Comment by lesdeuxmagots
1 day ago
The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.
All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.
> The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference.
In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.
I'd say this is true of almost all corporate conferences
I would strongly agree. Having been to a lot of industry conferences all over that world it's just the same.
Part of the problem is that the conference organizers open up panels to press and panellists (including me) are then very restricted on what we can say. The panel becomes a hash of corporate sound bites which no one likes.
To counter this increasingly panels are being requested to be under Chatham House by the companies paying to attend and sponsor.
Agreed. I go to many industry conferences and rarely step foot on the conference floor. It's a great way to get everyone I need to speak to in one place for a few days.
Similar thing happened to me at a surf competition at an anon place. People were flown in from everywhere, my surfboard arrived too late because the plane sucked.
But as me, everybody just gathered at the hot tub, nobody took part at the real sports event, we just fooled around and were happy to meet people from all around the world. Brazil, Hawaii, Germany, Canada, US. Really nice event. No idea if there even was a winner at the event. Maybe they did put something onto the web page, but nobody cared.
Many conferences work like that, yes.
There are even some companies that offer this style of conferences as meetings for money to vendors.
What I wonder though: How many deals are really made in these rooms? I always had the feeling that the conversion rates were rather low if not zero.
I've been told personally by the organizer of one of these conferences in the retail industry that illegal non-compete agreements and price-fixing agreements are made in the hallways. It was 10 years ago, and the whole conference existed for this reason.
This is how RSA works, too.
> It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.
People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section screeching about "OMG the C-whatever-O of X met with the C-whatever-O of Y" and it being reported on and markets moving.
There's no need to deny anything. Many of the deals made at the conference will be publicly announced after lawyers sort out the details.
Of course there's business happening and it will be publicized in the normal ways. This is completely tangential to all the business not happening and all the other sharing of information that's not set in stone enough to be creating a paper trail over.
Like you can't just schedule a conference call with a bunch of important people at your competitors for the purpose of bitching about suppliers or something. You can do that at a conference.