Giuliana Bueno, James Murray & Ricardo Correia
Business & Marketing Team
Business & Strategy
Industry & Trends
Reading time: 5 minutes
The Portuguese startup ecosystem has an obvious centre of gravity in Lisbon. But the most interesting events we attended this year happened elsewhere. SIM Conference 2026, in Porto, was one of them. What stayed with us wasn't the numbers. It was what those numbers left unexplained.
Key Takeaways
- The healthiest ecosystems don't concentrate in a single geography. Decentralising is a sign of maturity.
- Most products we see struggle don't struggle for lack of solution. They struggle from too much of it.
- The value of an event like SIM is measured by the conversations that continue after it ends, not the ones that happen inside it.
- The networks, platforms, and organisations sustaining the ecosystem do less visible work than founders and investors. That work is what decides whether an ecosystem grows or stalls.
- Being present at an event without a commercial agenda is rare, and almost always more productive than the opposite.
Why leaving Lisbon matters
SIM 2026 brought over 4,000 people, 450 startups, 270 investors, and 130 speakers to Alfândega do Porto. The numbers matter.
SIM happens in Porto. In the Portuguese context, that's still a choice.
The concentration of events, capital, and attention in Lisbon has created a recognisable pattern. If you want to be in the ecosystem, you go to Lisbon. If you're outside Lisbon, you either travel or disappear from the conversation. This is an observation about the cost of having a single centre of gravity. The ecosystems we admire abroad don't work this way. Berlin coexists with Munich. Amsterdam with Eindhoven. And when we look at Portugal, we know serious work is being done in Porto, Aveiro, Braga, and Coimbra. That work has a harder time becoming visible.
SIM, now in its third edition, is changing this concretely. With presence rather than with a manifesto. And you can feel it. The organisation has improved, conversations are denser, and more people travel to Porto each year because they know they'll meet people they don't run into the rest of the year.
The most interesting part wasn't the logistics. It was what we heard inside.
Fall in love with the problem, not the solution
Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze, took the stage on a Friday afternoon with sunshine outside and the Douro river right there. He pulled off something unlikely at that hour. He held a packed room in complete silence.
His argument is the title of his book: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution. Said live, the idea carries a different weight than when you read it. Levine isn't talking about product methodology. He's talking about a specific cognitive trap. The trap of teams that fall in love with the technical elegance of what they've built and stop asking whether it actually solves anyone's problem.
This trap is familiar. At Untile, we see it often in projects that reach us. Clients aren't naive. Most product teams work under pressure to ship, and shipping often means adding. More features, more integrations, more layers. The question Levine keeps repeating goes the other way. What can be removed without the problem stopping being solved?
It's an uncomfortable question because it forces every part of the product to justify itself by the value it delivers, rather than by the effort it took to build. It's the right question. It separates products that scale from products that simply grow in complexity.
Levine summarised it in one line: fall in love with your user's pain, your own idea. A blunt version of the advice. An accurate one.
What we saw when we stopped looking only at the startups
The obvious way to read an event like SIM is to look at the startups. We did that in earlier editions, and it still makes sense. There were founders building practical things in sectors from healthcare to real estate, and those conversations were among the most valuable of the two days.
This year we also looked at everything around them. That surrounding layer is more important than it appears.
The networks nobodys sees
The Portuguese ecosystem is full of organisations doing the work that doesn't make headlines. Unicorn Factory Lisboa, UPTEC, Startup Portugal, PCI in Aveiro. Corporate programmes like Vodafone Business, which is actively inside the ecosystem rather than observing it from a distance. Independent platforms like Equito.io trying to solve concrete matching problems between founders, talent, and opportunities.
None of this is glamorous. This is the fabric that decides whether a founder in Aveiro has access to the same contacts as a founder in Lisbon. Whether a startup in Braga can find senior talent. Whether an early-stage project survives its first two years.
The difference between a healthy ecosystem and a concentrated one lives here. Far from the events where capital gets announced.
The value of conversations without an agenda
The second observation is simpler and just as important. The best moments at SIM weren't planned. They were the corridors. The coffee breaks. The reunions with people we hadn't seen in months. The conversations with founders who weren't pitching because both of us were just getting some air between panels.
There's a pattern worth naming in these events. The more commercial the presence, the thinner the conversation. People who were there selling sold. People who were there to learn or share walked away with what matters.
What we're taking into next year
We left SIM 2026 with a few reinforced convictions and one in development.
The reinforced ones. Ecosystems are built outside the obvious centres. Winning products know what they don't do. The less visible work, the networks, the platforms, the corporate programmes with real presence, is what holds everything else together.
The one we're still developing is more practical. Events like SIM would benefit from more parallel spaces. Small dinners, themed meetups, moments where the conversation can go deep without the clock of the official programme. It's something we're thinking of being part of next year, as participants who want to contribute to making the ecosystem run better.
SIM confirmed something simple about the Portuguese ecosystem. It's more mature than it appears from the outside and more distributed than the official narrative suggests. The best of the year happened outside the bubble. It's worth paying attention to what's happening there.