TechBBQ 2025 (Bella Center)

TechBBQ has become something that one obviously needs to. Kind of like the People's Meeting, just without the draft beer and ideologies. And if you've never heard of it, imagine 6,000 people in the Bella Center with name tags around their necks, all looking to sell something to each other. Officially, it is “Scandinavia's largest tech and startup conference”. Unofficially, it's a two-day LinkedIn feed, just in physical form.

There are scenes with names like Lifescience, UrbanTech, European AI Summit, The Policy Lounge, Hero Academia and Board Summit, and the program is interspersed with panels, keynotes and pitch competitions. There are investors in search of the next unicorn, startups hoping for funding, consultants trying to land clients, and politicians who love to stand on a stage and say that Denmark is a “leader” in something.

And I? I thought I'd go from there with a few fresh ideas. Maybe even a sense of where technology is moving. I imagined that there would be talks that said something honest and wise about AI, climate, digitalization or just... the future. That I could sniff at something bigger than buzzwords. That I would meet someone who would actually talk about substance.

Instead, I got socks and a gentle pressure in the temporal region.

It's the odd duality: You walk into the Bella Center with the expectation of being inspired -- and walk out again with the feeling that you've just sat down for a group meeting in a midsize revision house. I had an idea that it could be a place where the little ones meet the big ones, where someone says something crooked, where spark arises. But pretty quickly you find out that most people are there for two reasons: to truant from work without a guilty conscience, or to network their way to a new job.

You know the feeling already when you walk into the Bella Center. An inferno of acoustics and equity. You get a neck loop with a badge on which your name is written in industrial font and your company is more important than your date of birth. And you notice right away: No one is listening — they are scrolling for new opportunities.

You walk around bumping into each other in the aisle between Urbantech stands and AI talks during the European AI Summit. I was given a flat cortado with thin foam and was greeted by four pitchdeck enthusiasts who had invented an app that could measure your climate anxiety and sell it as an API. Everyone wants to sell something. But no one has money. Or time. Or real need. It's like a cocktail party without alcohol -- and where everyone has written a script in advance they don't intend to deviate from.

I got free socks at Stripe. That's one thing, apparently. And as I'm standing there, a young guy comes up and asks if he can scan my badge. Not “hello”, not “what are you doing”, just clicks -- and then he knows if I'm investment-ready, or if I'm just one of those people who've come to drink beer and take pictures for their startup Instagram. I'm not replying. I'll take my socks off and go.

The whole thing is one big role-playing game. Sort of Tech LARPwhere people dress up as founders and investors, and where the most important thing is not to get funding, but to look as if you could. It's all the things you hate about modern working life, distilled into one great experience: performance rhetoric, self-optimization, sales language, acceleration psychosis. And no one dares to say it out loud.

But let's say it out loud.

What You Don't Learn at TechBBQ

You don't learn how to build a product anyone bothers to use.

You don't learn how to say no to an investor with poor energy.

You don't learn that it's okay not to scale.

You don't learn that impact is not just a KPI, but a human life.

You don't learn how to go down with the flag and get up again.

You don't learn how to work with people who don't look like you.

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You learn hype.

You learn to say “AI-first” without blinking.

You'll learn to use words like “decoupled,” “monetisable,” “frictionless,” “customer journey,” without having touched a line of code or spoken to a real customer.

You learn how to nod off to a keynote while thinking about how you look in the pictures someone takes at the back of the hall.

Talks, politics and beer

There were sessions during The Policy Loungewhere you really thought you were going to hear something about EU regulation or digital competition — and you do, to a point. There were, for example, panels of EU parliamentarians such as Arba Cockals, Kira-Marie Peter-Hansen, Morten Løkkegaard and Niels Flemming Hansen, who discussed “The 28th Regime” as the next step towards a seamless digital infrastructure in Europe.

I sat in the back row and listened. And when the talk started to drift over into LinkedIn language and “harmonising the digital value chain,” I went over and picked up a beer. It was the middle of the day, but I couldn't stand it. The beer was lukewarm, the speech long, and the applause automatic. I drank it to the end during a talk about how you as a startup should think about “regulatory readiness” from day one. I don't know if it was the beer or the phrase that knocked me out.

A network without a net

There are networking zones. There are matchmaking apps. There are QR codes and business cards with NFC. But the real networking isn't happening. It never turns into more than “I know someone you should meet” phrases tossed over a tepid croissant. Everyone is too busy performing. And it's not because people are idiots -- they're just trapped in a scene where everyone plays along. And no one has the surplus to step out.

There is also no room for doubt. No one dares to say they need help. That they have not found the product/market fit. That they fight. That they consider dropping it all and becoming a teacher. You don't tell an investor and you don't tell other startups -- which is why we sit in a conference hall with 6,000 people and feel... a little alone. Together.

Everything else worked damn well

On the surface, TechBBQ works. The scenes work. The doors open. There are toilets and tech-support and big screens and badges and shuttle buses. All the logistical stuff is pretty much in place. It's just not enough. Because if all that works is practicality, and the content itself feels like LinkedIn at speed, then we're in a kind of conference uncanny valley — where everything resembling Something but feels like nothing.

Let's just put it like this:

TechBBQ 2025 was not a tech conference. It was a self-help fair for aspiring middle managers in early stages of a crisis. I went home with tired feet, empty calories and a feeling that we should start all over again: A conference where all you have to talk about is mistakes. In which keynote speakers are only allowed to show things that did not succeed. Where you have to say “I don't know”. A conference without slogans. Just people trying.