Some Lessons from a 30,000 Person Conference

Hey,

Welcome back to Stay Curious — a newsletter I write once(ish) per week to riff on a few things keepin’ me curious.

On deck this week?

• a hiring story about the Uber Founder

• the magic of big conferences

• a new sauna startup you should check out

• deleting old contacts on your phone

• raising $8m of interest in 24 hours

• the rise of niche coworking studios

I’ll be honest. This last week was a whirlwind. But a good one. 

Here’s the thing:

95% of my year is spent working from my comfy home office typing on my fully charged laptop. It’s predictable. No drama. And fully removed from the chaos of the world. Great for deep work, but destroys any chance of serendipity.

5% of my year is spent working on the go - at a conference, at a friend’s place, at a coffee shop etc. Last week was one of those weeks. It’s a marathon of noise and unending stimulus.

I was at a 30,000 conference called Collision which consisted of 5+ events per day, running into CFOs of $100B brands at after parties and spotting NBA stars in speaker rooms.

Here’s some reflections I have coming out of the conference week:

1) chatting with an old C-suite member of Uber:

At one after-party, I found myself beside someone way above my pay grade.

He was on the leadership team for a dozen or so years that helped take Uber public and he had the war stories to prove it. One of them was about the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick.

He said Travis was so set on hiring him that he came after him 6 different times.

And on the 6th attempt, he shut the door, locked it and said, “we’re not gonna leave this room until we’re both happy with your new role with Uber.”

My eyebrows hit the roof.

Travis’ intensity was next level in the early days of building Uber. And I can’t help but wonder — if most early-stage founders are losing that by working purely online.

What do you think?

2) the magic of big conferences:

Big events can feel like a zoo. When I’m at them, I try to focus on 3 things to pull out the hidden gems of a big event:

• build 1 new intentional relationship per day vs 100 randos: this means you should have their text, a few fun things in common and see some chance of you 2 getting dinner or collaborating on projects in the future

• plan 1-2 mini-events within the big conference: it’s usually a founder coffee, a morning jog, a fireside chat with one of the big speakers. This helps put you in the driver seat vs just being a consumer

• get to know the event organizers, staff, and speakers: they hold the keys to the kingdom. Heck, the built the dam event. If you can get to know them or ask what they recommend you spend time doing, you skip all the noise that the rest of the attendees hear about

3) a new coworking space/sauna concept

A friend of mine named Presh, used to work with Jason Calicanis (from the All In Podcast) but just left to start his own thing.

I was pumped and had to see him in person.

We got to hang out with him at his coworking studio (that he spun up with a few X shopify staff) and the coolest part of the hangout was that he built a sauna/cold plunge experience on the back side.

If you’re in Toronto would highly recommend swinging by 535 or drop me a note and I’ll intro you to Presh

4) curating your contacts

There’s a new little hack I’ve been doing while I commute. If you’re curious like me, you’ll love it. It works like this:

• pick a letter in your phone, say it’s “S”

• go through all the names/contacts you have under S (sam, sarah, sasha etc)

• you’ll likely notice university friends, x colleagues, family friends. send 10 of them/day a text to check in how they’re doing in life/work. Just say hello. Be friendly. No one does it and it will blow their mind

• the contacts you don’t wanna message, delete - as you’re never gonna message them and you obviously don’t wanna stay in touch

• the ones that don’t text you back, delete

• the ones that text you back and you pick things up as if nothing happened, keep in your contacts list and edit their info in the notes tab to add any updates you learned (city they live in, spouse name, kids name, new venture they’re working on)

• Then in a year’s time when you’ve gone through everyone, you can just play contact roulette at random and text/call any of your close contacts to catch up during your next uber ride etc

it’ll help you stay in touch 100x better with old contacts and will be a neat way to build surface area luck into your relationships

5) raising $8m of interest in 24 hours

Yesterday I helped QB an event that drummed up $8m of investor interest and 200 email intros in 1 hour.

It was pretty cool. But it did take a ton of work to architect.

Here’s the video recording and startups that pitched if you’re curious.

We have our next one coming up July 18th if you wanna save a seat.

What was your favourite riff from the newsletter?

Reply to let me know.

Also, if you liked today’s deep dive, forward it to a friend.

Stay curious,

Joel

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