Conferences, VC’ing, hot topics this morning

January 29, 2006 By

I start up Memeorandum/Tech and see that VC’ing is causing a lot of conversations to start, so is Jeff Jarvis’ comments about the inadequacies of the conference model.

Now, I used to be a conference schmuck. Er, planner. And I’m involved with Mix06‘s implementation and promotion.

First, about costs of conferences. Jeff has his economics way wrong. Turns out that if you wanna do a 40 person conference you can do it for free. I was at one yesterday (the Entrepreneurs 27 event was free for everyone — someone even donated a few snacks. Both presenters and attendance was free. Awesome, right?)

If you wanna do a 400 attendee conference you can do it pretty inexpensively. Gnomedex was done for about $100 a person for years. Many other 200 to 400 attendee conferences are low-cost.

But, wanna do a 1,000 attendee conference? Costs per attendee start going up exponentially.

Why?

Because there aren’t many places in the world that you can hold a 1,000 attendee conference. Even in San Francisco there are only a handful of places that can do that (I know, our VBITS conference started at the Marriott by the airport, moved to the Hyatt, then to the Marriott downtown, and now it’s being held at the Moscone Convention Center.

Now, do you have any clue how much we paid for a hotdog lunch? How about around $30 per attendee. How much for a Coke? $5. How much for an urn of coffee? $1,000.

These were not negotiable.

Oh, and you had to guarantee you’d sell a certain number of hotel rooms. Don’t sell those rooms out? You might be in the hole for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Everyone keys in on the successful 2,000 conference events. But you don’t remember the baths we took on conferences that we had to cancel.

Oh, and you can just rent a normal projector for a 200 person event. But remember at the PDC where we had thousands of attendees? We had 32 projectors, each of which cost more than $120,000 (Dylan has photo and info here on those). You don’t just rent these at your local Best Buy.

Not to mention about promotion. Even at Mix we’ve already spent quite a bit of money on that. Ads in Wired Magazine aren’t free. Getting an audience is tough work and doesn’t happen by accident.

If you make money at conferences it’s really rare. At Fawcette the conference business did make a bit of money over the years and when that happened it subsidized other things like magazine editorial (without a magazine Fawcette would probably have never sold out a conference in the first place).

Now, onto editorial.

Even at Mix we’re trying to put into play a lot of the things Dave Winer pioneered with the BloggerCons. But, holding a conversation with 200 people in a University setting is a whole lot different than holding a conversation with 2,000 people in a Las Vegas conference venue. It’s not going to be easy to get audience participation and that’s even if everyone brings a laptop and joins in the various chat rooms and blog networks that we put into play.

Regarding content, I don’t like panel discussions either. They always sound better when you’re planning a conference than they actually turn out. Why? Because it’s hard to pitch a real idea out to the audience and really chew on it for a while. I watched Gary Flake give a talk to search champs. He setup the idea, pitched the idea, then explained it in the course of an hour. It was wonderful.

But, if we had a panel on “live labs” it would have sucked. Why? Cause getting five people to work on an idea just wouldn’t have worked.

Panels can be entertaining, though, if you have something where people disagree about. Then you might be entertained and you might learn something. Might.

Anyway, back to the point. What we need to do is figure out how to keep event size at about 400 people. If we do that, then we’ll be able to keep the economics at a great level per person.

++++++++++++

Back to VC’ing. Rick Segal wrote a followup to all the VC talk out there. I love Rick’s thinking and am glad he’s getting some focus on the funding part of the industry.

It’s interesting, some of the anti VC points (and anti blogging points) I’ve heard lately are “you guys have created another bubble.”

Listen, the event yesterday was with young entrepreneurs. They didn’t pay anything to be there. I didn’t pay anything to be there. There was no lockout, no exclusivity. That sure doesn’t seem like a bubble to me. The thing that’s changed is the word-of-mouth network is far more efficient. In the old days you’d never have heard about a meeting like this. Today everyone around the world was dragged into that room. I love this new world. I don’t have to attend conferences anymore to hear the best ideas or see the newest products. I do notice that eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft were there to build relationships with new businesses and see if there’s some talent there that’s hireable.

Where did the Rolling Stones come from? They didn’t just walk on stage and become popular. They started in small rooms. Er, bars. High school auditoriums. And such.

Another criticism I saw of my post yesterday? That ideas aren’t what’s needed. I hear this all the time “ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive.”

Oh, really? How many of you thought up RSS? How many of you thought up Flickr? If ideas are so cheap, where’s the new ideas? I don’t see that many being put out there. And, inside big companies I get to see idea generation at work. They simply aren’t there.

What IS cheap? People who tear down ideas. I see that all over the place. “That idea won’t work because…”

But I don’t meet many people who have consistently awesome ideas. They ARE valuable. Companies like Microsoft pay those guys big bucks for a reason. There aren’t enough of them.

Quick, tell me again how you’ll make a search engine better than Google’s. You got an idea? Write it down. If it really is a better idea it’s valuable. Yes, its value will only be exposed if that idea gets turned into an algorithm and put into a search engine. So, you do need implementation, I’m not arguing that, but Google started with an idea for a better algorithm. Let’s not forget that. People often do. To me, the idea is just as brilliant as the implementation.

Yeah, selling the idea is difficult. But, it’s not impossible. Just start a blog and explain why your idea is better than Microsoft’s or Google’s. If you can do that then let me know and we’ll figure out how to proceed.

Anyway, I’m off to travel back to Seattle today. Have a good one and keep the conversation going.

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  • Ricky

    Any “ideas deniers” here?

    Show me a success and I’ll bet you’ll find an idea in there somewhere.

    Even things like the notion of “implementing something good that someone has done before, but do it better” is a good idea.

    And sometimes, just saying something like that will get this response:

    “Do you know, that is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that, I think it might just work, if you can get people with the right kinds of experience to run it”.

  • Ricky

    Any “ideas deniers” here?

    Show me a success and I’ll bet you’ll find an idea in there somewhere.

    Even things like the notion of “implementing something good that someone has done before, but do it better” is a good idea.

    And sometimes, just saying something like that will get this response:

    “Do you know, that is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that, I think it might just work, if you can get people with the right kinds of experience to run it”.

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  • Anon Coward

    “Make a web search better than Google” is an idea. It’s easy, It’s not even innovative. How to do it may technically be “an idea” but it’s the difficult bit.

    Oh, and plenty of things are easy to think of, but the “how to make money” bit keeps a lot of people from actually turning the idea into a real product. If you don’t know how to turn your neat idea into a successful product then the idea is worthless.

    It seems that some people have worked out how to make money out of large conferences: rent stuff to suckers.

    I’ve always wondered why people think they can learn more in a 2 day “conference” than they can by just chipping in the cash to fund one guy writing a book. Really, a thousand people chipping in $200 each would keep an author living pretty well for a year while writing the book, then they can all get a free copy before it starts being sold. And it would be cheaper for them all, as well. The educational value sounds like an excuse to hide the fact that it’s all about meeting and socialising with people.

  • Anon Coward

    “Make a web search better than Google” is an idea. It’s easy, It’s not even innovative. How to do it may technically be “an idea” but it’s the difficult bit.

    Oh, and plenty of things are easy to think of, but the “how to make money” bit keeps a lot of people from actually turning the idea into a real product. If you don’t know how to turn your neat idea into a successful product then the idea is worthless.

    It seems that some people have worked out how to make money out of large conferences: rent stuff to suckers.

    I’ve always wondered why people think they can learn more in a 2 day “conference” than they can by just chipping in the cash to fund one guy writing a book. Really, a thousand people chipping in $200 each would keep an author living pretty well for a year while writing the book, then they can all get a free copy before it starts being sold. And it would be cheaper for them all, as well. The educational value sounds like an excuse to hide the fact that it’s all about meeting and socialising with people.

  • solomonrex

    But there is no value in the idea. Patents are the closest we have, but that’s no protection against copycats in China. And there’s certainly no protection on the web.

    Google succeeds because it executes. MS doesn’t execute outside it’s marketing dep’t. Google has 20% time to execute idle, experimental ideas. You guys are either greenlighted or no. The Xbox was an idea many people had, but J Allard executed. But there was no value before J Allard. Without value, there’s no point in discussing anything. Certainly not in terms of VCs. But I guess the world seems easier when your job is writing everything that pops into your head, no matter what.

    It’s like in Ocean’s 12, when they’re discussing why they were referred to as ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ instead of the ‘Benedict Job’ and the demolitions guys says, ‘Without us, it don’t leave your ‘ead’

  • solomonrex

    But there is no value in the idea. Patents are the closest we have, but that’s no protection against copycats in China. And there’s certainly no protection on the web.

    Google succeeds because it executes. MS doesn’t execute outside it’s marketing dep’t. Google has 20% time to execute idle, experimental ideas. You guys are either greenlighted or no. The Xbox was an idea many people had, but J Allard executed. But there was no value before J Allard. Without value, there’s no point in discussing anything. Certainly not in terms of VCs. But I guess the world seems easier when your job is writing everything that pops into your head, no matter what.

    It’s like in Ocean’s 12, when they’re discussing why they were referred to as ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ instead of the ‘Benedict Job’ and the demolitions guys says, ‘Without us, it don’t leave your ‘ead’

  • Christopher Coulter

    Gary, wow some great reading on your blog. Love it, esp. the Don Box post. Rare that I find a blog that doesn’t cause my blood pressure to boil over, so always a treat and a treasure.

    I was all set to tear that “patent ideas” conceptualization from limb to limb but you did it for me, and undeniably much calmer and nicer. :)

    Maybe if you stopped thinking of the world as being only two years old?

    We should be so lucky, rather try the world as 2 weeks old, which is the average attention-span level of the A-List blogger typeset-casting.

    they’re rather contradictory.

    I know (another thing I was going to point out), but these weebles wobble and don’t fall down. Logic and irony is meaningless. If cornered quit the ‘naked conversation’, and move onto the next new new thing.

  • Christopher Coulter

    Gary, wow some great reading on your blog. Love it, esp. the Don Box post. Rare that I find a blog that doesn’t cause my blood pressure to boil over, so always a treat and a treasure.

    I was all set to tear that “patent ideas” conceptualization from limb to limb but you did it for me, and undeniably much calmer and nicer. :)

    Maybe if you stopped thinking of the world as being only two years old?

    We should be so lucky, rather try the world as 2 weeks old, which is the average attention-span level of the A-List blogger typeset-casting.

    they’re rather contradictory.

    I know (another thing I was going to point out), but these weebles wobble and don’t fall down. Logic and irony is meaningless. If cornered quit the ‘naked conversation’, and move onto the next new new thing.

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  • http://www.marybranscombe.com/ Mary Branscombe

    heh ;-) Ever been to a fan convention? It’s a community that deals with these issues frequently. Don’t think costumed folk with Spock ears roaming the hall; a literary con will have 6 hours of programming a day at least. I’ve been on the committee for a 1,000 person con and I ran a 200 person con on my own, on a shoestring and the edge of a nervous breakdown. There’s a 600-1,000 person con in the UK every Easter - it usually conflicts with the equivalent size con in Minneapolis. There are plenty of 1,000-person sites in hotels even in the UK - if you have the money to hire the facilities and the attendees to fill the hotel rooms. Larger cons are difficult; in the UK the Worldcon will be around 6,000 people and there are rally only 3 sites that can take it. US Worldcons are 7,000 and up and there are ten or more regular sites, including the San Jose conference centre. Academic sites are good value but dorms are usually single rooms, so you need a hotel deal too. After that marketing is your biggest outlay. And insurance can be pricey. Many venues will have some facilities like projection; you’ll pay for the specialist stuff but you won;t need it until you get to the scale of PDC. A 20,000-person event can be a convention; there were over 30,000 people at the Oracle event in Moscone the week after PDC and the majority of them were at sessions for most of the day. But there aren’t many sites like Moscone and you need very strong planning to make something that size work.

    This all makes me think of the discussions around the PDC videos and whether they should be free for more than 6 months. Is a convention or conference a money-spinner (rarely), something that has to break even (very possible and common for fannish conventions) or something that can be a marketing loss leader because of the anciliary gains?

  • http://www.marybranscombe.com Mary Branscombe

    heh ;-) Ever been to a fan convention? It’s a community that deals with these issues frequently. Don’t think costumed folk with Spock ears roaming the hall; a literary con will have 6 hours of programming a day at least. I’ve been on the committee for a 1,000 person con and I ran a 200 person con on my own, on a shoestring and the edge of a nervous breakdown. There’s a 600-1,000 person con in the UK every Easter - it usually conflicts with the equivalent size con in Minneapolis. There are plenty of 1,000-person sites in hotels even in the UK - if you have the money to hire the facilities and the attendees to fill the hotel rooms. Larger cons are difficult; in the UK the Worldcon will be around 6,000 people and there are rally only 3 sites that can take it. US Worldcons are 7,000 and up and there are ten or more regular sites, including the San Jose conference centre. Academic sites are good value but dorms are usually single rooms, so you need a hotel deal too. After that marketing is your biggest outlay. And insurance can be pricey. Many venues will have some facilities like projection; you’ll pay for the specialist stuff but you won;t need it until you get to the scale of PDC. A 20,000-person event can be a convention; there were over 30,000 people at the Oracle event in Moscone the week after PDC and the majority of them were at sessions for most of the day. But there aren’t many sites like Moscone and you need very strong planning to make something that size work.

    This all makes me think of the discussions around the PDC videos and whether they should be free for more than 6 months. Is a convention or conference a money-spinner (rarely), something that has to break even (very possible and common for fannish conventions) or something that can be a marketing loss leader because of the anciliary gains?

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  • http://ryantate.com/ Ryan

    How serious are you about $1,000 for coffee at Moscone in SF? Is that real or an exaggeration?

  • http://ryantate.com Ryan

    How serious are you about $1,000 for coffee at Moscone in SF? Is that real or an exaggeration?

  • http://www.identitywoman.net/ Kaliya Hamlin

    Hey Scoble,
    We in the identity community are trying to figure out the venue thing too. 1st key is a place that lets you bring in outside catoring.
    We are also doing 75% open space at our next conference - so no planning for ‘sessions’ the attendees create them based on what is alive in the room that day. This is how you have a discussion with 2000 folks - not trying to have it all in one big room. You can also use process like Appreciative Inquiry where a whole room of over 5000 folks can have a meaningful conversatino ‘together’. I think we should have a conference for conference organizers to mull on options and issues faced by our crowd. Innvation is needed in this space and market needs are largely unmet.

  • http://www.identitywoman.net Kaliya Hamlin

    Hey Scoble,
    We in the identity community are trying to figure out the venue thing too. 1st key is a place that lets you bring in outside catoring.
    We are also doing 75% open space at our next conference - so no planning for ‘sessions’ the attendees create them based on what is alive in the room that day. This is how you have a discussion with 2000 folks - not trying to have it all in one big room. You can also use process like Appreciative Inquiry where a whole room of over 5000 folks can have a meaningful conversatino ‘together’. I think we should have a conference for conference organizers to mull on options and issues faced by our crowd. Innvation is needed in this space and market needs are largely unmet.

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  • http://www.ringrose.name Ian Ringrose

    A lot of Universities can host 2000+ people with little problem. They do it every day in term time after all.

    If you MUST have big keynotes, way not do them with video links between rooms that seat 1000 people each. Or even use a big church that is close to the University.

    The keynotes are never good enough to be worth the $1000 per person that they add to the cost of the event.

  • http://www.ringrose.name/ Ian Ringrose

    A lot of Universities can host 2000+ people with little problem. They do it every day in term time after all.

    If you MUST have big keynotes, way not do them with video links between rooms that seat 1000 people each. Or even use a big church that is close to the University.

    The keynotes are never good enough to be worth the $1000 per person that they add to the cost of the event.

  • None Given

    Moscone uses SMG as their caterer. You can look at some real prices here:
    https://www.cateringbysmg.com/site/do/orders/services
    You’ll have to pick an event; the second page includes prices.
    I couldn’t find a per urn price for coffee, but for 300 cup coffee service, it’s $1,650/day including an operator. They also have regular coffee at $46/gallon. $56 for Peets.
    Food is $19.50 per person for sandwiches, and doesn’t seem to include drinks or chips, so $30 per person for hot dogs sounds pretty accurate.

  • None Given

    Moscone uses SMG as their caterer. You can look at some real prices here:
    https://www.cateringbysmg.com/site/do/orders/services
    You’ll have to pick an event; the second page includes prices.
    I couldn’t find a per urn price for coffee, but for 300 cup coffee service, it’s $1,650/day including an operator. They also have regular coffee at $46/gallon. $56 for Peets.
    Food is $19.50 per person for sandwiches, and doesn’t seem to include drinks or chips, so $30 per person for hot dogs sounds pretty accurate.

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