Techweek, the international tech festival and conference, is coming to D.C. as its latest location. The next question is what will the festival look like when it does launch later this year in October.
See, each Techweek festival has its own flare unique to the city its in. In Dallas, the festival operates as the city's own mini-SXSW. In Kansas City, the conference is highly focused on big data and transportation. Techweek CEO Amanda Signorelli sees the District's own conference focusing on a variety of different industries.
"We're still very early on and we'll still continue to develop and grow, but from our initial conversations, the big pushes that we're hoping to nail in on are first and foremost health, wellness and wealth," Signorelli said. "You also have a lot coming out of cybersecurity, which is an obvious piece, but the other element, as well, is media."
The company is working with AARP as the D.C. conference's founding partner to promote and establish Techweek in the area. But promotion shouldn't be too difficult: Roy Schwartz, co-founder of new media company Axios, is already confirmed to speak. Capital One is also helping Techweek integrate itself in the community.
That's all a part of Techweek's expansion protocol. When Signorelli and her team are evaluating a list of potential new launch cities, they look for potential founding partners, and they evaluate the ecosystem for exciting early-stage startups and mature, larger companies. Lastly, they look at the general ethos of the tech community. What is the community like?
"I'd say that maybe two, even three years ago, we weren't as great at letting each market mold what the Techweek experience should be, but we've definitely now perfected that in 2016 to a point where every single market is different," Signorelli said. "We have a skeleton that we can build from, but in no way, shape or form is that static."
Along with seeing a large media landscape and cybersecurity community, Signorelli notes the women-friendly environment in D.C. tech, compared to other tech hubs. "Some of the initiatives coming out of BEACON DC and also looking at how 1776 was working with female entrepreneurs and the fact that D.C. was one of the best places to be for women in tech, that was a huge piece that I was excited about and made it very top of mind for myself," she said.
In 2016, the company launched new festivals in Toronto, Ontario and Dallas, Texas. With those launches came a few lessons—such as the one where they learned about the importance of building a top-notch advisory board in each city to help build out the festival. It's also where they learned the importance of having a founding partner who is connected to the local landscape.
"We will never say that we are the experts on any given market, we will always say that we are the best at listening to people to figure what we need to do and where we need to go," Signorelli said.
Techweek is coming to D.C. on Oct. 2-6, but Signorelli doesn't want the festival's influence to stop there.
"Everything that we do is done in an integrated fashion for a given community, and that is something that we live and breathe in a very tactical way," Signorelli said.
Image courtesy of Techweek
