Highlights from our first South American event: Web Summit Rio 2023

Web Summit – what the BBC calls “one of the world’s largest tech and innovation conferences” – made its debut in Latin America with an inaugural and sold-out event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from May 1-4.

With 21,367 attendees (40 percent of whom were women), 400 speakers, 974 startups and 507 investors present, it was a busy few days that kicked off with an Opening Night speech by Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio de Janeiro, who discussed the profound effect that Web Summit Rio will have on the city.

“It’s different from every other major event because of its capacity for major transformation,” Eduardo said, adding that there was a strategy in place – founded on the pillars of ‘attract, facilitate and qualify’ – for “transforming Rio de Janeiro into the capital of innovation in Latin America”.

Image: Ayọ Tometi, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, on Centre Stage during Opening Night at Web Summit Rio 2023. Sam Barnes/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)

Opening Night also saw the third appearance at a Web Summit event of Black Lives Matter’s Ayọ Tometi, who explored how the social movement she helped to found has changed how people think about the voices pushed to the margins of society.

“We’re living in a time in which democracies are under attack all over the world,” said Ayọ, adding that taking action to protect the civil rights of everyone isn’t just critical for the present, but also for the future: “We can be found on the right side of history or the wrong side of history.”

ChatGPT is your drunk uncle

It wasn’t surprising that AI was a pervasive theme at the event, with cheerleaders, critics, evangelists and sceptics scrutinising this field from every angle, from marketing and employment to ethics and creativity.

Signal president Meredith Whittaker didn’t pull any punches, critiquing how large-scale systems such as ChatGPT are developed and used, and how unreliable they can be in producing verifiable facts.

Responding to an example of ChatGPT producing incorrect information, Meredith said: “It’s a bullshit engine … Why are we using a bullshit engine for anything serious?”

“We see these companies – Microsoft in particular – releasing a ChatGPT demo that behaves kind of like that uncle who shows up to holiday gatherings, has a few drinks, and then just talks confidently about shit he does not know about.”

“That’s not something we should be injecting into our information ecosystem; into our core infrastructures. We should not be championing this as something you add on to a search engine where people go to find information they don’t already know and check facts,” added the Signal president.

Image: Chelsea Manning, security consultant for Nym, on Centre Stage during Day 1 of Web Summit Rio 2023 Piaras Ó Mídheach/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)

In a wide-ranging conversation covering cybersecurity, privacy, AI and Web3, prominent whistleblower Chelsea Manning was less critical but equally cautious, stating that technologists should be held to the same ethical standards as doctors and lawyers.

“We’re held to a different standard than, say, a surgeon, and I wouldn’t want to go to a surgeon who has the mentality of ‘break things and figure it out later’,” said Chelsea.

Chelsea took issue with the tech credo ‘move fast and break things’: “We’re in such a new environment and a new time. While we’re moving fast and breaking things, we have to think of the consequences of what that means.”

Snakes on a stage: The future of coding?

Meanwhile, execs, including GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, were bullish on the opportunities surrounding generative AI.

“Imagine 10 days of work done in a single day, 10 hours of work done in a single hour, and 10 minutes of work done with a single prompt command.”

This is the future of programming, according to Thomas, who claimed that, on average, 46 percent of code can be written by Copilot X, GitHub’s new GPT-4 enabled AI assistant.

And it’s not just talk. Thomas set a timer for 15 minutes and set a challenge to build a working app using Copilot X, live on stage, as time ticked away.

The GitHub CEO took the audience through all the steps of recreating the classic game of Snake, fully playable within a web browser, before adopting the code to enable it for mobile devices. Before the timer ran out, Thomas uploaded the link to an online repository for everyone to try out.

Are we in the era of the 10x developer, or will we need 10x fewer of them by the end of the decade?

Crypto isn’t dead yet

Is the crypto winter ever going to end? It depends on who you ask. While Tezos co-founder Kathleen Breitman talked about a humbled industry that “desperately needed” a wakeup call after a series of scandals, Bitso co-founder and CEO Daniel Vogel pointed to significant growth in emerging markets.

“There were two big scandals that plagued the industry over the last year – one being Terra Luna, which was basically a Ponzi scheme … and that phenomenon was exacerbated by FTX collapsing,” explained Kathleen, who noted that stories like these have, understandably, put many people off the entire industry.

Meanwhile, due to comparatively fast and cheap transaction fees, crypto has gained ground for US users to transfer money to their families in Mexico.

“In 2021, we did about US$1 billion in cross-border transactions from the US to Mexico. And, in 2022, we did US$3.3 billion in transactions. More than five percent of the remittances that go from the US to Mexico now go through crypto,” Daniel told the audience.

Crypto might have found a new home in Brazil

Image: Marcelo Sampaio, co-founder and CEO of Hashdex, on Crypto Stage during Day 2 of Web Summit Rio 2023. Eóin Noonan/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)

“Crypto usually thrives in jurisdictions where there are problems that need to be solved,” said Thiago Cesar, CEO at Transfero. “South America has that.”

It’s not just South America. Brazil specifically seems primed to be the new home for crypto speculation and development. With new regulations cycling through the Brazilian legislative system, the future of one of the most volatile trading environments in history might be rocking up to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and many more places throughout the country.

“What’s happening in Brazil is very unique,” said Global Blockchain Business Council CEO Sandra Ro.

Sandra highlighted the ongoing creation of regulations, which is beneficial because actual regulators have been working on different parts of the crypto ecosystem for years. “That is very powerful,” added Sandra.

But does that just mean the next crypto disaster will simply have a Brazilian soundtrack? Apparently not. “Brazil, risk management-wise, is one of the strongest financial systems on the planet,” said Marcelo Sampaio, co-founder and CEO at Hashdex. “The way we’re structured, it is very unlikely something like FTX would have happened [had it been in Brazil].”

Meet the Web Summit Rio 2023 PITCH champion!

What have the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the 2016 UEFA European Championship and the Web Summit Rio 2023 PITCH competition got in common? Starring roles from somebody called ‘Ronaldo’.

At each of our events, PITCH brings together some of the world’s most promising early-stage startups for an electrifying live onstage battle. In the inaugural Web Summit Rio PITCH contest, 42 hard-fighting startups entered the competition – but only one could win it. Meet Jade Autism and its founder, Ronaldo Cohin.

Jade Autism is a novel gamified education platform that stimulates cognitive development for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other learning disabilities. Established in 2018 in Vitoria, Brazil, the platform was built by a team of experts, including neuroscientists, UX game designers and learning specialists.

“PITCH is amazing, because I think it’s the most important part – it’s better than money. There are other competitions where you could earn bigger prizes, but it doesn’t have this size,” said Ronaldo.

Building a Brazilian ‘startup mafia’

Image: Race Capital general partner Edith Yeung onstage at Web Summit Rio. Piaras Ó Mídheach/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)

Talk after talk at Web Summit Rio showcased the growing startup scene and vibrant ecommerce sector in Brazil.

Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, expressed an interest in meeting “the next generation of the Brazilian founder mafia” here at Web Summit Rio – a reference to the success of the ‘PayPal Mafia’, the founders and former employees who went on to build other fruitful startups, including Tesla, YouTube and Yelp.

The Brazilian startup ecosystem has matured since 2010, when, according to Monashees founder and managing general partner Eric Acher, “entrepreneurs had basically no capital at all and had to be incredibly resilient”. Now, as Edith pointed out, it’s pulling in one-third of all VC funding pouring into Latin America.

“It’s great to see Brazilian founders with good outcomes who can go back and be angel investors; fund the ecosystem. And so much of it is connections,” said Renata Quintini, co-founder of Renegade Partners.

“Be each other’s customers. Give each other money. Give each other talent. Because these are the engines that compound and multiply,” Renata continued.

“This mafia concept is really, really important. If you think about Y Combinator, one of the most valuable things is that they are all each other’s customers.”

How Latin America is shopping live to shop better

The demise of brick-and-mortar retail has been much discussed. But how can we retain its best qualities and combine it with the practicality of online shopping? Live shopping, through a livestream on a social platform, could be that happy medium.

Monique Lima, co-founder and CEO of shopstreaming platform Mimo Live Sales, said that although wider ecommerce platforms only have nine percent penetration in the Latin American retail market, 20 percent of all Brazilians have bought a product through live shopping.

“Live shopping is the most humanised way to shop and sell online,” said Monique, adding that it “offers real-time brand interaction, more trust in the buying process, and the opportunity for product demos.”

According to Monique, the appeal of this type of retail is obvious when you consider the success of Mimo Live Sales: “The ecommerce conversion rate is usually two percent. Our conversion rate is 10 percent.”

Monique pointed out that live shopping is an unheralded opportunity in Latin America, with China often a stronger focus point for entrepreneurs and investors.

Got FOMO? Web Summit 2022 in Lisbon is sure to rival the excitement of Web Summit Rio! Get your tickets today.

Main image of attendees posing for a photograph during Day 1 of Web Summit Rio 2023: Stephen McCarthy/Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)