Numbers never tell the full story, but in the case of Boardwave Live: The Great Acceleration, they certainly give you an idea.
Over 400 software leaders and 30-plus world class speakers from across Europe descended on IET London on Wednesday to accelerate the AI-driven future of the European software sector. Boardwave Live 2024 was almost twice the size of last year’s event, with our community having nearly doubled to over 1700 members.
And since we’re talking in numbers, here are our 5 key takeaways from Boardwave Live: The Great Acceleration.
It’s time to accelerate.
If last year’s inaugural Boardwave Live was about envisioning a future of European tech supremacy within the next decade, this year was all about motoring towards that goal.
Based on our survey of the current growth rate of companies in attendance at Boardwave Live, the top 25% are showing us signs that we can produce the £100 million plus companies our industry needs.
But as MoneySupermarket NED MB Christie said in our panel on scaling successful fintechs, it’s not all about unicorns: “encouraging small business” is crucial in terms of fostering talent and growth in our industry.
However, the reality is that beyond the top 25%, our current overall average growth rate isn’t fast enough to challenge US tech sector dominance.
So how do we take our industry’s overall growth rate from average to great?
This is where Boardwave’s new Accelerate Program comes in. Announced at the event, and available for free to all Boardwave members, it’s designed to help more leaders across Europe scale to £100 million ARR faster with less risk, providing a structured pathway for business acceleration.
Tailored to you and your stage of growth, the Boardwave Accelerate Programme combines: a brand new platform; curated breakout groups led by Boardwave Coaches, and matched with relevant Patrons and Nextwavers; stage of growth-specific events; and dedicated mentoring.
AI is becoming the priority.
The Great Accelerant behind our Great Acceleration, AI has the potential to revolutionise healthcare and medical science, limit climate change, democratise education, and fuel economic growth.
Can our industries live up to such potential? Boardwave Live showed that we’re more than ready to. Based on both the anecdotal and numerical evidence on show at the IET, AI has now leapt up the agenda for companies in attendance.
Our survey data shows that since 2022, ‘AI strategy’ has become the second highest concern for leaders at companies over £1 million in revenue – despite AI not making it into the top 10 lists of concerns in the same survey from 2022.
The fact that ‘AI strategy’ is the key concern for our delegates, and not simply AI investment or implementation, is encouraging. In contrast to previous years of excited AI hype, which led to countless unsuccessful pilots, much of the talk at Boardwave Live was about using AI niche use cases, and taking a strategic rather than gung-ho approach to its application.
“If we’re to fix the ‘rate of scale’, or the rate at which European software companies grow to £100 million, AI is going to play a huge part”, said Boardwave CEO Phill Robinson. “At a time when US tech firms are twice the size of European firms and 10 times more profitable (according to Mario Draghi’s recent report), the onus is on leadership not just to act on the potential of AI, but to do so strategically and with use cases that stay the course.”
It’s not a straight line to success.
If AI is our acceleration rocket fuel, our resilience is what’s going to keep us mission-driven in spite of setbacks.
While the day was alive with AI-fuelled optimism, it wasn’t all about hype and hope. There were real stories of mistakes and failure, shared among peers as learning opportunities to fuel a growth mindset. Such is the Boardwave way.
Whether it was the setbacks recounted by CEOs in our ‘Moments of Truth’ panel, or the marginal gains approach explored in Dr Rob Archer’s ‘Sustaining High Performance’ workshop, Boardwave Live reminded us that our acceleration as a community won’t always come in a straight line, and that success doesn’t happen overnight.As we saw with our Boardwave Live workshops, resilience comes in many forms – personal, business, emotional – but all are equally crucial in staying the course and scaling a company.
“You can’t let yourself think it’s 3,000 miles”, said explorer-entrepreneur Sam Glover about his solo Atlantic row in our closing session. Instead, he broke the mammoth journey down into four-hour cycles, counting each and every mile and oar stroke until the next checkpoint. It served as a salient lesson for the founders and CEOs in attendance about entrepreneurial endurance.
Throughout the day we saw that resilience is something we learn from our peers and role models. Silicon Valley has had no shortage of role models to look up to, from Sandberg to Zuckerberg, to Benioff. They say Europe suffers for its lack of role models, but we’re highlighting a number of amazing leaders, as we think there are great role models amongst our midst
You can find them all in our Leaders’ Lives book, which traces the success stories of 25 leaders from all corners of the European tech ecosystem. Transcending the clichés of management books, these are stories not just of people’s careers but of the ups and downs of their lives, all inspirational in their own way.
Kath Easthope, our co-founder and COO, summed it up beautifully: “We’re all in it together as an ecosystem, helping each other grow, learn and develop, whether a founder is at £1m or £50m ARR.”
We need to put customers first and replicate the UK’s ability to scale fintechs.
Now a bonafide global centre of fintech, the UK attracted $5 billion of investment funding in 2023, more than the rest of Europe put together.
What’s the secret, and how can we transfer some of that fintech magic to our other software sectors, and to the rest of Europe?Our panel of heavyweights from some of the world’s most innovative unicorns – OakNorth Co-Founder Joel Perlman, Monzo Bank COO Sujata Bhatia, MoneySuperMarket NED MB Christie, and Zilch Co-Founder and CEO Philip Belamant – had a few ideas.
In a wide-ranging discussion, the consensus was that staying mission-driven, encouraging talent, and putting customers at the heart of all business decisions is key. And in the case of fintechs, adopting new technology like tap-and-go payments, alongside having forward-thinking yet robust regulatory frameworks, has really helped the sector flourish.
MB Christie called for “more innovators on boards” to challenge outdated thinking. Rather than focusing on product or competitors, our fintech panel agreed that customers need to be at the forefront of our thinking. “Any company betting on not having competition to be successful is not putting customer outcomes first”, said Bhatia.
In fact, unlocking scale with customer centricity was a recurrent theme of the day. Discussing Workday’s scale up from $400 million in 2014 to $6 billion in 2024 in our ‘Scale-Ups: Strategies for Sustainable Success’ panel, former co-CEO Chano Fernandez emphasised the importance of building a relationship with their customers. “We created trust. Our customers were willing to partner with us for who we were as much as how good the product was”, he said – a sentiment echoed in another panel discussing TyperformWeTransfer’s phenomenal growth trajectory. CEO Joaquim Lecha explained, “For us, we have a customer centric culture. We now assess every candidate we hire based on that, and if someone doesn’t have that mindset, they won’t fit.”
This is only the beginning.
The European tech sector is just getting started, with new frontiers being explored all the time. Take Katie King, co-founder and CEO of BioOrbit, the space manufacturing company revolutionising cancer treatment by crystallising drugs in space. In her morning talk titled ‘Rocket-Fuelled Inspiration’, Katie showed us that the sky isn’t the limit to what our industry can achieve – we can go further than that and start leading the way by capitalising on new frontiers and technology in a timely manner.
Embodying the optimism in his keynote, Boardwave CEO Phill Robinson compared AI’s trajectory to that of the internet, from the dial-up stage to broadband and beyond. So where are we in that trajectory?
“We’re at the very beginning”, said Phill, in a statement echoed by many of our speakers.
He added that while it’s true that most of the big AI players right now are in the US, the dot com boom and bust of the internet showed us that some of them will be left behind, presenting opportunities for European companies to learn from the early pioneers’ mistakes.
“A window has opened for Europe to redress its failings in innovation and productivity”, wrote former EU central bank president Mario Draghi in a recent report, echoing the sentiments of our white paper published earlier this year.
The excitement and innovation in the air at Boardwave Live: The Great Acceleration showed us that the European software sector is ready and able to seize the opportunity.
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