We held Resilience Conference in September 2024. It was our first conference, and we pulled it together in six months. We are grateful to all the speakers, sponsors, and attendees who got behind the conference despite it being new and unproven. The support the event received indicates the need for an independent tech conference addressing defence and security. The feedback we received suggests it went well.
By the numbers
The conference attracted 411 attendees over the two days. We had 78 speakers, 28 panels and fireside chats, six startup pitches, and 11 breakout sessions. Our attendees were split almost equally between military & government, investors, industry, with startups being the largest group with 127 founders.
We also had 18 leading journalists there to moderate panels and write about the participants. They wrote articles in Forbes, TechCrunch, and two in the Financial Times.
You can find the event photos here and videos of the panels and fireside chats on our Youtube Channel.
Intersection of public and private profiles
Some of the best content is missing from the photos and videos as senior leaders from the British Army, GCHQ, the NSA, and HMGCC spoke on our stage. Out of necessity, these panels were completely off the record – you had to be in the room. We will build on this at next year’s conference.
We organised Resilience Conference to bring together the military and national security community with tech investors and startup founders to support the growth of the defence tech ecosystem. We believe it is important that these groups learn to work closer. This will not be achieved just in transactional meetings; the conference was a chance for them to spend a day and a half together networking, and discussing fundamental topics on stage and in breakout sessions.
The conference successfully created significant new connections between these groups. We have seen real outcomes already — most of which we cannot talk about — but needless to say that the conference has led to a better understanding between these public and private sector groups, new partnerships, contracts, and investments.
Other things to note
- Resilience Conference is mission driven. We are doing this because it needs to be done, and we want it to be impactful and useful.
- The conference was completely independent. It was funded entirely from ticket sales and sponsorship.
- We maintained a strict policy of keeping editorial decisions separate from our commercial outcomes. Nobody paid to be on the main stage.
- The content was curated purely on merit and interest, a process to which the brilliant Matt Burns brought over a 15 years of experience as the former Managing Editor at TechCrunch.
- We planned the conference so we could give away over 100 tickets to people in the public sector who needed to be in the room to create maximum impact.
- We also maintained a policy of not charging Ukrainians for tickets.
- We are not restricting the value we create to the conference, and have continued to support startups and government agencies with access to this new network we have built.
RC25
We are programming Resilience Conference 2025, with dates to be announced soon. Please contact us to:
· discuss speaking or presenting
· if you want to sponsor the conference
· if you want to partner with us
