Bath Digital Festival has come and gone for another year. BDF adapted to the 2020 online era and put on 60 events over the course of 5 days via their website. Hundreds of attendees from around the world, not just Bath, tuned into the festival. It’s safe to say that Bath Digital Festival 2020 was a huge success.
As well as being sponsors of this year’s festival, our CEO David Kelly, hosted some of Bath and Bristol’s most renowned founders. They discussed their most pivotal moments in business and how they made them successful.
Our first guest was Col Needham, the founder of IMDb. His story is an impressive one and we hope to be able to hear more about it in the future. IMDb has recently celebrated their 30th birthday, a credit to a man who loved films and wanted to share his knowledge with the world. We really felt like we were celebrating the momentous occasion by having Col speak about the history of the company.
We also heard from Chris May, the Founder and Managing Director of Mayden. He spoke about how Mayden turned their management style into a flat structure. With a team of 80 this is quite the achievement to make this technique work at scale.
Tom Carter, CTO and founder of Ultraleap spoke about growth in the company. How do you seamlessly transition from a small team that could fit around a pub table to a global company? How do you keep communication strong when you’ve grown so big? Tom’s top tip “Write things down”.
If you follow the Storm blog, you’ll know quite a bit about CiteAb as they’re one of our partnering companies. Andrew Chalmers the Founder and CEO spoke about how they grew the company and did give a little shout out to Storm (not to toot our own horn or anything…). But the biggest takeaway from his talk was speaking about how the most exciting thing wasn’t getting new sales… “Renewals are more exciting than sales because it validates your product”.
Elliot Coad, Founder of Ecologi has achieved amazing things in a short space of time. They’ve planted thousands of trees and offset a huge amount of their customers’ carbon footprints. Elliot shared that customers trust was the most important thing in order to grow a company.
Margaret Heffernan, Entrepreneur and Author gave a huge insight into her decision to close a “living dead” company. She would have had to make lots of cuts over years but decided it was unethical. “Everyone left with their heads held high”. “It was a beautiful and clean exit”. Margaret spoke about how it’s normally the harder decisions you make in business that allow you to grow.
If you missed the event but those highlights have pricked your interest in wanting to know more, fear not as the full event will go on Youtube. We’d definitely recommend watching it when it goes up as there’s quite a lot of things that you can take away from these experiences.
Bath Digital Festival week was filled with education, insights and knowledge sharing. It was amazing to see Bath and beyond come together online to take part in this amazing event.
Until next year!
