Nine months after we registered the GmbH, ThreeB IT stood up our own booth in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 — Arena Berlin, 11–12 December 2019, in-person event with a hybrid stream. It turned out to be the last European edition TechCrunch ever ran; Disrupt has been a San Francisco-only event since.
What Startup Alley actually was
For two days the floor of the Arena Berlin — the bus depot on the Spree that Berlin uses for everything from gigs to gaming expos — held a few hundred early-stage startups exhibiting on the same template. Per TechCrunch's official exhibitor guide, every Startup Alley booth was a 160 × 80 cm table with two chairs, a tabletop sign, power, and Wi-Fi, with an optional 2 × 8 ft banner behind it. Lead retrieval ran through the Boomset badge-scanning app, badged attendees walked the alley both days, and TechCrunch's own reporters cherry-picked startups from the floor to feature.
3,000+ attendees on-site, 200+ media outlets, the Startup Battlefield pitch competition (won that year by Spain's Scaled Robotics) — the show was the European counterpart to Disrupt San Francisco at the time.
How we did it
We did it ourselves. Not as part of a regional delegation, not under a hub umbrella — a single Münsterland software house with a booked-and-paid 160 × 80 cm table, the ThreeB IT sign on top, and two chairs we sat in for two days.
The thesis we tested was simple: can a German Mittelstand-focused .NET shop, founded nine months earlier in a town of forty thousand, stand on the same exhibit floor as the better-funded pan-European startups and walk away with serious conversations? The answer was yes.
What it left behind
Three things, all still load-bearing:
- An English-language pitch that survives contact with an American or French CTO. The exact words we use to explain ThreeB IT today were rewritten in real time at the Disrupt Berlin 2019 table. The phrasing carried into the .NET Conf 2020 sponsor interview, the Iron Software case study six years later, and the homepage you're reading now.
- Confidence that geography isn't fate. Ibbenbüren has a fibre rollout that goes back to before remote work was normal (kudos to WESt mbH on that one — see the WESt founder story). The Disrupt Berlin booth was the first time we proved publicly that the location wouldn't hold us back.
- The first cohort of contacts that fed into everything that followed — the Copernicus Hackathon, the .NET Conf sponsorships, the .NET Foundation involvement.
The end of an era
Disrupt Berlin 2019 was the last European Disrupt. TechCrunch never ran a Berlin edition again — COVID-19 hit in the months that followed and the franchise consolidated around San Francisco only. We didn't know it at the time, but we'd booked a booth at the closing chapter of TechCrunch's Europe bet. That makes it a slightly weirder thing to be able to say we exhibited there — and a more valuable thing.