A stand at an event designed for startup entrepreneurs should only be a valid incentive if your market is startups. If you're doing anything else then you're marketing to the wrong audience, which is a huge waste of time. Feedback only counts if it's from potential customers, or better yet, actual customers. Having 1000 people file past your stand saying "That's really clever and innovative" is a great ego boost - but that's all it is if they're not people who will buy what you're selling.
When you're building a startup you should only spend money getting to events where your customers are going to be. Go to those (often quite boring) events and sell to people. Being in the same room as a startup celebrity is far less valuable to your business than a even one single paying customer.
If you do that then you'll have no problem meeting investors. In fact, they'll come to you.
"By charging big companies big money we can offer promising startups like you this opportunity for free"
All you need to do is buy couple of tickets for 1500+ euros and the free booth is yours.
Ouch. But we've come this far, maybe it's worth a shot...
When you get to the place you realize it's 500 startups like you, crammed shoulder to shoulder. Very few investors around...
"Shoulder to shoulder" is not an exagerration either. I think it was 50-80 startups per wall - no more than 1 meter each. Like a supermarket. Totally depressing and wrong. I actually did not meet one single investor there. But of course there are one or two lucky outliers to give a testimonial. Ugh! Stay far, far away.
My impression is startups paying their fees is their business model
I disagree. We met a LOT of investors. The important thing to note is that they won't come to you just because you're there. You have to attract them in some way (or better yet: contact them in advance and have meetings already set up).
I completely agree with the "shoulder to shoulder" thing though. It was very cramped :(
Granted, there weren't thousands of investors there, but my startup personally had a busy schedule meeting with them - that week (before, during and after the event itself) we had meetings with approx. 40 different investors.
Nowhere am I saying you should pay to pitch or pay to meet investors. I'm merely saying that whether or not an event is worth it depends on what you do at it (and beforehand) and that you can't expect it to be worthwhile just for showing up, because it won't. I found it useful, others didn't - I only wanted to shed light on why I thought it was useful and what we did to make it so.
NOTE: We also did NOT take part in the pitch contests.
I thought I was giving a counterpoint to the statement "there were very few investors" and adding advice from my experience:
The important thing to note is that they won't come to you just because you're there. You have to attract them in some way (or better yet: contact them in advance and have meetings already set up).
My other comment similarly was a counterpoint to "the only winner was the organizers", giving my experience and why I think I had the experience I did.
I'm sorry that this came across as "no you're wrong" without any details. :-(
I've been at the last three Web Summits and while I don't think the stand is worth €1000 in itself, the Web Summit (including stand) totally are - but you get from it what you make of it. With sufficient preparation, Web Summit can be quite valuable. For example, in the last one we arranged meetings with both investors and potential customers weeks in advance of the event; we also printed flyers (which worked as people came to our stand saying they saw the flyers). Over all, it was very positive for us.
BUT the reason for this is that we made use of the fact that a lot of people we wanted to talk to would be in one place. We didn't just go and hope people would talk to us, we arranged it in advance (and the flyers were bonus). That made it worth a lot more than €1000 to us.
Would I pay that much just for a stand? Hell no. Would I pay to pitch? Hell no. Would I take advantage of the fact that such an event draws a lot of useful people? Yes, of course.
Note: I didn't actually bring all this up, I was just responding to all the folks writing about Keiretsu forum and Collision. While I do have a conference, it doesn't compete with any of these other events -- because winning for me is just giving back as much as I can (and taking NOTHING).
I do these events for my own intellectual curiosity, to help my founders get exposure and to find new founders to invest in.
I wish Paddy the best with his events and I hope the Keiretsu forum folds.