I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas go to be funded and then die). Then there are the sharks, cruising around looking for easy pickings.

My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."

> I've been inside the conference

Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.

Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.

All the action at PSB happens in the hot tub discussions. I didn't spend any time in them, as I was too junior and didn't know the right people, but PSB did get me some good post doc options!

Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.

(Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).

Ok, sure, but were you also involved in dosing the creature that lives under the Westin St Francis?

For some reason this rings a bell - is there an article/blog/post/message in a bottle about Lynn Conway at that conference (and how it’s not really conference; lol?).