Web Summit cofounder and CEO Paddy Cosgrave has resigned after angering Israel's entire tech community on his comments about the Israel-Hamas war.
Following Hamas's murderous attack on southern Israel on October 7, Cosgrave put several posts on X, formerly Twitter, condemning Israel's response without even condemning Hamas. A range of Israeli investors and entrepreneurs objected to Cosgrave's comments and withdrew from next month's conference and the wave of protests even saw tech giants including Google, Facebook, Intel and Amazon pull out of the event.
Web Summit is due to imminently appoint a new CEO, although it remains unclear which companies will participate in the conference in Lisbon on November 13.
Too little too late
The boycott of the conference went beyond Israeli investors and entrepreneurs last Monday when Garry Tan from Y Combinator and Rabi Gupta from Sequoia withdrew their participation. After calls for a boycott Cosgrave published an apology on the conference website regretting the deep hurt and timing of the things that he had posted.
However, it seems that the apology was too little too late because calls to boycott the conference only strengthened with more and more companies pulling out of the conference and withdrawing sponsorship.
Cosgrave has served as CEO of the conference since 2009 and last year there were 70,000 participants, according to "Bloomberg."
Before Cosgrave published his apology, and in response to initial criticism against his pro-Palestinian tweets, he chose to double-down on his position and wrote that "war crimes are war crimes, even when they are committed by allies." He also wrote that his mailbox had been flooded with messages of support coming from Israel and all over the world. Referring to the conference, Cosgrave wrote that despite the calls for a boycott, some of the "most respected voices in the fields of international laws for human rights and peace" will take part in the conference.
He added that despite the cancellations of a number of investors, new investors had already signed up, and also said on the Monday after the boycott calls began, more tickets to the conference were sold than on any other Monday this year.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 22, 2023.
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