TechBBQ 2025 (Bella Center)

TechBBQ has become one of those things you apparently have to attend. A bit like Folkemødet, only without the beer and the ideologies. And if you’ve never heard of it, imagine 6,000 people in Bella Center with name badges around their necks, all of them eager to sell something to one another. Officially, it’s “Scandinavia’s largest tech and startup conference.” Unofficially, it’s a two-day LinkedIn feed, only in physical form.

There are stages with names like Life Science, UrbanTech, European AI Summit, The Policy Lounge, Hero Academy and Board Summit, and the programme is packed with panels, keynotes and pitch competitions. There are investors hunting for the next unicorn, startups hoping for funding, consultants trying to land clients, and politicians who love getting on stage and saying Denmark is “leading” in something or other.

And me? I thought I’d leave with a few new ideas. Maybe even some sense of where technology is heading. I told myself there would be talks that said something honest and intelligent about AI, climate, digitalisation or just… the future. That I might catch a whiff of something bigger than buzzwords. That I’d meet someone who actually wanted to talk substance.

Instead, I got socks and a mild pressure behind the temples.

That’s the strange double bind: you walk into Bella Center expecting to be inspired — and walk out feeling like you’ve just sat through a team meeting at a mid-sized accountancy firm. I had this idea that it might be a place where the small meet the big, where someone says something off-kilter, where a spark catches. But very quickly you realise most people are there for two reasons: to skive off work without feeling guilty, or to network their way into a new job.

You know the feeling the moment you step inside Bella Center. An inferno of acoustics and share capital. You get a lanyard with a badge, your name printed in industrial font, and your company matters more than your date of birth. And you feel it straight away: nobody is listening — they’re scrolling for new opportunities.

You wander around bumping into people in the aisle between UrbanTech stands and AI talks at the European AI Summit. I got a flat cortado with a thin layer of foam and was met by four pitch-deck enthusiasts who had invented an app that could measure your climate anxiety and sell it as an API. Everyone wants to sell something. But nobody has money. Or time. Or any real need. It’s like a cocktail party without alcohol — and where everyone has written a script in advance that they have no intention of deviating from.

I got free socks at Stripe. Apparently that’s a thing. And as I’m standing there, a young guy comes over and asks if he can scan my badge. Not “hello,” not “what do you do,” just click — and then he knows whether I’m ready for investment or just one of those people who came to drink beer and take pictures for their startup Instagram. I don’t answer. I take the socks and leave.

It’s all one big role-play. A kind of Tech LARP, where people dress up as founders and investors, and where the important thing isn’t getting funding, but looking as if you could. It’s everything you hate about modern working life, distilled into one giant experience: performance rhetoric, self-optimisation, sales language, acceleration psychosis. And nobody dares say it out loud.

So let’s say it out loud.

What you don’t learn at TechBBQ

You don’t learn how to build a product anyone actually wants to use.

You don’t learn how to say no to an investor with bad energy.

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

You don’t learn that impact isn’t just a KPI, but a human life.

You don’t learn how to go down fighting and get back 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 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 to nod at a keynote while thinking about how you look in the photos someone is taking at the back of the hall.

Talks, politics and beer

There were sessions under The Policy Lounge, where you’d really expect to hear something about EU regulation or digital competition — and to a point, you do. There were panels with MEPs such as Arba Kokalari, Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, Morten Løkkegaard and Niels Flemming Hansen, discussing “The 28th Regime” as the next step towards a frictionless digital infrastructure in Europe.

I sat down in the back row and listened. And when the talk started sliding into LinkedIn-speak and “harmonising the digital value chain,” I went to get a beer. It was midday, but I couldn’t stand it. The beer was lukewarm, the talk was long, and the applause was automatic. I drank it to the end while listening to a discussion about how startups should think about “regulatory readiness” from day one. I don’t know whether it was the beer or the sentence that did me in.

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 never happens. It never becomes more than “I know someone you should meet” tossed across a lukewarm croissant. Everyone is too busy performing. And it’s not because people are idiots — they’re just trapped in a scene where everyone is playing along. And nobody has the energy to step outside it.

There’s no room for doubt either. Nobody dares say they need help. That they haven’t found product/market fit. That they’re struggling. That they’re thinking of dropping the whole thing and becoming a teacher. You don’t say that to an investor, and you don’t say it to other startups — and so here we are, in a conference hall with 6,000 people, feeling… a little alone. Together.

Everything else worked bloody well

On the surface, TechBBQ works. The stages work. The doors open. There are toilets and tech support and big screens and badges and shuttle buses. The logistics are more or less in place. It’s just not enough. Because if the only thing that works is the practical side, and the content itself feels like LinkedIn on speed, then we’re in some kind of conference uncanny valley — where everything looks like 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 hopeful middle managers in the early stages of a crisis. I went home with tired feet, empty calories and the feeling that we should start all over again: a conference where you’re only allowed to talk about mistakes. Where keynote speakers are only allowed to show things that didn’t work. Where you’re allowed to say “I don’t know.” A conference without slogans. Just people trying.