It runs from 9 to 12 November, at Altice Arena and FIL, in Parque das Nações. Monday is opening night, in the Arena, and the real conference days are Tuesday to Thursday, in the FIL pavilions. This is on the official pages and in every guide, so I won't waste time on logistics the website does better than I can. What matters is everything else. The first thing I learned, and learned badly, is that Web Summit is not a conference. It's a market with a stage. Anyone who goes expecting to watch talks, take notes and come home wiser will spend money and walking miles to see, live, things that end up on YouTube anyway. I went like that the first time, with a notebook and a list of eight talks highlighted in yellow in the app, and I managed to see three. The other five were buried by queues, by a conversation I couldn't cut short, by a pavilion that felt two kilometres from the previous one and that, measured on my phone afterwards, was about 400 metres away. Distance there isn't measured in metres. It's measured in people. So my opinion, without much ceremony: the stage is the least important part. Go for the corridors. But careful, and here I'm already contradicting myself a little, because some talks are worth it and only make sense live. Not for the content, which is almost never new, but for the room. Watching forty investors scroll on their phones while a founder talks about "vision" tells you more about the state of the ecosystem than any Dealroom report. Once I saw a CEO of a company whose name I've since forgotten get interrupted by a stock alert on the giant screen behind him. Nobody laughed. I made a note of it and have never forgotten it. The phone, by the way. This is one of those details only people who've been take seriously. With tens of thousands of people packed into the same two venues, the network barely copes, and the official app is practically the operating system of the event: schedule, messages, connections, everything goes through it. If your battery dies at three in the afternoon, you cease to exist socially until the end of the day. Bring a serious power bank, not the 5000 mAh one you've been dragging around since 2017. And download the app, update it and build your profile at home, not in the metro queue. Oriente station is right next door and the red line connects it to the airport, which makes life easier for people coming from abroad. A taxi, in that area during the event, is an expensive way of standing still. Shoes. It sounds like grandmother's advice and it is grandmother's advice. They feel great for the first two hundred metres and then they charge interest. By day two I was limping down the corridor of pavilion 3 in a pair of trainers I'd have sworn were the most comfortable I owned. They weren't. None are, after nine hours on concrete. And business cards? My scepticism here is total. Nobody swaps cards anymore, everyone scans a connection in the app or a QR code, and I think that's good, because at least there are no piles of paper in a drawer. But the important question isn't how you exchange contacts. It's what you do with them afterwards. At my first edition I collected 41 connections. Six turned into a real conversation, two into something concrete. The remaining 33 kept a CRM company that I opened on 14 November and closed on the 15th. Honestly, that ratio is normal, and anyone who says otherwise is selling tickets or selling networking services. An aside, unrelated to the subject. In November 2019, while I was away spending money on something like this, a nightly cron job died on a shared server and I spent the following morning debugging a `Connection timed out` error on my phone, standing against a pillar, unable to open a decent terminal. That was the day I decided never again to leave home without a remote-access plan B. I mention it because anyone who runs one or two online projects alone feels the same discomfort at long events: half the head in Lisbon, half in the hosting panel. I don't know if this ever gets solved. I think you learn to live with it. Back to the essentials. Anyone going for the first time should decide before landing what they want out of it. One thing. Not five. Do you want to show a product? Hear investors? Find distribution partners? Or just find out, after years of looking at the event from a distance, whether it's as big as they say? That last one is legitimate and nobody admits it. I admit it. My first edition was mostly curiosity, and for that very reason I was a bad person to have next to a founder with ten minutes to speak. There's a second-order effect that's rarely discussed. An event this size hijacks the entire city. Hotels fifteen minutes away by metro double their prices, the restaurants around Oriente are full at 12:30 and have no table at 12:35, and the so-called side events scattered around Lisbon, bars, rooftops, coworking spaces, end up being more productive than the conference itself. When the doors close in the late afternoon, the event carries on elsewhere, and that's where conversations stop being badge conversations and become people conversations. If you go to only one of those evenings, make it Tuesday. By Wednesday everyone is tired and the conversations get worse, and by Thursday only those with nothing to lose are left. As for tickets, I won't quote prices, because they change by sales phase and because everything I've seen written over the years was wrong two months later. There are categories for startups, general attendees and investors, and you need to check what each one gives you access to. The difference between them isn't cosmetic. It's the difference between being where the meetings happen and being where you watch the meetings happen. Do the maths honestly before buying. A less popular opinion. I think most small startups, the ones that turn up with a 2x2 metre booth and the hope of being discovered by a London fund, will spend more than they should for a very low probability of a result. It isn't gratuitous cynicism. It's the arithmetic of someone who has seen empty booths on day three, founders staring at their phones. If your company doesn't yet have visible traction, the money for the stand is better spent on ten well-prepared cold meetings by email in the three weeks beforehand. That said, some people closed their first round there. I don't know any personally, I know the folklore. Some people also win the lottery. And then there's the question almost nobody wants to put on the table: what Web Summit means for the kind of person who reads this. An independent developer, a content creator, someone who runs a small community and grows it through SEO, word of mouth and a lot of stubbornness. That ecosystem of badges and investors wasn't designed for you. It was designed for companies that want to be bought or funded. You'll find useful tools, yes, and people with problems similar to yours, but most of the money and attention flows in another direction. Knowing this from the start saves you frustration. It took me two editions to accept it. One thing I still need to say and have been putting off. The days after the event are the real test. Write your notes on the train, on the plane, on the sofa, with your feet still sore, while memory still has texture. After a week, everything that felt alive turns into a list of names. I write three paragraphs a day, in no order, just to have material. Then, maybe, I do something with them. Almost never. But now and then one of those paragraphs becomes an article, or a product decision, and that's why I keep doing it. Eat a proper breakfast, because the food inside is expensive and mediocre. Sleep what you can. Don't book more than three meetings a day, and the third should be the easiest to cancel. Accept that you'll miss things. And if someone tells you Web Summit changed their life, ask which day it was, in which pavilion, and what they did the following Monday. The answer is almost never what you expect.