Tickets for Web Summit, a splashy tech conference attended by roughly 70,000 people every year, have been on sale for months. But with just a few weeks to go until this year’s event in Lisbon, Portugal, a number of high-profile tech industry figures vowed to boycott the event and excoriated Web Summit cofounder Paddy Cosgrave.
“You chose to support terrorists. As such I’ll never attend/sponsor/speak at any of your events again” tweeted David Marcus, a former Facebook executive. “I refuse to appear at Web Summit and am canceling my appearance,” Gary Tan, the president of startup incubator Y Combinator, said in a post.
