cosgraves

Paddy Cosgrave, the co-founder of the Web Summit tech conference, is returning to his role as CEO after resigning in October over controversial statements he made about the Israel/Gaza war last year on social media. “As Web Summit becomes bigger, our aim should be to make it smaller for our attendees. More opportunistically, as with Facebook, the emphasis on community is a counterweight to Web Summit’s bigger business aim: scale, in Web Summit’s case growing its conference empire by getting as many people and companies as possible paying to attend its events. Web Summit runs a number of global tech conferences, the best known and biggest of which is in Lisbon, which in recent years attracted upwards of 70,000 attendees. Scrambling in the lead-up to the Lisbon event, Web Summit quickly appointed Wikimedia CEO Catherine Maher as Cosgrave’s CEO replacement, even as Cosgrave retained an 80% ownership of the business.