Startcon: While Silicon Valley is dying, Sydney is thriving

Wow – StartCon was a blast!

The theme of the ninth StartCon was ‘While Silicon Valley is dying, Sydney is thriving’. We couldn’t agree more.

It is our mission to help Australia’s innovation ecosystem to be on the rise and we are supporting this by connecting students to innovative companies. This is why this year we brought the world of innovation and startups to students.

For two days, over 4000 entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, marketers and corporate innovation teams came together at Australia’s largest startup and growth conference. There was certainly a lot to learn and take in.

We got the chance to see over 20 incredible international speakers, including industry leaders from NASA, Slack and InVision. Speakers were diverse and included the fantastic Krista Selden from Google, Jay Samit from Disrupt You!, Jon Chang for IBM Watson and Matthew Brimer from General Assembly, just to name a few.

Between talks there were plenty of opportunities to connect with over 300 investors and over 650 startups.

The Ribit booth was an awesome hub during the event and we were glad to be visited by many familiar, as well as all new faces. Some of Ribit’s most enthusiastic students dropped in to say hi to the team, after they had purchased discounted tickets through ribit.net. Mia Bueno and Mayra Escobedo came all the way from Canberra for the day. Both agreed that it was more than worth it.

Some of Ribit’s students said that the pitching competition for $1 Million was a highlight of the event as it gave great insights on how to perfect their own pitch. Hopefully we’ll be seeing you guys on stage pitching next year!

Thanks again to our friends at StartCon for providing Ribit students with discounted tickets.

See you all next year!