ideia fórum with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Biz Stone in Lisbon
I was lucky to be invited to the conference promoted by the portuguese i newspaper at the Museu do Oriente in Lisbon on June 24th, in the context of their idea promotion. Lucky because otherwise I most certainly would have not paid ~700 Eur to get a ticket - regardless of the event’s quality, which, I must say, was very good. Probably that’s why there was only a half-full room.
The conference was split into 2 x 2 hours, the first being dedicated to Nassim Nicholas Taleb (yeah I know, nice website - but read the last sentence), challenged by four major portuguese entrepreneurs, including from two national banks, and moderated by the newspapers director, Martim Avillez Figueiredo.
It was a very interesting debate, starting with the black swan theory and ending with practical ideas of how to prevent big corporations - specifically banks - from failing and having catastrophic consequences for the society. In a nutshell, everyone agreed that greed, lack of ethics and lack of effective regulation is responsible for the current situation and part of the solution.
“Sort of a no-brainer”, you’ll think - and I agree, but the interesting part was actually observing the tensions of these heavy-weights on the stage and watching their expressions and body language when defending themselves or attacking someone else.
Taleb also insisted on the idea that “if you want to take a risk, don’t play risks with banks”, since that is something like a critical service for our system. Two sentences I remember: “You can more easily fool one with billions than with thousands”, and “You can more easily fool a group of people than one single individual”.
The second 2 hours were dedicated to Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone, moderated by the newspapers co-director André Macedo and challenged by Elvira Fortunato, António Câmara and Paulo Querido. Biz Stone sure has a superstar status but delivered not more than the predictable. He is clearly in neutrality mode, and although you could take some lessons of what was said, it was more of a fact-check and than an inspiration or any other mind-blowing experience.
There was only little time for intervention by Biz’s challengers - most of it was spent explaining what twitter is (starting with the basic “why 140 characters?” question) and its evolution. Which makes sense in an audience where only a hand-full of people knew what South by Southwest is, and not many more actually use twitter on a daily basis. The usage of the #ideiaforum tag on twitter was at least disappointing.
Elvira Fortunato had little time to intervene (and she did admit not having a twitter account), António Câmara made a point by explaining how - even tough being harder - you can build an IT-based startup in Portugal and how twitter is a great marketing tool, and Paulo Querido brought in some numbers about twitters (supposedly lack) of growth in Portugal that were sort of useless to the debate, and rather felt like a necessity of giving some answer to the moderators question of “what might be twitters biggest weakness”. Yeah.. I can see mashable’s headline already, “Twitter’s growth in Portugal stopped… shuts down worldwide operations”.
Contrarily to the first 2 hours, this time there was some nice time for Q&A, and I did get a chance to ask about the necessity of not focusing on revenue long enough to achieve a critical mass of usage that, only then, allows you to discover previously unimagined revenue models. It was a sort of “yes, I agree, and it depends” question to him, but I still got an interesting 5-minute answer.
Thanks i for the excellent organization and setup. There was also a free live stream on their website (you can also watch the whole conference on video here) which is very rare for our standards - again thanks. Only negative points are some cast choices that could have been better (not sure Joe Berardo was relevant, and clearly there’s a lack of good Web-oriented entrepreneurs and journalists to take stage), and the tickets were way to pricey.
