Geek odyssey: inside the TechCrunch tournament

There’s a startup dude on stage pitching his gaming ads business to five of the biggest tech names in the world, but something has gone wrong. Instead of his website appearing on the big screen, the investors and the thousand-strong audience are looking at his business partner, posing with an unknown woman. Weeks of all-night coding and hundreds of practice runs and we’re barely a click away from seeing his naked selfies. It could be funny but, like most things in tech, it’s just awkward.

I have been to interviews day at Cambridge University, and to Infernos nightclub in Clapham, but I have never smelled desperation quite like this. The two-day TechCrunch Disrupt conference is Europe’s chance to prove that it can finally produce a world-beating internet company, and the hundreds of startups chosen to show off their wares in what used to be Billingsgate Fish Market are united in panic. The best ones, selected from nearly 700 applicants, are on stage in the Battlefield competition — a kind of live and more jargon-filled Dragons’ Den — with three heats and a £30,000 prize from the AOL-owned TechCrunch media company for the winner. But the real incentive is the backstage investment deals traditionally associated with the US Disrupt gatherings. Non-Battlefielders are manning stalls in ‘Startup Alley’, which my colleague Oscar, who covers the tech beat for the Standard, describes as a freshers’ fair for startups. They want money, they want publicity and this is probably the best chance they’ll get. But give it a few years and most of this will be no more than unworn T-shirts piled up in the closets of new-build flats in Shoreditch.

I’m distracted by a guy to my right holding a very long, extendable selfie stick in the air. His girlfriend, or business partner perhaps, looks away in embarrassment. ‘I’ve been playing games since I was six years old and building them since I was 13,’ shouts an earnest youngster in a tight company T-shirt. His in-game advertising company seems promising, but people around me are sniggering at his excitable delivery. I make a mental note to track him down later. ‘It looks like a game,’ says one of the investor-judges to the founder of a deadly serious medical startup, ruining his day.

Someone introduces me to the lanky figure of star US venture capitalist Sean Seton-Rogers, 39, who says tech conferences are ‘a bit of a pain in the ass’. Having made his name by backing Bebo early, he’s met 1,800 companies in four years for his fund PROfounders Capital but invested in just 25, so I ask him to tell me what he thinks of this lot. ‘A huge number of these companies won’t be around in a year, frankly,’ is his take when we sit down for coffee, though he says he’s ‘bullish’ about prospects in Europe. ‘My job is to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.’ He recalls meeting an apparent frog at one of these shindigs in Barcelona (one of the many locations for such conferences) six years ago — a ‘kinda scraggly guy’ who wasn’t getting much attention for his startup: ‘He turned out to be Jack Dorsey and his company was Twitter.’

Walking around, I notice there are a lot of short guys, scruffy guys. There are a lot of guys full stop. After one Battlefield session I count 50 people through the exit to test my hunch that the gender ratio here is worse than at Stamford Bridge. Forty-five men and five women file past. I ask a member of the ten per cent, Dee Saigal, 31, how it feels: ‘Let’s just say I was the only girl on the dancefloor at the party last night, and the guys were very drunk.’ Dress varies greatly, from baggy jeans and company T-shirts to skinny-fit chinos and designer blazers — as do looks. There are a lot of blokes called Pete. Such as Pete Read, a middle-aged guy behind me in the accreditation queue who is one of the partners Google has sent to look for companies it can ‘eat’. He’s got a blond Bowie bob and looks like the kind of dad who would embarrass his daughter in public — and then, about 20 minutes later, with his first words on stage, he does, name-checking her in his first answer, to zero laughs.

I find the 42-year-old Belgian rock-star investor Fred Destin — the perfect person to join me in critiquing the startups pitching for their lives on stage because he used to prepare companies for things like this. ‘The French guy with the picture thing was terrible — it was all one level. And the malaria guy was a huge missed opportunity because he pitched everything at 120 [per cent].’ Destin has just returned from Boston to work for the powerful Accel Partners fund, and has a big reputation, having been the seed investor and sole investor director for property site Zoopla. ‘Half the time what’s missing in Europe is that everyone’s too nice. The objective in pitching is not to be liked but to raise money.’ He says the arrival of Disrupt in London shows that the capital has ‘reached maturity’ as a credible global tech hub, but not yet stardom. ‘I love that people are now mentioning billion-dollar companies and nobody laughs at them any more, but there is no technology leader that has emerged from Europe since Nokia. We don’t have anything near a Google, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter. But we will keep looking.’

In the Alley the desperation intensifies in the afternoon. A guy dressed up as Elvis to advertise a secure mobile payments site is looking bored, and everyone else is getting frantic. Over two days, 225 companies from 30 countries cram into the Alley. Cards are shoved into my hand from companies that mine data from text documents, scan utility bills to find better deals, and match you up with people who can teach you the guitar. ‘We will not and do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form,’ says the conference brochure.

Eventually I bump into Nick Hatter, 23, the eager shouty guy who earlier pitched his advertising platform Giftgaming. ‘It kinda feels like you’re about to jump out of a plane,’ he says. ‘But you feel a bit like a rock star for like five minutes when you come off stage.’ Backstage is where the magic happens, according to TechCrunch’s editor-at-large Mike Butcher, 45, the guy who brought this conference to London three years after the first one in New York. ‘The judges come off the stage and say, “Right, let’s talk.” I was backstage yesterday and I went to sit down, and there was an investor there who said, “Mike, can I just get a bit of privacy with these guys?” — it was one of our Battlefield companies. Many of these companies will end up with term sheets by this evening, I’m not kidding you.’ Londoner Josh Summers, 25, co-founder of shopping site Shufflehub, tells me that happened to him at the Berlin Disrupt last year. ‘One of the judges on the stage came up to us afterwards, told us he liked our presentation, gave us his business card and ended up being our first investor,’ he says.

After-hours, there’s venture capital money behind the bar at various after-parties. The one I pop into, in a bar on Moorgate, features high-fiving Russians and well-dressed Swedish co-founders chatting in a booth. But if tech is the new rock’n’roll — as many of its number seem to believe — where are the hotel suites heaving under the weight of champagne, powder and prostitutes? Butcher says his industry can do brash, but higher up the chain from the earnest world of startups. ‘I’ve been to parties with X [a famous tech founder we cannot name] where you’re destroying the glass elevator and trashing the reception of a hotel.’

Columnist Milo Yiannopoulos says that tech has its fair share of groupies: ‘They’re bloggers, PRs or so-called “mentors”. Some of them like the attention or the glamour. There are a lot of people who claim to be investors but they’ve never written a cheque. They’re everywhere.’ Butcher, on the other hand, thinks ‘the Isambard Kingdom Brunels of this age’ are stalking Billingsgate. ‘We’re talking about a fourth industrial revolution, really.’

The Battlefield’s final round arrives and, of the original 14 competitors, Hatter the gamer hasn’t made it, but the malaria jock (Disease Diagnostic Group) has. ‘What are you really disrupting?’ asks one US judge of a pair who have turned an iPad into an ultrasound machine called Oscult. An ostentatiously sceptical German judge is scowling and Mat Braddy, CMO of Just Eat, is implying that one of the device’s most distinctive features is not distinctive at all. Also in the final are the Austrian guys behind ‘elastic data store’ Crate, and a Croatian startup called PhotoMath that scans a maths problem, solves it on-screen and shows the working. None of them are particularly brilliant pitchers. ‘But there’s no point in saying no to a company because they’re having a bad day, or because they’re feeling a bit intimidated,’ says Sonali De Rycker, 41, one of the final judges and Destin’s colleague at Accel.

The announcement a few hours later is tense. The finalists line up on stage. One of TechCrunch’s irritating custom techno tracks fills the room. Some flashbulbs fire. Mike Butcher steps up to the mic in a shiny leather jacket and gives the award to Crate, whose founders, forty-something Austrians Jodok Batlogg and Christian Lutz, celebrate wildly, punching the air. Now for explaining to the public how their easy-to-use interface for making distributed database clusters is going to change our lives.