20 Become 40; TechCrunch20/40 Throws the Planning Out The Window

After a day on the web of scored out numbers and questions piling up in the comments, the team at TechCrunch 20 have posted the details of the change to the Conference and that they’ll now be showcasing 40 companies, as opposed to 20, and re-branding to TechCrunch 40.

The official reason on the website is:

…we decided that there were just too many strong start-ups to limit the conference format to 20 company presentations. So we revisited our agenda, cut out a number of content panels and determined that we could successfully break 40 companies at the conference and still leave room for interesting discussion and debate about new business models and verticals with our expert advisory panel.
TechCrunch 40 Blog

And I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough., Yes I know that you need to always be open to new ideas, and be reactive when this is required. But the whole point of the conference was that the best twenty companies would be broken at the event, with time to show their new products. 20 is a manageable number, 40 is not. That’s more like a VC Roadshow than an in-depth look at the companies.

While the impact of TechCrunch40 for the organisers (Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington) won’t be diluted, the presenting companies are going to have to fight harder to be noticed. Of course that’s what they should be doing, natural selection and all, but at such a late stage (the show happens in just over two weeks) if my plans are all up in the air, what must the chosen companies be thinking? After all, it’s too late to back out now – I hope they’ve not spent anything on marketing materials shouting TechCrunch20.

I’m also a bit miffed that the team at The Podcast Network have now got to go back to our sponsors, explain the new format of the conference and the effect this will have on the coverage we planned. Hopefully it’s not going to cause problems or cold feet, but we won’t know that till mid-week.

Getting 20 interviews out over roughly a week of shows was just about on the cards – but the jump to 40 is going to mean either a huge delay in getting some interviews out (which isn’t great), or pushing more interviews into longer shows… which is probably going to make those shows either too arduous because of their length, or too superficial to keep everything in manageable chunks.

The alternative is that the team selects our personal 20 companies and runs with the original plan.

I’m positive that the coverage coming out of TechCrunch 40 is going to be just as good as other conferences and festivals I’ve covered – once I hit the ground I’ll be digging out all the best bits and pieces, it’s just a bit of a drag having to re-do so much of the preparatory legwork at short notice. And it would be nice if they could remember to add The Podcast Network as one of the Press Attending on their website… it would save me giving them another nudge.