I’m at the Vegan Party Conference in London this weekend, an event that originally caused some confusion because it sounds political but its not. It should really be written as ‘The Vegan Party/Conference’ because it’s about coming together to discuss the big issues of the movement whilst, well, having a bit of a party.
Vegan Business Tribe was invited to hold a panel discussion on supporting vegan business (see our ‘stage selfie’ above), so I called together some of our members who support different parts of our sector including Daisy Botha from Vegan Fairs, Keith Lesser from Vegan Accounts and Matali Deypurkastha from The Vegan Publisher. We were also joined by vegan business superstar Matthew Glover, founder of Veganuary, VegCapital, GenV and VFC.
We had a really good discussion for 45 minutes, but it was obvious that one of the members of the panel was less positive about where the vegan scene is now than the others. And that, surprisingly, was Matthew.
Matthew has ridden the vegan bubble – heck he pretty much created it 10 years ago when he launched the Veganuary movement – and he’s obviously frustrated that growth has slowed and the negative media that’s resulted from that. But to me, I feel like I’ve been through this before.
Back in the 90s I started out working as a web and multimedia designer (I was building websites before Google was even online) and I worked through what was called the ‘Dot Com Bubble’. The commercial internet was just immerging and, like in any new sector, a couple of very early movers completely blew-up. Investors who knew little about how it worked, pumped millions of dollars into other websites and platforms hoping to emulate that success.
Needless to say, most of those didn’t and a lot of people lost a lot of money. The media heralded the death of the internet. Start-ups couldn’t raise money as too many investors had burnt fingers.
Sound familiar?
Well – 25 years on, look at where the internet is now.
David’s thoughts from the week, published every weekend for members only.
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