Filling two massive pavilions in downtown Las Vegas’s World Market Center from May 5 to 6 was the Collision tech conference. It was an event where attendees dressed Silicon Valley casual, but the talk was serious business with high stakes—and little was left to chance.
Collision is the sister event to Europe’s four-year-old Web Summit, a conference that now draws 20,000. It's also a part of Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project, which is aimed at revitalizing Downtown Las Vegas.
Since its Vegas launch just last year, Collision’s growth has been explosive: This year there were 7,500 attendees from 89 different countries. They included hopeful entrepreneurs from more than 1,200 start-ups, who showed off their concepts at small, uniform exhibits in the pavilions, as well as more than 450 investors. For organizers, the primary goal is to to connect these two groups in the most productive, lucrative, and logical ways.
To make that happen with precision, Collision used data science ahead of the event to pair start-ups and investors in the most, well, scientific ways.
Through an approach organizers call "engineering serendipity,” the organizers hired a team including computational physicists, applied statisticians, and other scientists to design algorithms that helped engineer the most purposeful face-to-face connections.
"Our approach to the challenge is from a more technical and mathematical point of view with, probabilistically speaking, for better results,” Cosgrave wrote in a conference blog post. "Manual approaches in particular begin to fail as conferences scale, because the permutations a curator needs to consider tend towards infinity. But complement them with technology and you can fundamentally change conferences.”
That’s why, according to Dublin-based director of communication Mike Harvey, "We persuaded a very talented physicist to leave a job smashing atoms together in mainland Europe to come to Dublin to join the team.”
Harvey notes that the point of all the scientific legwork behind the event is the physical interaction, of course. "The primary value driver [for face-to-face attendees] is the people they meet. It’s all about the human interaction. So with all of our data science, all of the traffic that we do—that’s what we’re trying to drive."
And it's a quantifiably successful approach, he says: "Last year, Collision was 1,500, and now we’re five times that. There’s proof that what we’re doing is working."
The data science team is new—organizers used it for the first time effectively in Dublin last year—but it’s the system that linked up Collision’s investors and start-ups for face-to-face meetings known as “Office Hours.” These are a series of prearranged meetings not unlike speed dating: There are 15 meetings happening at any one time, and each lasts just 15 minutes. That’s 600 meetings over 48 hours. “It’s a massive logistical thing to do,” says John O’Reilly, who headed up the investor attendee team.
For investors, he says, “We give, say, 10 suggestions of companies we think are relevant to you based on data science, and we give a score to each of the suggestions—literally on a spreadsheet. The way investor matchmaking works is quite like online matchmaking. Rather than just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, we [arrange these pair-ups] ahead of time. None of it’s done by chance. And that’s why the investors are happy to do it. Otherwise they’re giving up their time for little return."
The strategy involves iterating and fixing bugs over time. For instance, the team hung GoPro cameras throughout the venue in an effort to understand how people move, flow, and network. “We’re beginning to write algorithms to understand where people gather, where the blockage points might be, so we can improve layout and content,” Harvey says.
Additionally, he explains, “We’re analyzing visual imagery. Should we have a pitch stage next to a start-up lounge? Should they be near each other or further away? We’ve learned a lot from Web Summit, but it’s still early days.”
For all the science, there's no pre-planning—and no substitute for—the spontaneous interactions that happen at Collision (and at every other live event).
If a spark results from the meeting, it gets the ball rolling for folks to continue conversations in the lounge, hotels, or during various evening events. "We just want the right people to connect and the conversation goes from there wherever it needs to go," O’Reilly says.
