This past Friday I attended the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Annual unConference at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. This conference has been one of the best annual events put on by the MassTLC, and has grown tremendously just in the last couple of years. Have you ever been to an “unConference”?
The minute I walked into the large meeting room where introductory speeches were given, I immediately felt the presence of 500+ innovative New England business leaders. Nearly everyone there carried an air of confidence, energy, enthusiasm, and appeared to listen very carefully to what the speaker had to say in his opening remarks. I quickly assessed that this unConference was going to be like no other conference I had been to before. And I was right!
After introductory remarks about the unConference, about 100 attendees walked up to the microphone to announce their topic of discussion for the session they would conduct. This kind of open forum provided much creativity for all the innovative people in attendance. Many of the topics included things like: freemium, SaaS, metrics, VC funding, platform as a service, software development, virtual teams, crowdsourcing, and on and on.
After people announced their session topics, attendees then chose and attended the sessions that they were most interested in. Two of the more memorable sessions I attended included : finding the right metrics for your business, and the 10 mistakes that startups make. The speakers brought great insight into the sessions, but it was the discussions that everyone had with each other that really became the gems of the unConference. I really enjoyed listening to the high-level discussions that took place during the sessions I attended. This is the true value of the unConference, and as it should be!
To sum up my experience, I came away extremely impressed that this conference brought together industry-leading innovators, CEOs, CMOs, venture capitalists, angels, software developers, and the top entrepreneurs in the Boston Area. It was also great to see some of our friends and colleagues from companies like Google, Microsoft, Hubspot, Constant Contact, and others. It was truly a great experience to attend the unConference, and I hope to attend it again next year!
See the unConference blog at: http://blog.masstlc.org/
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