Thoughts on Nebular Summit & Interop's event strategy

Three years ago, I founded Nebular Summit as a side event to EthCC [5], with the goal of creating a space for Cosmos developers and founders to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in Paris. Since then, we’ve held two more conferences in Paris and Brussels, establishing Nebular as the go-to Cosmos-focused conference during EthCC.

Every year, we receive great feedback from founders, builders, and investors who appreciate the quality of our attendees and the high signal-to-noise ratio. Over the years, we’ve partnered with around 30 teams through sponsorships and marketing, which has helped fuel our growth. Most of all, I'm proud of the amazing community of builders and enthusiasts we've built–it is truly the most gratifying part of the work that goes into organizing Nebular Summit.

In these three years, we’ve learned a lot about organizing events and the value they bring to us as a fund. Nebular Summit was instrumental in getting Interop Ventures off the ground—two of our largest investors joined us after the 2022 event. It also allows us to meet great teams, many of which are now portfolio companies of the fund.

With the fund now established, it's time to review our goals and how best to align our event strategy with them. I see events as supporting four main goals for Interop Ventures:

• Build a strong ecosystem of high-quality developers and founders that contributes to our deal flow and investment opportunities.
• Provide a platform for portfolio companies and partners to connect, share ideas, and collaborate.
• Support our research efforts by continuously challenging our biases and theses.
• Establish credibility among investors and grow our fund’s brand presence with LPs.

To better support these goals, it feels natural for our event strategy to evolve. Here are some thoughts on how we might move forward:

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Organizing a two-day conference with 500+ attendees and 80+ speakers is a massive undertaking. Going forward, the focus will be on making this process more scalable and repeatable to increase our return on investment of time, resources, and capital.

More Focused

This year, we hosted nearly 90 sessions, including talks, workshops, and panels across three stages. Instead of trying to cover all possible topics, future events will be more focused on specific themes to provide deeper value.

Smaller and More Frequent

Rather than one large annual conference around EthCC, we will move towards hosting smaller, curated events spread out throughout the year and in different cities. This will allow us to cover more ground with less overhead.

Re-evaluate the Nebular Summit Brand

Nebular Summit was originally designed to be broad enough to stand as an annual Cosmos developer conference. Moving forward, events may need to align more closely with specific themes and research areas. This raises questions about whether the Nebular brand, broad as it is, will continue to serve our evolving goals.

These are just some early thoughts as our event strategy continues to evolve. I’m grateful for the lessons learned in organizing Nebular Summit and for the community’s enthusiasm and support—this is truly our strongest asset. Whatever direction we take, I’m committed to maintaining Nebular’s founding principles of collaboration, learning, and good vibes.