My First day at the GIF-London

The beginning.

17 November was the day. The GIF-London finally started! I think the start was a great success. I was finally able to put a vision on all my expectations. It all started today with the opening conference of the chairperson and CEO at Brand genetics, Tom Ellis. At first, I had many questions about how everything was going to happen. But slowly along with the first conference, my questions were answered and it gave me a great perspective. Even though the event works perfectly fine online. I think It would have been so much more fun to follow it in London in the way they usually make it happen. But Covid-19 forces us to do it this way so it seems like there is not much we can do about it. You see that the organizers gave it a lot of effort so that we have a great experience.

The speakers of day one.

After the introduction and opening of Tom Ellis, it was time to listen to the first real conference. The GIF-London started with “The Peculiar Amazon Approach to Culture and Innovation” with Ben Strut and Eric Tachibana. Eric is a Senior Practice Manager for Advisory, APAC, and Japan at Amazon WS. Honestly, it was a very interesting and productive conference. He gave us lots of insides of the company and how they functioned. In my opinion, it was probably the most interesting conference I listened to of the day. It was a great way to start the event. And it actually was a little funny because of the past experiences he had lived. He explained it in such a passionate way, which made it so interesting. Coming from me I would say that it is a very good thing. I could say I am someone that easily loses focus on things. But this time I stayed focused for quite a while which made It great to have a good listening attitude.

I followed this up with “Ask an Expert’: Corporate Venturing & Start-ups Collaboration” with Michael Stahl, Charles Carter, and Robert Lowe. They were talking about what LEGO Ventures did for start-ups. Myself being a very big LEGO fan like I have mentioned before was a little disappointed. I thought they would have gone a little more into detail about the designs and production. But that is a personal opinion because in general, it was interesting to see the corporate aspect of the business. Even if I did not always understand what they meant. This is probably because I have not been into this kind of business talk before.

And lastly, I went and listened to “The fairy tales of the future” I didn’t prepare myself to do it at first but in the end, I stayed and listened. It was an audiovisual story talking about all that’s happening in this world today. All this was written in a way it looked like it was a fairy world. Reflecting on it now I thought it was a GREAT life lesson. It made so much sense even if was written from another perspective I really enjoyed it. In the end, it thought me that you can choose. It explained that you can live in a world with a living monster with all our belongings or leave everything and go to a new world where there is hope and clarity. It might not make a lot of sense but after hearing that story you would exactly know what I am talking about. So I would totally advise you to read it or look at the audiovisual fragment of it.

That was pretty much it for my first day. I am excited to know what tomorrow holds for me. I hope you once again enjoyed this post and I will be back very soon to talk about the conferences on the 18th of November. Be sure to subscribe if you want to get a notification when I post and don’t hesitate to send me your questions!