforces the beauty of the UK being in the centre of the world’s timezones,” jokes Shaw.

New ways of networking

Whilst we can all feel a bit Zoomed-out at the moment, Shaw things there is a place for digital conferences as it can be easier for people to fit into their weeks.

For instance, getting Hillary Clinton to speak at LTWConnect was possible because she didn’t have to travel, and the US VC Tim Draper also dropped in for a session from his home in California.

In between events, there’s networking sessions and roundtable discussions so people can reach out to other attendees and get to know them. One digital event Shaw attended was on a platform that looked like a board game, and you could visit different levels to meet other people in between tuning in to the main sessions.

“It looked a bit hokey but it worked brilliantly and I thought wow, what a fun way to engage in an event. Avatars are going to come in and virtual reality .. you can see where this is going.”

The challenges of the pandemic

Over the past few months, Shaw and the wider TLA network have been instrumental in supporting London’s small businesses, from the Save Our Startup campaign which eventually led the UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak to launch the Future Fund, to backing the Standard’s Spirit of London Kickstart fund.

The main worry has been for early-stage companies running out of cash, as well as supporting people in the city who don’t have the digital skills necessary to handle the shift to online working. In July, the TLA Education Resource was established, offering a comprehensive portal on digital skills training. “We’re going to see unemployment continue to go up and we need to ensure that the people who are being displaced are reskilled and upskilled for the jobs of the future. We don’t expect all of them to be data scientists and coders, but if they have more basic digital skills training, that will help them in a number of areas,” says Shaw.

He’s also calling on government and the private sector to help people going through the transition. “Businesses are going to have to fund more of this training because they are going to be the beneficiaries of it.”

The B word

Given everything else going on, it can be easy to forget that the UK has now left the European Union. Shaw thinks the reality of this won’t really hit until January 1, but it’s definitely something for start-ups and tech companies to think about when it comes to challenges. “Freedom of movement is gone. We're going to have to really rely on our homegrown talent to step into many of these jobs that we can't fill today and how are we going to do it? We have to train people. We have to bring more women, more people from the bane community, people with disabilities.”

Shaw can be regularly found at speaking events around the world, pushing the mission of London's tech scene forward

Though Brexit, like the pandemic, will be another shock to the system, overall Shaw is positive for London’s future in the tech scene. “It’s going to be a tough slog out there. Some businesses aren’t going to make it. But from Brexit to the pandemic we’ve got resilient entrepreneurs out there.”

Not to mention, those that come through this will be stronger than ever.

“The seedlings of the tech ecosystem in London came out of the financial recession of 2008/09. There’s going to be a massive amount of innovation that comes out of this,” he adds.

Russ Shaw’s top events for LTW 2020

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