Magazine entrepreneur and event impresario John Battelle has been working on an event series called NewCo, launched last February. In its second year, it's coming to Boston.
NewCo calls its events "festivals": Each event is a series of tech company open-houses. "I think it encompasses more than just let's hear pitches and exchange business cards," Battelle said in an interview over the weekend. "It's an acknowledgement that business has a central role in a city."
It sounds a bit like HUBweek or BostInno's annual State of Innovation conference, with a College Day twist.
Boston's now one of 17 cities where NewCo has events planned for this year--from Istanbul to Oakland, California, with stops in Cincinnati and Mexico City. Its partner here, MassTLC, plans to make an announcement this week. The Boston NewCo event is set for April 27; they plan to make it an annual thing.
MassTLC already runs Boston's UnConference, another annual tech event that aims to be unlike most networking events. The UnConference was smaller in 2015 than in years past. MassTLC chief executive Tom Hopcroft says that was intentional, to deliver more "highly qualified sessions" and "curated discussions." MassTLC plans to keep "working to continue to evolve" its UnConference, he said.
So far, NewCo Boston has signed up Care.com, Greentown Labs, Localytics, Startup Institute and Wayfair as host companies, according to its site. The same site has a lengthy list of names on an "advisory council," including Gail Goodman from Constant Contact, Diane Hessan from Startup Institute, Raj Aggarwal from Localytics, Tim Rowe from Cambridge Innovation Center and Julie Yoo from Kyruus.
NewCo charges up to $150 a ticket to visit companies like these, though the company has let its local partners adjust fees downward to make the event more accessible. Hopcroft said MassTLC plans to offer a nominal ticket price for college students in Boston.
Revenue comes from ticket sales and sponsorships (Twitter is listed as a "platinum" sponsor on every city's event.) Host companies don't pay for the privilege (Battelle says their selection is an editorial function), but they can pay for added services--like limiting their events to engineers, he said. The next revenue stream, planned for this year, will be a media business attached to the events. NewCo already has a CrunchBase-style database of tech company pages, like this one for Slack. Battelle said he's also working on data-driven revenue models serving multiple categories of event participants.
In that way, it's a similar business to Battelle's past efforts, which include Wired magazine, Industry Standard and the Web 2.0 Conference. NewCo has raised $2.7 million, Battelle told me--most of that coming from a $1.75 million round closed last year with Bloomberg Beta, Obvious Ventures and True Ventures.
The vision Battelle sold investors is telling tech business stories as part of the story of a city, he said. "Cities are booming, and cities are where we have our largest problems, and cities are where we solve them."
For Boston, doing that gets at a long-standing frustration, Hopcroft said. "We disproportionately educate more of the world here and yet are frustrated when people leave and go back home to start companies," he said. "And the feeling is if only they knew what was going on inside of iRobot and PTC and more of these great companies here, they'd stay."
