1/20/20
NewCo, New Year: 2019 Recap
With the end of 2019, we welcome in a new year for NewCo. But, before we happily move on to 2020, let’s look back and reflect on some of the great achievements from this past year. NewCo was featured in four strategic locations: London, Toronto, Boston and Shanghai, where we saw great participation and engaged audiences ready to learn, share and celebrate innovation.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into each of the local festivals, where each city has its own community of supporters that has worked tirelessly to ensure the success of their NewCo.
London Calling
For their third album, The Clash recorded London Calling at a time when their musical interests changed and started to integrate sounds from other genres. A similar innovative ability to collaborate was definitely on display at the first NewCo festival of 2019, which took place in London. Our partners at the London Business School put together a wonderful lineup of companies that included Divido (Google named them the best technology company within consumer finance in Europe), SeedLegals (a company that automate the legal process of securing funding) and L Marks (one of Europe’s largest corporate accelerators). With the success of this event, planning is already underway for NewCo London 2020 happening March 12 and 13. Be on the lookout for a schedule announcement soon.
Toronto, TDot, The 6ix
Whatever you want to call it, it’s the home of one of last year’s most outstanding NewCo festivals. With almost 3,000 registered attendees and over 80 host company sessions it was one of the largest NewCo festivals to date. Popular sessions were hosted by companies such as Shopify, Facebook, Ritual, Uber Canada and Slack. We received great feedback from participants; one of our favourites exemplifies NewCo:
“This event allows us to have a peek inside companies that are changing the world to learn about its business, people and culture! Please keep it up.”
And so we will. NewCo Toronto 2020 is coming back in June.
Who drinks tea anyways? Definitely not in Boston
Never get in the way of an American colonialist, especially when you raise their taxes on tea. While our event in Boston didn’t lead to the disposal of well over 300 chests of British tea, NewCo Boston took place for the 4th year in row thanks to our Boston affiliate Mass TLC. Despite a very stormy start to the day, attendees took to the streets, visiting Boston’s most innovative firms. Host companies included Zipcar, Human, Shell TechWorks and Wayfair. To cap off the day, attendees met up at software company Mendix to celebrate the close of the festival. Stay tuned for details about this year’s NewCo Boston.
Last stop of the year, Shanghai
Shanghai was the final NewCo festival of 2019. Our partner, Chinaccelerator put on another great event. NewCo Shanghai brought attendees into the headquarters of 22 of Shanghai’s most innovative companies to meet the leaders transforming China’s startup ecosystem. When asked about the event, Wang Zhenyang, Brand Innovation Leader at host company 36kr Eastern China, said NewCo offered her “a chance to meet with people from different backgrounds, build partnerships with them, and build a foundation for future cooperation—it’s extremely relevant to what we do.” Stay tuned for details about the next event in Shanghai in 2020.
Our global team has some exciting things planned for 2020. There have been several conversations happening about opening up new markets and resurrecting previous markets that have not seen a NewCo festival in a few years. Stay tuned for more information about which additional markets will be hosting a NewCo festival.
Since NewCo is truly a grassroots organization, in order for a new festival to pop up, we need a local affiliate to lead the way. As always, we appreciate your support of NewCo and are here if you have ideas or connections you would like to put forth.
Want to stay in touch? Please be sure to sign up to stay informed and follow up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look forward to seeing you in a NewCo city soon.