The upLIFTing dinner
When we attended the LIFT conference in Geneva for the first time last year, we immediately loved it. Laurent, Nicolas and their team are doing a great job in creating a nice atmosphere with inspiring content, where a very diverse crowd of super-interesting people meet.
Thus, it was clear that the Sandbox team would be back in lovely Geneva for the LIFT 09 conference. But this time, we wanted to contribute something. Together with the LIFT team, we decided to throw a small dinner to bring together some young attendees of the conference as well as people from the Sandbox network.
Photo by Dominik Grolimund / Wuala
On Wednesday evening, after the first day of conference, a group of 30 hand-selected people met at the beautiful Restaurant La Broche. Despite some initial resistance, we managed to mix up the people so that everyone would meet new people. As usual at Sandbox dinners, the crowd was a diverse one, ranging from entrepreneurs to NGO people and researchers.
Equally broad were topics that were covered in the discussions at the five tables: One group immediately dived into the big debate of money vs. freedom and why being a poor entrepreneur might make you happier than being a rich employee. Another table discussed intensively the business model of Poken, the very successful Swiss startup, with its founders.
As the evening went on and the wine bottles were slowly emptying, the debates moved on to the advantages of Islamic banking, the future of journalism – and medieval propaganda. Over coffee and dessert, some people discussed how innovation can actually flow from less developed countries to the developed ones, as it happened with the concept of microcredits, while others got into a heated argument on the Swiss banking secret. And before we even realised, it was 1am in the morning… Time, at least for some, to start discovering the bars of Geneva ;-)
The dinner was, in our view, a great success – it allowed us to spread the word about Sandbox and, more importantly, meet some of the smartest and most interesting people at the conference. Thanks to everyone for attending – and see you at the next conference!
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