Steve O'Grady
Appearances
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah, I think conferences today are very different. To the point where I'm at the extreme end of the spectrum at this point where you know, to your point, you know, sort of back in the day, you know, you'd go to a conference, you know, at least for most people, you know, analyst lasso.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
But for most people, they go to a conference, you know, to watch talks, you know, that aren't recorded, you can only get them there and so on. You know, these days, everything's recorded, right? You know, for the most part. And so my, sort of my, probably skipping ahead here, but like, you know, the way that I look at it at this point is that,
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I don't ever want to go to a conference at this point and see a talk. That's not why I'm there. I could do that at home. The only reason for me to travel and be at an event and spend time away from family and everything else is really to spend time meeting with people face-to-face because that's the part that I can't duplicate. It's the only reason I'm going to these events.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
That's the tough thing. Conferences have not sort of transition and a lot of them, uh, and many of them won't, right. You know, you have an event like reinvent, you have hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of presentations. People are going for that, you know, that that's fine.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Um, but you know, I think it's, it's, you know, again, like if the, if the primary, I don't know if, if, if what you're going to a conference to consume is, um, you know, straight content and presentations and so on. Like, I just don't see the point of, you know, getting on a plane to do that. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
you know you know because it's in in many cases you know it used to be okay you can interact with the speaker afterwards but that's you know such a zoo at this point right um you know that you're not probably going to get facetime with the person who's giving the presentation in most cases so yeah anyway and so yeah i'm i'm sort of at one extreme end of the spectrum because sort of as analysts you know for what we're doing is very different but um
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah. I mean, even, even if I was there for the real negative talks, man, probably.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
That seems sort of roughly in that ballpark, yeah. Although, dating us is probably not a great thing.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You're talking to somebody who tries desperately to conceal exactly how old his company is. We try to pretend that there is no birthday.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
We just don't like to talk about how old it is. It doesn't necessarily need to be younger. So we just pretend that that doesn't exist.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah, Monctoberfest was first. And then, so we get through the first Monctoberfest. We never run an event. I ended up sleeping for something like
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
14 hours after the event or something because we didn't staff it right we had no idea what we were doing and uh and then james gets up on the on the stage uh at the end of the first one i'm just like thankful i survived and he's like and we're doing monkey graw and it's gonna be like in a month two months or whatever it was you're like what and i was like that's that's all i like you could do that but i'm gonna have no part of that so um so yeah that's my total stress was first
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah. So, so we wanted to do basically two things. We, we have been fortunate enough, you know, we've been doing this over one, we've been doing it and we've gotten to know some really cool people doing interesting work from lots of different disciplines. Right. And it was okay.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You know, what, what if we brought them together and put an emphasis like, yes, we have talks and the talks are great and whatever, but what if we just brought them together and optimized our conference for the hallway track? Yeah. So that was our sort of our theory. And we needed to obviously figure out what our content strategy was.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And so we ended up doing, you know, I talked to, I don't know, probably two dozen people, you know, and, you know, we sort of came up with some ideas. I don't know. The way we describe it now is not necessarily the language we use at the time, but it's basically the same principle, which is... I talk to people like, hey, I'm going to come in and give a talk on Python internals.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
It's like, hey, man, there's an event for that. We don't need another... Um, and more importantly, like our, our audience is very diverse and people are, you might have sort of one portion of the audience, which is super into that. And, you know, another portion of the audience, which is totally relevant. So we try to do is basically find things that are, uh, horizontal.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
In other words, they, they touch on, you know, uh, some, or it's certainly a majority of the audience, but, um, ideally, you know, all of them in some form or fashion. And most importantly, they just don't have a home at other events. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So, you know, this past Octoberfest, for example, there's a great guy from Microsoft, David Smith, and he and his partner, Jay, have been coming to the event for years. And sadly, Jay died. And so David pinged me and was like, hey.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
you know, could we have like a, you know, for developers and other technologies, could we have a talk that's about the practical experience of grief, like how this works? And that's not a talk that you're, you're not going to see that at reinvent.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You're not going to see that somewhere else, but you know, those are the kinds of things where if we think it's important, you know, for the people are in orbit, to have the opportunity to hear messages like that. Some of them are gutting. I know Rachel's listening. We had Kelly, not Kelly, Kellyanne, Kelly Sturman, I believe, gave a talk on his son's experience with Instagram and social media.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Oh, God. Oh yeah. That was intense. And you know, so what we're trying to do, like I said, some of them are lighthearted. Some of them are, are, um, you know, really potentially traumatic, but what we're trying to do with the event is create a home. Like I said, just two things like optimize for the hallway track and then have people think about the world around them. What are they building?
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
How are they building? Why are they building it? Um, and sort of, what does that look like? And so, um, When people propose things, the heuristic is actually really simple because, in other words, I can look at it very quickly and say, all right, if this has a home at another event, it's not a good talk for us. It doesn't mean it's a bad talk.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
We turn down lots of things that would be great talks, but they have homes elsewhere, and that's not what we're trying to put together.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I'll give you an example. One of the reasons that I miss OSCON was that it was the one event for many years where people from all sorts of walks of open source life would get together in one place at one time. And I tell the story endlessly internally. But there was one year I was there for three days, I think it was, and I had 30 minutes unaccounted for the entire three days.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And I didn't go to one talk. All it was was meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, and or bumping into people in the hall. And so there are some events which are... very good for that. The Portland Convention Center, Portland, Oregon, was much smaller and easier to navigate. You can't do that at reInvent. It's too big.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
In other words, you hit a certain point and the hallway track is not a thing because it's not navigable. But...
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
i hadn't really thought about that by the portland convention center in portland or portland oregon it is kind of like it's a very large hallway actually you could basically you could walk in there and grab a table outside the starbucks and yeah every 10 seconds or so like somebody would walk by it's like oh hey i haven't caught up with him you know or her in a while It's like, great.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You can sit down and catch up, and then other people would stop by and say, I've seen them in a while. That's the type of experience for me. Like I said, that's what I get on planes for. You cannot duplicate, in my view. If you can, if somebody's got a way to do that, please let me know.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Well, and so a perfect example is that, so one year, OSCON went down to Austin. Yeah, I was going to say. It was at the Austin Convention Center. Disaster. Totally, totally broke, you know, the hallway track because that place, you know, for people who haven't been there, it's like a maze. It's like Harry Potter. You get on a fucking escalator, you end up like three floors away.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You're like, wait, what? Like, How does that, I'm trying to get to, anyway. So that's the thing is, is that some of it is the design and size and scope of the conference, but some of it is the event or the event venue rather. And like I said, the bigger and more complicated they get, you know, the sort of more unwieldy and frankly impossible, you know, the hallway track gets.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah, you know, and that's a trade-off. And, you know, sort of, as you know, we've sort of thought about, you know, we used to release all the tickets, you know, to sort of prior attendees and or people signed up for the list. We cut that in half. So we only release half ahead of the time.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So then people who've never been have, you know, sort of an opportunity to score half the tickets, but half the tickets at the event is, you know, under 200 tickets, right? You know, we're typically between 150 and... you know, 200 people at the event. So, you know, it's limited.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And that is, you know, unfortunately, you know, cause you know, sort of very much like Theo, we've had people many, many times over the years saying this is great. And, you know, can we scale it up and so on? And we sort of looked at it after the first year or two, we're just like, We can't, we just can't scale the event to the way that we want. Could get a little bigger, sure.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
But again, you begin to add people and it breaks down because the reason that we kept it the size that we did, this was, this floored me. So after the first one that we, the first Mocktoberfest in 2011, excuse me, Um, we capped, we intentionally capped attendance at a hundred people because we're like, we've never run an event. It's probably going to be a disaster.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So when it fails, let's keep the blast radius small. So, um, we had a hundred people and people that seem to have pretty good time. And, uh, I had a bunch of people come up to me after and say, I met more people at this event than any other event I've ever been to of any size. Um, And I was sitting there, I was like, I can't, that doesn't work. We're too small.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
There's literally 100 people in the room. But it turns out if you take 100 people and you stick them in the same room, single track, and it's a very navigable space, they end up having conversations. It doesn't hurt that we serve beer at lunch, which tends to free people up. But that's a fundamentally different approach. And we cannot scale that to...
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
three, four, five, you know, 600 people, um, or up. It's just, it's not, you know, it would break fundamentally the word, you know, sort of what we value about the event itself.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Um, yeah, yeah. I went to two or three of them, I think. Um, but yeah, I was late to that party.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
But again, that's part of it. Right. So in other words, you know, sort of the difference there, because again, we've had people ask us like, Hey, can you, you know, could you move this out to San Francisco? Can you do it? So the answer is sure. I mean, we could, but part of the part, part of the opportunity is, is that if you, if you are in Portland and, Right.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Particularly if you're coming from the West Coast, like you really have to want to be there. And so, you know, if we ran it in sort of downtown San Francisco, we'd have people, you know, show up. And this is sort of not to cast a burden, but people would show up just because they could. Right. Not because they're necessarily invested in the event.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
That was one of my favorite experiences where... Somebody asked in the room, it's like, okay, who has basically written sort of low-level internals for hardware? And every goddamn hand goes up to the room, except I'm looking around like, yeah, man, I don't do that. No, I was not very good at this. So one of these things is very much not like the other.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Do we have to talk about this? Well, what I'll say is that I've certainly learned from organizing a conference. Because 100%, when people come up to you with feedback during the event, you're like, not now, man. Just not now. Wait, I'm happy to hear it after the event. So I will say, in my defense, that is a much more important thing.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You know, like I'm in favor because, again, you know, it really just depends on sort of what, you know, we use the, you know, Christensen notion of jobs to be done a lot at Redmonk. And, you know, if the job that you're trying to try to sort of tackle is, hey, I want to get, you know, essentially content and messaging and lessons learned and so on out.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Um, you know, virtual events, a great way to do that. Right. And, you know, I can say like, so I, I walk a lot for, uh, just for, for health and so on reasons. And one of the, one of the things I do all the time is. okay, you know, I don't have time necessarily sit down and watch this talk, but I will pull them down and just listen to them while I'm walking around. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And, um, you know, so it's, it's a great way of sort of, um, you know, sort of maximizing, you know, sort of the availability. Um, now again, it's all trade-offs, like it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but you know, I'm, I'm, you know, like, I think if it's, For me, it's either sort of online, small and in-person, or huge.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And those are the types of events at this point, at least for me, speaking just for myself. Those are the ones that I'm likeliest to attend. Right.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing I talked to the organizer to, you know, sort of a bunch of events that were kind of in the mid sort of size. So, you know, a thousand North, a thousand people sort of less than, three or four, and she was saying it's almost impossible to pull them off. Because the selling part, in terms of what you get out of it, small intimate conferences are easy to understand.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
very very large events like reinvent you know there's everybody uh is sort of from the industry is there so you get that but it's a small like thousand people two thousand people three thousand people um you know there are definitely events that pull that off but i think it's much harder um you know these days because it's it's travel budgets are tight um you know a lot of you know once you have the option of like hey these things are gonna be online anyway
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
right? You know, that, that can be a tough sell, you know, for people to get travel budget to go to events. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, the burnout is a real thing. Um, the thing that's helped the most is just that, um, you know, we've, we've brought on people to sort of offload, um,
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
in a bunch of the heavy lifting um so i'm not dealing you know so like i said that first year i did like way too much of it and slept for 14 hours or whatever um and these days you know there's entire portions of it where people will come up and say hey this was great and whatever i'm like i had no idea that was a thing literally nothing to do with it so yeah you try to offload as much as you can but you know there's still pieces that are just sort of highly
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I just take a ton of time, right? So, you know, speaker selection is all me. And, you know, there's a lot of communication. There's back and forth. Like this year in particular, because of the macroeconomic, we had a ton of people who couldn't make it because they lost their job or changed jobs or whatever. And so...
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
you know, you're trying to juggle all these talks and, you know, sort of make sure that you are, um, you know, sort of hitting the marks that you want to sort of make, you know, with respect to diversity of speakers. And so, yeah, there's a, it's a lot of overhead. Um,
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And I frequently say that my favorite time of the event is like two hours in, because at that point, anything that hasn't been done yet, it just isn't going to get done. It's a lost cause. It's like, yep, we had one year where it was like, you know, I, I shouldn't say we, I forgot all the power cables. It was like, okay, we don't have power.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
But yeah, sort of organizer burnout is definitely a real thing.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah. Well, and, and sort of, we, we do the opposite almost in the sense that, I mean, we probably have one or two speakers every year who have never given a talk before. Right. And it's like, you know, maybe there'll be good, you know, sort of, maybe they'll, they'll, you know, sort of, you know, struggle, but they got to learn.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And, you know, when, when we give people that opportunity and as I've told people, you know, first time speakers before, I'm like, look, you're, you're here. We picked you because of, you know, this, this, it's important that, you know, sort of we hear whatever the subject is. Right. And, you know, we, we care about the delivery.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
We want the delivery to be as good as possible, but that, you know, for our audience in particular and that size of event and so on, that's not, that's not a priority for me. I don't, I don't really look at that.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
No, the trajectory has been better. So this morning, I couldn't talk at all. And that was not super helpful. But we'll see how long I last. The hot toddy seemed to help a little bit, although I can't taste anything at all because I smoked the inside of my mouth with some broth earlier.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
my brooks brothers yeah your brooks brothers suit yeah i had forgotten about the suits uh okay steven how about uh what was your what was your first conference oh man uh best guess is like some random ibm event um from the firm that james and i worked at prior to starting runbook um they sent us this i don't even remember what the event was but i got down there and was like
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
the hell is this like how's this work where's everything what am i doing here um so yeah it was uh you know sort of a shock to the system as it were but right because we go to so many of them now so
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
When I lived in Denver, this was years ago, I would take all my lanyards and I would hang them up right above my desk. It got to be this enormous pile, and I was like, this is just that now. I'm getting rid of all of them. The desk collapses. At this point, it's probably been... I don't know. I've been doing this for... I'm trying to think. I don't even know what the number would be.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Because we're going to half a dozen a year, at least. Been doing it for a long time. It's a big number.