MWC is cancelled. Our entire business is people in a room
The world's biggest mobile conference was cancelled over the new coronavirus. A founder's worries, a few weeks in, with friends in Wuhan under lockdown.
On Wednesday the GSMA cancelled Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which normally brings over 100,000 people together at the end of February. It came after a week of big exhibitors pulling out one by one, including LG, Ericsson, Nvidia, Amazon and Sony, over the new coronavirus.
I studied in Wuhan for four years. My undergrad classmates, the ones who stayed, have been under lockdown since January 23. The city is closed, public transport stopped, people can’t leave their apartment complexes except for essentials. The messages in our class WeChat group started as jokes about being stuck inside and have gotten a lot quieter. I don’t know what to say to them, so mostly I send small things and read.
From here, the virus still feels far away to most people. There are a handful of cases in Canada and the US. But MWC is a signal I can’t ignore, because our entire business depends on large groups of people meeting in one room.
Amanda’s product makes conference check-in fast. If conferences stop happening, even for a few months, we have no customers. Our events calendar for March and April is fuller than it’s ever been, and this week three organizers emailed to ask how cancellation would work under our contract. None of them has cancelled yet. All of them are thinking about it.
I don’t know how bad this will get. Nobody seems to. The optimistic version is that it stays mostly in China and a few places, and the spring conference season goes on with hand sanitizer at every door. The pessimistic version is that it spreads widely and events stop everywhere for a while. We’re planning for something in between, which in practice means looking hard at our cash and at what else our technology is good for if large gatherings pause.
One thing I’ve noticed in the conversations: nobody wants to touch anything right now. Shared pens, touchscreens, the counter at registration. Our check-in is already touchless, since you just look at the iPad. That’s a small thing. It might matter more than I thought.
For now, I’m refreshing the news too often and checking on friends in Wuhan every day. 加油.