21 August 2024
Hundreds of meetings are required to organise an event like Resilience Conference. Over the last few months, our small team of myself, Leslie Hitchcock, and Matt Burns have met with leaders from across the defence and security innovation space, creating a fantastic network and identifying key topics critical to building a resilient world. Here’s some of what we’ve learned below. If you haven’t registered to join us at the event on 26-27 September in London, don’t forget to secure your ticket now.
1. Connecting Government to Venture and Startups
The defence and national security community is entering an era where incumbent corporations are looking to startups for innovation. Venture funded startups can grow fast, innovate quickly, and bring new pace and efficiency to the wider defence and security sector.
Existing approaches to procurement have lengthy timeframes for technology development. Likewise, defence primes can handle long sales cycles and deploy technology through established procurement contracts.
Government agencies and primes know they need to engage more with VCs and startups, shaping each other’s cultures to operate more effectively together. This has happened rapidly in Ukraine, out of necessity, and that is now changing how NATO countries view tech and innovation.
Resilience Conference aims to support this mission. We know these three communities well, and we’re designing a unique event in which these groups will meet, learn, and engage. Our core theme is to explore how government, venture capital, and tech can work together around a joint mission.
2. The need for pull-through
Startups can join accelerators, apply for grants, and run pilots with defence primes and government agencies. However, getting from this early stage to deploying technology in the field remains a considerable challenge to everyone in the chain.
More needs to be done to support pull-through. Many public funding sources focus too heavily on early-stage grants or are measured on standardised investment returns. This does not support getting technology into users’ hands.
Resilience Conference will curate discussions and breakout sessions on this problem. How can governments support early-stage technologies with grants and pilots and then work with VCs to fund them through deployment? Conference sessions will examine how government funding and demand signalling can unlock private capital and what VCs and startups need from government customers.
3. What is dual-use?
We are hearing a range of views on dual-use. One is that investors use this as a veil to avoid admitting that they are investing in defence and security, perhaps because their LPs are not fully behind the sector yet.
Another angle on dual-use is that the concept is preventing investors from backing straight defence startups, forcing them to focus away from a need to innovate in actual weaponry.
However, a counter argument comes from government buyers, who argue that they are a difficult customer with slow procurement, so they want startups to have alternative revenue sources. This viewpoint supports a genuine approach to dual-use, where companies become financially sustainable through traditional corporate business, and are able to sustain themselves during the long sales cycles to the public sector.
Dual-use will be explored in a specific panel and across several breakout sessions. We want to encourage more startups and tech companies to consider how their technology could be used in a defence and security setting.
4. The need to network
It remains difficult for government employees to meet and network with VCs, startups, tech companies, and the tech sector in general. Founders also need help finding customers and contacts within government.
We hear there is good engagement from top government leadership, who routinely meet with founders and funders of leading startups. However, for an ecosystem to become coherent, interaction needs to happen at all levels and in a less transactional way.
To support this, Resilience Conference does not have a separate VIP area or green room which means the conversations happening on stage will be happening throughout the event. Breakout sessions will include Q&A’s, workshops, and roundtables that will allow people to spend time around a specific topic with dedicated networking. This will make it easier for people to find the right connections and have a chance to meet one another.
The public sector will be well represented at Resilience Conference as we are distributing tickets to key public sector attendees, especially senior leadership in the science and technology areas. This will ensure that people at all government levels can watch the content, join the breakout sessions, and build out their networks.
We are working with leaders in the defence and national security community to identify who to invite, and we’ll be organising briefing sessions to ensure maximum value for these participants.
5. An independent event
Resilience Conference is based on what we learned running the leading global tech conferences. It is also completely independent. We have no institutional support or funding, and nobody is underwriting the conference so we rely entirely on ticket sales and sponsorship to pay for it. This means we are flexible, agile, and responsive and are not constrained by any rules or preconceptions.
This independence means we can ask our speakers and partners to help define the most valuable content. We are highly collaborative, and we enjoy working with brilliant people and organisations to program content that will be impactful and useful. Useful is our most used word, as we often say to partners, “Help us make this really useful!”
On panels and in breakout sessions, we mix people from different organisations, from the most senior to the newcomers. We have journalists and public servants, startup founders and the CEOs of billion-dollar companies, the leading investors in the world, and the founders of new funds. We combine expert advice with our experience programming dozens of the world’s leading tech conferences for over a decade to get the best out of this unique and fascinating group of people.
We hope that you can join us - register here for a ticket here and if you’re interested in sponsoring a breakout session with us contact us at hello@resilienceconference.io.
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