I am not at Davos…nor at Burning Man Davos

- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
I am up to the 11th email in which I get invited to doing this or that party, talk, dinner at Davos so let me clarify. I am not in Davos.
I am not in Davos for a number of reasons. The first one you can read about on the net, it is well known and it is my dispute with Klaus Schwab. If you still have not heard about it you can Google Klaus Schwab and see how him and I used to be friends but got into an argument over the future of the GLT community that I was an elected board member of. As Klaus broke his promise to invite GLTs for 3 years to Davos, dissolved the program, making over 400 prizes worthless and transformed the GLTs into the similar program known as YGLs we had a major disagreement that we were never able to settle. Klaus and I have had conversations since then, but as academic as Klaus claims to be, what I found out, is that if you write a negative article him on him you are likely never to be invited back to Davos. So much for transparency.
Now this first explanation is not good enough as to why I am not at Davos. And this is because even though I maybe blacklisted by Klaus I could still be in the most fun part of Davos. Probably because WEF is so related to the whims of Klaus Schwab and he is hardly “open source“, over the last years a large non WEF Davos community has developed. This is not the anti Davos meetings in Porto Alegre. This is more the “I can´t stand the rigidity of Klaus Schwab Davos and I will organize my own event” Davos. This is what I call the Burning Man Davos, fun, lose and very party like.
So while WEF Davos is going on there are many events and parties that you can attend to that are not put together by WEF. A Burning Man Davos that goes on from the pizzeria accross from the Congress Center where all the techies go to the Google Party or the many private dinners hosted by the Murdochs other top participants who prefer to host their own events that attend WEF´s highly structured dinners. This is something that I have not seen happen at more flexible conferences such as my favorite conference of all times, Sun Valley, organized by Allen and Co. Sun Valley seems to offer the right combination of content and networking/fun time for people not to organize events on their own. But at Burning Man Davos everyone does their own thing freely. It is both tremendous fun and productive networking.
But as much as I like Burning Man Davos, I could not attend for personal reasons. I have 4 kids and 3 of them have health problems. It´s just bad luck. Two snow accidents, a throat infection, well things that happen to kids. They are all recovering but are not there yet. So between Burning Man Davos and my kids….well I chose my kids. Especially since I had already gone to my favorite tech event in Europe: DLD.



I recently had a chance to test 

Acabo de llegar a Klosters, un pueblito de esquiadores ubicado a 10 km de Davos donde se hospedan los invitados al World Economic Forum (WEF) que no son VIP (como yo!). Los jefes de Estado y mega empresarios se quedan en Davos. Todo en Klosters parece una película navideña: las casitas suizas con los balconcitos de madera, los bosques de pinos, la limpieza suiza, la nieve, el orden. Primer mundo 100%.