Opening Sweden’s leading industry event Techarena on Thursday, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson could not help but notice Ukraine was on many attendees’ minds, remarking: “Geopolitics sometimes beats technology.”
An appropriate tagline for the two-day event in Stockholm might be “Europe (particularly Sweden) against the world”, as organisers sought to keep up the momentum of the AI Action Summit, held in Paris earlier this month.
But instead of billion-dollar investments (Sweden is against subsidies), eight government ministers appeared on stage to show their commitment to tech — and promising to help Europe become “more like Sweden,” citing the country’s functioning capital market and looser regulatory framework.
This “very Swedish affair”, as one attendee described it, played host to policy experts, lawmakers and big corporations like Amazon and Microsoft.
But one group was notably absent from the main policy discussions: startup founders. Swedish success stories — like Spotify, Klarna and other unicorns — were mentioned on stage, but nowhere to be seen.
While high profile guests like Richard Branson, Netflix cofounder Marc Randolph and former Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin addressed massive crowds, startups were relegated to the smaller side stages and pitch competitions.
In spite of the dedicated matchmaking area on offer, neither the investors nor founders I spoke to over the two days were satisfied. The top-tier AI startups that Stockholm has become known for were nowhere to be seen, nor did the high-profile investors sit down to chat once they exited the stage.
Instead, the most sought-after investors and startups circulated Stockholm at unofficial side events. These included “Beers & Batts”, Legora’s invite-only drinks with AI discussions co-organised with Andreessen Horowitz and Lovable’s hackathon with Northzone and (again) Andreessen Horowitz. Many of these meetups had little to do with Techarena itself but could take advantage of the many high-profile techies — like OpenAI’s EMEA startup lead Laura Modiano — in town.
As I departed Techarena, one well-connected figure told me the event is still working out some kinks. “It’s the second year running and it is really well organised, great space and all that but it still doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be,” he said.
But while Techarena may not be the best place for an unknown startup to secure a term sheet from a top-tier VC, it did something else: it gave at least Sweden a place where tech and politics took centre stage. Whether that is a winning formula for the future remains to be seen, but this year, it certainly had timing on its side. And there was one thing everyone agreed on — the time for Europe to act is now.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/sweden-techarena-conference-prime-minister-startups/
