It's my pleasure to announce that the first-ever virtual TechCrunch Disrupt will be happening on Hopin this year.
As many know, TC Disrupt SF is a five-day conference of tens of thousands of attendees gathering in San Francisco and it regularly features the world's leading minds in venture capital, technology, innovation, and startups.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, Marc Benioff, Marissa Mayer, and other names have spoken in the past on the Disrupt stage.
As an event, Disrupt is a large-scale conference with unique offerings, from multiple simultaneous stages of high-impact programming, to the Startup Alley, a global exhibitor floor with hundreds of startup booths, to CrunchMatch, a founder-investor private networking experience, to sponsor after-parties.
Unsurprisingly, the list of requirements that TechCrunch provided us was extensive — as it should be! It takes a lot to successfully put on an event as sophisticated as Disrupt. Some features didn't even exist yet in the industry — at least not all in one seamless event platform.
But our teams laid out a plan to deliver the world's first all-virtual Disrupt, making it also the safest, most accessible, and sustainable Disrupt to date.
After months of collaboration and development, we're pleased to share that the event is arriving around the corner.
I'm truly excited to see the virtual doors open to the TechCrunch venue on September 14 — it is a stunning, beautiful event. Not only that, but we are revealing brand new platform features that are being released with Disrupt.
I'll highlight a few:
- Self-serve vendor roles — Vendors can access, preview, and edit their booths live, switching as they please between live content, pre-recorded content, and presentations.
- Custom tag system — to make the Schedule, Speakers, Expo, and Sessions areas easily navigable and searchable, you'll find a custom tag interface that allows attendees to browse hundreds of items (i.e., vendor booths) by category. This is a massive benefit for larger events when there are hundreds of booths or sessions.
- Mini-booths — we launched a fourth design of the expo booths called "Mini" that adds a more detailed layer to the Expo area.
- Networking integration — to replicate the networking meetings at Disrupt, we implemented an integration with Grips that allows attendees to pre-book 1:1 video meetings with others. This feature is exclusive to TechCrunch.
- Event-wide announcements — TechCrunch can make targeted global announcements across the event for all attendees to see, or they can send messages to just certain ticket types.
Each year, TC Disrupt attracts 10,000+ attendees but I expect that number will be higher when you take airfare and San Francisco hotel prices out of the picture. As a virtual event, anyone can attend. There's still time to pick up your tickets.
Of course, I'll be in attendance this year at Disrupt, as I hope you'll be — perhaps we'll catch each other at a roundtable or a booth or in a networking chat.
Regardless, as the finishing touches are being made, I'll end with saying I'm proud of the teams who put in the hard work to make this happen. Thank you for the creativity and diligence you put into building the inaugural TC Disrupt virtual venue.
On to a great event!
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