Al Gore opened it. n8n, GetYourGuide, ResearchGate, and the partners of Khosla, Lightspeed, Accel and General Catalyst filled the room. Here's what it actually takes to produce a flagship event at that level and how fast it can be done.
Most conferences of this scale are planned for a year. BAD1 was conceived, built, and delivered in under 90 days.
On June 12, 2026, 500 hand-selected people; 200 of Europe's best founders, 200 top-tier investors, and 100 builders under 25 came to The Delta in Berlin for a single day of honest conversation about whether Europe is, in fact, cooked. (The room concluded it isn't.) Al Gore gave the opening remarks. Julian Teicke interviewed Ijad Madisch on whether ResearchGate is secretly Europe's hottest AI company. Founders from Enpal, SumUp, SAP Signavio and GetYourGuide traded notes on building generational companies from this continent. The day ran from a 9am atrium check-in to a flying dinner and DJ on the rooftop, into the FOMO afterparty.
It was the flagship event of Berlin auf die Eins, a movement to make Berlin a magnet for the next generation of builders and it was produced end-to-end at our campus, by our team, on a 90-day clock.
Here's what that timeline really demands.
A venue that's already a production environment. The single biggest accelerator is not having to build a venue from scratch. The Delta is a multi-storey creative campus with an industrial atrium that seats hundreds, a permanent event stage, a winter garden, and a rooftop with a pool and panoramic views across Berlin. Stage, power, AV, breakout space, catering flow, and an evening venue all live under one roof. A conference that would normally require stitching together three suppliers and a convention hall happened in one building.
One team that owns the whole thing. Speakers, run-of-show, partner logistics, catering, AV, photography, guest flow, and the after-party were coordinated by a single production team; not a chain of external vendors emailing each other. When the timeline is 90 days, every handoff you remove is a day you save.
Curation over volume. Every one of the 500 seats was chosen by hand. That's the harder path, but it's why the room worked: the right founders next to the right investors, with conversations that actually mattered. Production at this level isn't about filling a space but it's about designing who's in it.
Partners who wanted to be in the room. AWS, PwC, Berliner Sparkasse, Dentsu, Siemens, Axel Springer and SAP came on as partners because the audience was undeniable. A well-produced event is also a commercial asset; the room sells itself to sponsors.
BAD1 is the clearest proof of what our event capability can do under pressure. But it's the same engine behind every gathering we run from 50-person founder dinners to multi-day hackathons.
If you're planning something that needs to feel inevitable and you don't have a year to plan it; that's exactly the brief we're built for.
Planning something that deserves a room like this? Host it at The Delta
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Written by Elisabeth Sabeditsch
Partner
