This piece first appeared on Dr Tobias Stone’s Medium account. We are reposting it here.
I’m organising the Resilience Conference on 26–27 September in London to bring together startups, investors, and government around the topic of defence, security, and resilience. The conference aims to get more of the tech sector involved in defence and security. Here’s why I’m doing it.
When I joined the Institute for Security Science and Technology at Imperial College London, I wrote a piece on why startups need to do more to support defence and security. In short, there’s a war in Europe and it’s no longer okay to sit on the sidelines. My friends in Ukraine and the Baltics will leave you in no doubt about that.
The tech sector specialises in innovating cleverly and quickly, and we need all that skill now to protect our democracies. Tech that protects and defends us goes beyond weapons, it includes technology that secures our information space, and protects our energy, healthcare, food, and supply chains. This bigger picture is resilience. We have all experienced the need for resilience in recent years, from adapting rapidly to the pandemic, to food and commodity shortages and instability in our energy supplies due to the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Resilience in a defence context looks at how to protect underwater Internet cables or gas pipes from state actors or terrorists, how to power cities when infrastructure has been bombed, and how to protect democracies from disinformation.
These challenges are perfect for the tech sector as they require bold, rapid, and disruptive innovation. Already, startups are rising to the challenge. Startup founders in Ukraine have become a vital part of the war effort, producing drones and other technology far faster than any military infrastructure. The startup sector has also adapted to address the challenge in countries like Estonia, with Russia on the border. Investors with no prior background in defence are also shifting their attention to defence and dual-use startups.
In countries bordering Russia, startups and investors have a sense of urgency. But the tech sectors farther away from conflict zones are slower to engage in defence and security. Some founders find defence distasteful, and in the investor community, some funds are either prevented from investing in defence due to their LPA terms, not encouraged to, or don’t feel they have the expertise to.
When viewed through the resilience and dual-use lens, a broader range of technologies become relevant to defence and security. All of this is now essential and necessary, as well as presenting an economic opportunity.
I want to engage the broader startup ecosystem in a dialogue about defence and security. We live in a volatile era now, with a major war in Europe. The tech sector has a critical role to play, especially startups that are agile, lean, and disruptive.
To address the wider tech sector on this topic, I decided to organise a tech conference on resilience, defence, and security. I was quickly joined by Leslie Hitchcock and Matt Burns, the former Director of Events and former Managing Editor at TechCrunch. They bring huge expertise and knowledge about how to organise tech conferences, bring together ecosystems, and produce impactful tech media content.
Leslie and Matt are best known for producing and programming TechCrunch Disrupt. But I am also looking back to events like their 2018 Blockchain event in Zug, when they brought together everyone in the nascent blockchain and crypto space at a pivotal moment in its development. It wasn’t just the content on the stage that was so impactful, but also the power of everyone in one place mixing freely and connecting. That is what we are doing now with defence, security, and resilience.
Together, we are organising Resilience Conference, an event about startups, security, and defence. We will showcase startups that have made it work in defence and security. We will hear from the leading VCs about why they invest in defence and security, and why so many investors avoid the sector. We will hear from the customers — the military and national security community, and the Primes — about the opportunities, challenges, and the sector’s future.
We are signing up new speakers every day, but already you can see the breadth of the dialogue we are curating with founders, VCs, and defence leaders forming panels and firesides. Check our Speakers page here.
Resilience Conference aims to improve the ability of public sector organisations to connect with the tech sector, encourage more investors to look at this vertical, and showcase startups to future customers and investors. Through partnerships with the media we will spread the message into the tech sector that defence, security, and resilience provide exciting opportunities for investors, are a worthy challenge for innovators, and are now necessary areas to focus our expertise on as innovators.
Resilience Conference will be unique in several ways. There are already many very good defence and security technology events, but they tend to be very closed, invitation-only, and operate under the Chatham House Rule — meaning that very little of what is said at the event is shared beyond it.
Resilience Conference will be more open than the other conferences, with media coverage, a greater diversity of people in the room, and will feature startups in a more prominent way. We have also decided to fund the conference entirely from ticket sales and sponsorships to remain independent and agile.
Resilience Conference is mission-driven and collaborative, looking to help build the ecosystem, so we are working with everyone else who shares this aim.
Resilience Conference is on 26–27 September in London. We will be sharing more on the conference over the coming months — sign up for our newsletter here.
If you are interested in partnering or sponsoring, contact us at [email protected].
To attend, you can apply here.
