Seoul, Lisbon, Bali, Shenzhen and a farewell to Stan Lee!

First, a quick trip to Seoul to speak about how RISE became such a big conference and the future of media at Next Content 2018. 3 takeaways from this trip:

Back to Lisbon for the 3rd Web Summit in Portugal - its getting bigger and bigger every year.

It was cool that Sunil Sharma (co-host of Collision) and I got a lot of MC time up on Center Stage to expose to the 70,000 attendees about the Toronto and Hong Kong conferences. After this third year it’s not as freaky to be on that massive stage, but now they have this steadicam that follows us out from backstage - its super Oscars style - and then we had a flying camera capture us introducing the PITCH finalists from the audience floor - that was amazing (and we just decided to do it on the day.)

Here are 5 photos from my camera roll at Web Summit:

One of the talks I actually caught live was this one with Alexis Ohanian - the co-founder of Reddit and Initialized Capital and probably even more famous these days for being Mr. Serena Williams lol:

All the talks are at the Web Summit YouTube channel – so many good ones!

Honored to be invited to tag along to the Google for Startups (name changed from Entrepreneurs) APAC Summit - so meeting up with old friends like Grace from Found, Aim from Hubba and Bob from Peoples Squared and meeting new ones! Of all the stuff I do, working with ecosystems is really at my core and this is a great initiative by Google to help ecosystems from around the world. Mike Kim heads it up via Seoul and he’s awesome. I was there for 2-days being part of workshops on all kinds of community development stuff and happy that they will be announcing a Hong Kong partner soon. Learn more about how you can get involved with GfS here.

Jumped over the border for Techcrunch Shenzhen to see some friends and if you haven’t been to the Nanshan district - this is what Shenzhen looks like now. Restaurants that you pay for KFC with your face, convenience stores with no one inside and you just scan with your WeChat and go and every major tech company in the country with a major office there and a Tech park that makes HK’s Science Park look like a pre-school! Wow! I’ll be going back and posting more.

Stan “The Man” Lee passed away at the age of 95 on November 12, 2018 - Stan had the most profound affect on my life, more than Steve Jobs, and I was lucky to meet him once way back in 1998 when I was doing my own comic books. You will be missed Stan but your legacy will live on for generations.

Your friend,