Cianan Brennan: Slick Web Summit briefly succumbs to Sod's Law 

After initial wobbles including a wayward camera, the technology conference got underway seamlessly today 

Web Summit founder and CEO Paddy Cosgrave bringing Portugal's economy minister Antonio Costa Silva and prime minister Antonio Costa on a tour around the Web Summit venue in Lisbon as the conference got underway today.  Picture: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis//Getty

Before heading for Web Summit for the first time, one prior attendee told me to “expect chaos”.

It wasn’t meant in a derogatory fashion: The event is now recognised as being run brilliantly, and massive networking sessions like this are meant to bring a certain amount of madcap energy.

And yet the launch instead served to prove the truism: What can go wrong, will.

First impressions of the event are how extraordinarily large it has become. With 70,000 attendees, this year’s iteration is its first sell-out.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine that it was ever held in Ireland, both due to its massive scale and the fact that the Altice Arena in balmy Lisbon in November is so much more pleasant a prospect than the RDS.

Doors didn’t open until 4pm, which left thousands of summiters wandering aimlessly around the Lisbon shore.

Come 4pm though, and the Web Summit had settled into its stride.

And then, out of nowhere, the speeches descended into chaos.

Summit chief executive Paddy Cosgrave is someone who, love him or loathe him, must boast an iron resolve.

The strain of putting on an event of such massive scale doesn’t allow for much second-guessing of oneself, one would imagine.

Nevertheless, Mr Cosgrave looked just a little perturbed about an hour into the opener after a bizarre incident looked set to derail a year of choreography.

The launch show is the preamble to the networking and pitching festival to come, with the first people behind high-growth startups giving their pitch.

The lady behind one of them, Casafari, said her aim is to digitise the real estate market, and “make housing accessible to everyone”. Peace in the Middle East would seem more attainable, but still, good on her.

Then, during a pitch on the metaverse, the passion project that seems destined to teach Mark Zuckerberg humility, this most clinically-run of events bowed to the pressure of Sod’s Law.

Midway through that pitch, a spidercam — the mobile camera we’ve become used to from the likes of football matches which follows the action from above the pitch — suddenly burst clear of its tether and fell to earth, stopping about 10 feet above the crowd seated in front of the stage at the Altice Arena, amid a collective gasp from the audience.

The hair-raising incident left a bank of loudspeakers in the rafters swinging crazily on their moorings.

My initial reaction was that the event would have to stop. Which it did, but only for an hour.

Doubtless, Mr Cosgrave would tell you he wasn’t worried for a second.

Either way, it was an appropriately dramatic curtain-raiser for the arrival of Ukraine’s first lady, the keynote speaker, who spoke emotively and powerfully about the power of technology to bring people together.

From farce to the sublime, the rest of Web Summit 2022 will do well to be as memorable as its launch.