What is TechDay And Why Are 7,500 People – Including 200 Start-ups Going To Be Attending On October 27th?

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TechDay is coming – even by London start-up standards October 27th represents a special date for your diary.

“Meet the entire London start-up community”, the flier exclaims; “build the relationships you need for growth with the 200 start-ups and 7,500 press, investors, & early adopters attending TechDay.”

That’s VCs, Corporates, reporters, students, freelancers, tech savvy types, job seekers, analysts and – well, the entire start-up community – they weren’t kidding!

Start-ups looking to grow are advised to grab a booth and set up in person to make live connections with real people – it might be passé for start-up founders to have to meet real people in person, but hey, until the first VR only conference comes to Shoreditch (and surely it won’t be long) this is the next best thing.

You can even deliver a demo live on stage if you’re brave enough – it’s a calculated gamble – it will get you attention, but you will have to deliver the goods!

TechDay’s list of event partners is also pretty decent – NASDAQ Private Market, General Assembly, Rise / Barclays, the Warwick Business School, Hired…will all be there, sniffing out opportunities and accompanied by representatives from accelerators like TechHub, Mass Challenge, Accelerate Cambridge, The Bakery…

…and many others, themselves supported by Community Partners including Tech City UK, Tech.London London & Partners, Trade Horizons and Incisive Edge. All people, as a start-up or entrepreneur, you want to meet.

And as for the start-ups – deep breath…DevicePilot, Makers Academy, SAM, Vivacity labs, Tide, Jobbio, Hassle.com, Nerdy Tutors, HiyaCar, TruBe, tibit, MobiDev…the list goes on. And on. Getting the picture?

So far so good – of course there is a live stage too, and it all takes place at Old Billingsgate, “London’s most flexible event space”, (and home to Tech Crunch Disrupt in the past) located by the river, a stone’s throw from Tower Bridge tube.

TechDay, who operate in both London and Los Angeles (an often under-estimated breeding ground for hot tech start-ups) are led by CEO Alec Hartman, Sharon Lieberman, COO and Director of Events, and Jasmine Hoffman, Event Director.

And the best part – it’s free!

To attend that is, start-ups are invited to pay from £510 for Exhibition space and 2 start-up party tickets, as well as access to the press, a directory listing, access to investors, 2 chairs and tickets for all your team members.

In fact, a little research indicates that TechDay is, incredibly and impressively, the largest start-up event in the US, and this is the first time the event will be hosted in the UK.

The UK’s relationship with US tech has traditionally been a case of London slavishly copying Silicon Valley trends, but with a £100 billion tech fund to be administered from London being announced this week, as well as the success of start-ups such as Deep Mind, King, the mobile games company now owned by Activision Blizzard, and of course the sale of Cambridge based ARM technologies to SoftBank, start-ups should feel more relevant and in demand internationally than ever before.

We’re either on something, or on to something here in the UK, you know.

So dust off your team T-shirts, rehearse that pitch and clear the diary for October 27th.

This is yet another exciting win for London tech – yet another celebration of a scene that, however much you try to temper enthusiasm, just keeps getting bigger, and better.

That’s the promise underpinning TechDay – put names to faces and put your start-up firmly in the shop window – events will be coming thick and fast between now and Christmas – TechDay looks like an oh-so convenient launch pad.

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