15 years in, Philly Tech Week still brings the city's tech scene together

Technical.ly

07-05-2025

2025 marks 15 years of the Philly tech ecosystem coming together for Philly Tech Week — and a lot has changed since that first scrappy conference was announced in 2010.
The 15th annual Philly Tech Week (PTW) started on Monday, kicking off over 40 tech and innovation-themed events throughout the city. Today, the celebration is presented by Comcast and hosted by 1Philadelphia, and has turned into a citywide collaborative effort. But it began under Technical.ly as a way for orgs from different sectors and sizes to get to know each other, Technical.ly cofounder and CEO, Chris Wink said.
While it'll continue to change, Wink said, the ethos of community gathering that brought innovators and technologists together from the start should remain at the heart of it. So far, it's met that goal, but what that looks like going forward will have to keep evolving to meet the needs of the participants, according to its leaders.
'Philadelphia needed the last 15 years of Philly Tech Week,' Wink said. 'I'm not sure if Philadelphia needs another 15 years of the same, but Philadelphia absolutely needs a place where its entrepreneurship, tech and innovation community comes together.'
People across sectors and throughout the region come out to engage with the ecosystem, and 2025 is no exception. Events like the Department of Commerce's Level Up Your Pitch workshop, Out in Tech Philly's PTW Mixer and Technical.ly's Builders Conference are happening throughout the city until May 10.
Technical.ly kicked it off, but PTW belongs to the entire ecosystem
Technical.ly founders, Wink, Brian James Kirk and Sean Blanda, hosted the first PTW in 2011, taking inspiration from the annual beer festival Philly Beer Week and joining the 2010s trend of cities hosting startup weeks. They found through their early reporting that traditional institutions like the Chamber of Commerce and big corporations were not connected to tech meetup groups and the startup community, Wink said.
These groups were all relevant to the ecosystem, but they weren't connected, he said. The idea was that the city would be more powerful as a collective than as individuals.
'It was more about people who liked each other, coming from very different jobs,' Wink said. 'It's not an industry at that point. It's a community.'
It wasn't until 2013 that PTW started to hit its stride. Event attendance doubled, people recognized the format, and they started to lean into the 'spectacle' of the week, Wink said. That year, Drexel University professor Frank Lee organized 'Pong on the Cira Center,' setting a world record for the largest architectural video game display.
The goal of having many different organizations host a variety of events across the city was coming to fruition and the community calendar of events was keeping existing stakeholders engaged while also bringing in new people, Wink said.
'Philly Tech Week mattered because we established the format,' Wink said. 'The idea of having a week of events related at all to this topic is ours first.'
From a wider lens, PTW puts a spotlight on the potential of Philly's tech and innovation community, Danae Mobley, executive director of 1Philadelphia and CEO of Coded By, said. The legacy of PTW is the collaboration among the community and the people who still care about coming together under a shared vision, she said.
'We've seen the evolution of [PTW],' Mobley said. 'While the people may have changed, I don't think the energy or the sentiment behind wanting Philly to succeed as a tech market has changed.'
Bringing the city together and catching the mayor's attention
Many memorable and impactful tech moments happened at PTW over its first 10 years.
Local data project OpenDataPhilly launched at the very first Philly Tech Week's opening event, providing a resource for Philadelphians to access publicly available data.
'It was a great rollout of an open data catalog for and by a community,' Robert Cheetham, founder of software company Azavea, told Technical.ly.
The following year, Mayor Michael Nutter signed an executive order to establish an Open Data Policy for the City of Philadelphia. The city's open data program went on to see a lot of progress over the last decade, but the project has lost momentum over the last few years.
PTW has also broken more than one world record, once again for the largest architectural video game display. Drexel's Lee returned in 2014 to organize games of Tetris on the Cira Center that year. This event is a favorite PTW memory for Mobley. Now that 1Philadelphia runs PTW, the memory feels like a full circle moment, she said.
'I thought that that was just so amazing, that there were people that just had that spirit of ingenuity and playfulness and fun around something that brought the city together,' she said.
1Philadelphia takes over to make PTW part of its mission
Last year, Technical.ly began the process of handing PTW off to 1Philadelphia, and the org is fully hosting this year's lineup of events.
1Philadelphia, an initiative of tech education nonprofit Coded by, launched in 2020. Coded by had always participated in PTW and the org saw how it brought the community together, according to Mobley.
It made sense to get more involved with Philly Tech Week because of 1Philadelphia's mission to bring stakeholders together and create a more equitable tech ecosystem in Philly, she said.
'Because of the work that we were doing as a convener with some of our signature events,' Mobley said. 'We really wanted to see how we could come in and support and bolster this long-standing tradition of a great innovation festival that happens in Philadelphia.'
For Technical.ly, 1Philadelphia's takeover made sense, too. Wink said he's been thinking about handing the reins to someone else since 2019, but the pivot to online celebrations for its 10th anniversary stalled the process of searching for the next leader.
Last year was a transition period. 1Philadelphia cohosted Philly Tech Week alongside Technical.ly, helping to organize the community calendar, contributing to the marketing and hosting its own events. This year, the org is ready to fully take over coordinating PTW.
As for what's next, it's up to the community that rallies around PTW each year.
'Philly Tech Week is for everyone,' Mobley said. 'It is not the ownership of one entity.'
Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.