As well as Cosgrave, Wednesday's inauguration was attended by the PT chairman, Paulo Neves, and Portugal's secretary of state for industry, João Vasconcelos.

The office is the Irish organisation's first outside Ireland, where it was founded. Paddy Cosgrave, WebSummit's president and founder, had announced its intention to set up shop in Lisbon last September, hiring "more than a dozen employees right after the 2016 event". At the time, the chosen premises was thought to be across town in a 'creative hub' in Beato.

Instead, WebSummit has opted to join forces with PT, which provided internet for the event last year. Wednesday's ceremony also marked the opening of that company's new dedicated space for startups, with space for 100 people. This forms part of the strategy of the Altice group, with the aim of accelerating its own innovation process, by making know-how and networking opportunities available to innovative new partners.

WebSummit itself was founded in 2010 by Cosgrave, Daire Hickey e David Kelly, a WebSummit, and has gone from this team of three to a permanent structure with more than 150 employees.

Last year's event - held in Lisbon for the first of at least five years, if all goes well - brought some 53,000 participants from 166 countries, including 15,000 companies, 7,000 chief executives and 700 investors.

In an interview with Lusa, Cosgrave said that WebSummit expects to increase the number of attendees this year, making use of a larger space, but not to 80,000 as he predicted at the end of last year's event.

"I think the mission should be not how do we get to a million attendees, but how to we make people a million times happier, with a better experience," he said. "I think 60,000 is the perfect number."

This was in part, he said, the reason for having increased prices.

This year's WebSummit, scheduled to take place from 6 to 9 November, will be "taken to the next level," Cosgrave promised.

"There will be a lot more politicians, scientists, academics coming together to have serious discussions about these things that are changing our world, that are creating a huge amount of uncertainty," he said.

Cosgrave also held out the possibility of his organisation holding other events in the Azores and other parts of Portugal, citing how impressed he was during a two-and-a-half-day visit to the archipelago and other trips he and his team had made around the country. He described the "fantastic cities" he had seen, some of which he found to be "very old" and "very cool" and with a strong "creative spirit".