About 40.000 people from all over the world flocked to Dublin last week for the annual Web Summit. No time to see the sights, just three days of meeting up with fellow tech startups, investors, experiencing the chaos of Dublin traffic and random advice about the best way to drink Guinness. Needless to say, it was awesome and a great way to meet up with tech startups from around the globe. 
This is also the last time the Web Summit is to be held in Dublin. If we’re able to make it next year (fingers crossed!), we’ll be off to sunny Lisbon, Portugal! Day one: the booth, the embassy and the best way to drink Guinness We were selected for the Web Summit ALPHA program, so that meant we got our own exhibition booth on the main convention floor. It took us a long and healthy walk but we eventually made it to the floor, which you can imagine as a huge farmer’s market of tech startups. Thanks and props go out to the good folks from French startup Krommatik, an online platform where you can create music with musicians from around the world. They were kind enough to lend us their speakers so we could show off Chordify and let people hear it at the same time. Pretty essential stuff of course. 
After talking to a lot of cool people and cleaning out our booth, off we went to the Dutch Embassy as Chordify was selected for an investor pitch. The taxi driver gave us helpful advice about the best way to drink Guinness. Pro tip: don’t order pints, just regular glasses, because stale and warm Guinness is not very pleasant… And try to drink it while keeping all the foam in there, so your last sip is all foamy, buttery goodness. Getting invited to an embassy may sound very formal in a James Bond tuxedo and shaken martinis kinda way, but you would be mistaken dear Moneypenny! The Dutch ambassador, we learned, started his career as a music scientist and loved what we were doing. Day two: the Summit and the Globe You only get an exhibition booth for one day, so on the second day, we were free to roam around the Web Summit and check out some of the cool startups and tech gadgets like the latest VR goggles. We also got the chance to chat with a few other cool music tech startups over a cup of coffee. Like UberChord from Germany. As their name suggests, they do stuff with chords too, more specifically, they’ve created an app to learn all the different chords in a game like way. 
And we also spoke with Jordan Young from the Canadian SKIO Music. It’s a one stop shop for music rights, you may know Jordan as DJ Swivel, a Grammy Award winning producer, working with the likes of Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Kanye West. BEATGASM was another cool company we talked to, who support indie and underground bands by connecting them with their fans. And that evening, we put what we recently learned about Guinness into practice in The Globe pub where we met up with all the other Dutch startups for drinks and laughs. 
DJ Swivel – Photocredits: Corry van der Ploeg Day three: Heavy metal lullabies One of the funniest ideas we found roaming around the Web Summit has got be Baby Stars Rock 2 Sleep. It’s a baby monitor music box and mp3 player, all rolled into one. The company turns rock songs into baby friendly lullabies, which is really convenient if you’re really into black metal but don’t want to emotionally scar your baby for life! That’s it folks! The personal highlights of a busy, busy Web Summit with way too many highlights.