I’ll be honest, organizing events is pretty horrible. Doing a thousand people event is horrible plus. And, as we want everyone to love it and it to be perfect, it gets worse. So, why have we done it for five years?
First of all, the simple matter is that we’re a venture fund in Malmö. A city of 300.000 inhabitants and very few venture funds. We often go to London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and so forth, but with The Drop we bring the scene to us. We often meet over zoom, but that isn’t the best for deep connections.
The thing is that meeting wonderful people in person is… wonderful. It is the best part of our job. It not only gives us energy, but it drives the business forward. It is how we all meet our next investments, investors, and people investing in our companies.
The problem with most events is that anyone can get a ticket and that all those anyone end up attacking you with sales emails and meeting invites. So, when we started The Drop five years ago, we said: invite-only, no meeting app system, not sharing the attendee list, the content is created by the people coming, and if we are unsure: ask if we would do it at our wedding or birthday party!
It is the ultimate “user generated content” and it also means that the conference changes and evolves. When we started, the whole conversation was how we suck down carbon and “stop climate change.” Then it moved to funding challenges and then to energy, sovereignty and resilience.
This year it is clear that people are thinking about hard tech a lot! Robots, data centres, CAPEX financing, are topics that have grown to dominate this year.
We’re excited by the sheer number of topics and events. Some have grown out of proportion to conferences of their own, for example Autonomy (200+ people in Physical AI) and How to finance hard tech (200+ people). But there are also 45 other public side events. There is an LP meetup, a microfund meetup, a Physical AI meetup, a CVC meetup, each with 50+ people and their own programs. And, on top of that are the many dinners, drinks, sauna and swim sessions. All in all, seeing the Cambrian explosion of side events is what makes us do The Drop.
In less two weeks, a thousand ambitious people will come to Malmö (which might be more than what the city holds) and it will be a party!