When people hear “Davos,” they picture a Swiss ski town in January full of finance ministers and CEOs in dark coats. There is also a “Summer Davos.” The World Economic Forum holds its Annual Meeting of the New Champions in China each September, alternating between Tianjin and Dalian. This year it was Tianjin. I just got back, and I want to set down some thoughts about what a gathering like this is actually for, particularly for someone who builds technology rather than policy or capital.
The short answer is that I went because the WEF named me a Young Global Leader earlier this year, and the YGL community gathers around these meetings. The longer answer is more interesting to share.
What is the WEF for, exactly
Most people I talked to before the trip had one of two reactions. Either they assumed Davos is a serious place where serious decisions get made, or they assumed it is a self-important talking shop where rich people congratulate each other. After a week of sessions, hallway conversations, dinners, and bus rides, I think both views miss what is actually happening.
The Forum is, mostly, a convening institution. It does not pass laws, does not write checks, does not run companies. What it does is put people in the same room who would otherwise never sit across a table from each other. A regulator from one country, a founder from another, a researcher from a third, a journalist who covers all of them. The output of these gatherings is rarely a press release. It is a set of relationships, and a slow shift in how the people in the room think about a problem.
I came in skeptical of how much that matters. I am leaving more convinced that it matters quite a bit, though probably not for the reasons most attendees would describe.
What a technologist gets out of it
A banker at Davos is doing one job. A foreign minister is doing a different one. A CTO is doing something else again, and I had to work out what that something was over the course of the week.
The most valuable conversations for me were not in the keynote rooms. They were the ones where I sat with someone running infrastructure for a Chinese mobile operator, or a researcher working on tomorrow’s consumer hardware, and tried to understand what the next ten years of technology look like from somewhere that is not New York or San Francisco. Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon gave a session on emerging consumer interfaces that was as good as anything I have seen at a tech-only conference, and the audience for it was a mix of engineers, manufacturers, and government officials. That mix changes the questions people ask.
When you watch someone like Lu Wei, China’s internet minister, talk about the future of the digital economy, you are not getting a Silicon Valley pitch. You are getting a view of the internet as state infrastructure. Whether or not you agree with that framing, you should understand it, because it is shaping the rules under which a billion users live online. I left that session with a longer reading list and a different sense of what regulatory pressure on global platforms might look like over the next five years.
The room for a Premier walking past
There is a moment in any large international gathering that is hard to describe without sounding silly. Premier Li Keqiang walked through the corridor about ten feet from where I was sitting. I noticed because the security shifted, not because I was star-struck. It was a useful reminder that the Forum is operating at a register where heads of government show up not as guest speakers but as participants who need to talk to other participants.
That register is what makes the WEF different from most conferences. At a tech conference, you go to learn about products. At a finance conference, you go to learn about deals. At Davos and its summer counterpart, you go because the world is messy, the problems are interconnected, and the people who can move things are willing to spend a week in the same building.
For a technologist, this is humbling in a specific way. It is easy in our industry to assume that technology is the dominant force shaping the next decade. A week in Tianjin is a useful corrective. Demographics, capital flows, governance models, and trade policy will shape what we can build and who we can build it for. Knowing the people who think about those things every day is part of the job.
On being slightly out of place
The Young Global Leaders cohort is intentionally mixed, and that mix is the point. There are technologists, but there are also social entrepreneurs, classical musicians, public health officials, and people running family businesses on continents I have never visited. The conversations are richer because no one in the room is the obvious expert on every topic.
I led three workshop sessions during the meetings. The rooms filled past capacity, which says something useful about how much non-technologists at this gathering are working to understand what is happening to their industries. The questions were not the questions I usually get from peers in the technology industry. They were sharper in some ways and more naive in others, and both directions were useful.
What I will take home
Three things, mostly.
First, the technology decisions we make in New York and San Francisco are read very differently in Beijing, Berlin, and Brasilia, and the gap between those readings is widening. If you ship products globally, you cannot afford to be casual about that.
Second, the people who run countries are not, by and large, technologists. They are trying to understand the systems we build, and they are getting their information from a small number of sources. If we want better policy, more of us need to be willing to spend time outside our own conferences.
Third, the convening function the Forum performs is unusual and probably underrated. I do not know of another institution that puts the same people in the same room with the same regularity. That is worth something even when no specific decision comes out of any specific meeting.
A CTO at a gathering like this has a clear job: to listen carefully, to ask better questions than you would ask at home, and to take seriously the fact that the world does not revolve around the part of it where you happen to work. That is what I am taking back to New York.