Retrospective: Change Inspire - Georgia
“I’m still on my bike, trying to lose the eight pounds I gained in Tbilisi. ”
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Attendee count: 1300+
Company count: 50+
Years running: 7
Industry: General Tech (Not just Cloud Native)
Travel time: 10+ hours not including layovers (Cork —> Dublin(3) —> Istanbul(4) —> Georgia(3) —> Hotel(1))
Cost range for us to attend: 1 - 15k
Worth doing? YES
I like to travel a lot, and in the last while I've been privileged to be able to travel for work, talking at conferences, conventions, helping with partner events ranging from 50 people to 1500 people.
With Tigera, I was asked to attend a tech event in Tbilisi, Georgia called Change Inspire. I wasn't sure what to expect, we had short notice to prepare, and I found out we had a customer of our company welcoming us on stage for a shared presentation. Originally, it was prepped as a technical demo, but they moved us to the main stage. I had to scramble to redo my slides, but it was fine. I wasn't expecting to hear there was over 1300 attendees this year, so this was definitely a shock and my largest presentation to date. Scary, but exciting.
Myself and my colleague spent the time after at our table in the trade hall, talking to people interested in our tech, and sharing our information around agentic AI security as well as Kubernetes security and networking as a whole. The usual stuff.
Tbilisi itself is probably the cleanest city I have ever seen. The entire place was immaculate and clean. The presentation of the city when you drive in was almost picturesque and planned, and every single bush, tree, blade of grass looked manicured, and every storefront had fully working LED lighting, there wasn't a single lightbulb broken. Kind of absurd really, but it was awesome.
The community of technical people in the city and surrounding areas seemed massive, and I'm sure the event will continue to grow.
If only it wasn't 12+ hours of travel away.
