Now that the booths are packed up, the lanyards are off, and your LinkedIn is 37 connection requests heavier, what do we actually do with everything WebSummit Vancouver exposed?

There’s been a lot of talk (as there always is) about what Vancouver’s startup and tech ecosystem needs to do next. We’ve got a year. Momentum is still warm. But if we’re honest, that window’s going to cool off fast if we don’t turn post-conference energy into action.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Yes, Web Summit gave Vancouver a massive opportunity to show up for the world. The scale was big. The interest was real. The foot traffic? Endless. From Lisbon to Lagos, you had folks who didn’t know a thing about Kits or Cambie getting a first taste of what the Vancouver startup scene looks like.

But did we actually show them something?

Maybe we did. Sort of. These events are complex beasts; how much you take away often depends on how well you played the hand you were dealt. Some folks walked away with investor intros, others with a sore back and a pile of unqualified leads.

But the most common takeaway I heard on the floor, day in, day out, was this:

“We need more funds.”

It was so consistent it almost felt like Web Summit should rebrand to Funding Summit. That was the chorus, whether you were at a panel, a booth, or just standing in the hallway with a half-drunk coffee and an overworked pitch deck.

But the second theme I picked up, quieter, but maybe more important, was:

“Let’s build more.”

Now, here's the twist: Build more what? To what end? For whom? Why now? That part was often left hanging. And that’s a problem.

In our rush to innovate, founders sometimes forget to interrogate use cases. The excitement of building something new can overshadow the far less glamorous, but far more critical, task of building something needed.

Let me put it plainly: If there isn’t a compelling reason for someone to buy from you a third time, you don’t have a startup. You have a prototype on life support.

And until that use case is clear, until the value is obvious, you won’t raise serious money. Nor should you.

Of course, there are always exceptions. I know founders who haven’t raised a single dollar and are crushing it. Why? They’re selling. Not selling the dream, actually selling the product.

They’ve figured out what their customer wants, and they’re delivering it, repeatedly.

At Web Summit, I met a lot of founders who were eager to build, eager to create, eager to raise, and eager to disrupt.

But I wish I met more founders who were eager to sell.

Because selling solves most of your problems. It’s proof. It’s traction. It’s the one metric that doesn’t need a 20-slide deck and a TAM chart to explain.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: If we want to make real progress before the next Web Summit, we need to shift the narrative.

Let’s move from: “How do I raise?” to “How do I sell?”

From: “We need more capital in the ecosystem” to “We need more customers in the ecosystem.”

From: “Let’s build more” to “Let’s build what sells more than once.”

Web Summit held up a mirror to our ecosystem. It showed us our energy, our hunger, and yes, our gaps.

Now we get to choose, do we spend the next year talking about it?

Or doing something that makes next year’s event the one where global VCs aren’t asking “So what’s happening in Vancouver?” – they’re flying in because they already know.

Amogh Oak is co-founder of Clueless Monk Technologies.