Data Conference Afterparties
During my last visit to San Francisco in June, to attend the Databricks and Snowflake Summits, I attended a whole bunch of afterparties. Here are some observations from those
OK writing this REALLY late. This is late September, and I found this lying in my drafts from mid-June. So I’m doing the right thing, by finishing it off and shipping it out.
Whenever you have large conferences, like the Snowflake and Databricks summits I attended in San Francisco earlier this month in June, you also have afterparties.
They are a good way for companies to market themselves. The promise of free food and drink (and most importantly, networking) means that a lot of the main conference attendees will attend these afterparties. And they can be a good occasion for the hosts to network with the guests with the hope of selling to them sometime.
Three months after I spent nearly every evening of my San Francisco trip attending one or more afterparties, here are a bunch of pertinent observations. These are the most memorable stuff, since the less pertinent observations wouldn’t have made my memory filter three months hence.
The venues can be a mixed bag. At one (good) end was MotherDuck during the Snowflake Summit, which had booked out an art gallery and its adjoining bar. Not satisfied with that, they had also blocked out the alley in front of the venue, and most of my good conversation happened there. Funnily enough, if you had picked up a drink inside, you couldn’t take it outside, and vice versa.
At the other end was a bunch of companies (who I won’t name - not that I remember now) who held an afterparty during the Databricks Data+AI Summit at what can be charitably described as an under-construction building. It was an unoccupied floor of a random building on Market Street, close to the conference venue. Food and drink had been laid out, and there was a dance floor with disco lights. It was downright creepy
Hosting an afterparty doesn’t come cheap, especially if you decide to book out an entire bar. On one day during the Databricks Data+AI Summit, there were at least three afterparties happening at one bar! One of them even had a panel discussion. It was chaotic. That said, someone I met told me “we’re just having this afterparty, this works out much cheaper than exhibiting at the main conference”
Another thing companies did to cut their hosting cost was to collaborate. You had companies at different levels of the “data stack” exhibiting at the conferences, and some sets of non-competitors came together to host parties.
The quality of an afterparty (in terms of networking opportunities) is obviously based on the number of “outsiders” (from outside the host company) who attend. A bunch of parties that I attended pretty much seemed to be "office parties” for the host companies where others were invited. I didn’t stay long at any of those.
Some of these parties had loud music, whose point I don’t understand, given that the point of the parties is selling and networking. As I mentioned above, some even had dance floors.
At most parties I didn’t bother with the food. Eating and networking don’t go very well hand in hand (no pun intended). Most days I fuelled up before going for these parties. It could mean I could talk freely without bothering to nourish myself.
Most parties had customized cocktail menus, with the customized names being bad puns on the names of the hosting company (you can imagine a bunch of “duck-based” names at the MotherDuck party, for example. I’m too old to have cocktails so I gave them all a wide berth. It helps that California, in general, has good beer. On days when I didn’t want to drink, I just asked for sparkling water with ice.
On most days there would be more than one afterparty, so it was a guessing game in terms of which would provide the most RoI (in terms of people you could meet). There were days when I hopped (literally - I did more than 20000 steps each day in those two weeks) between 3-4 parties.
You had to sign up in advance to go to these parties. Most of them needed approval. Some of them were first come first serve (in terms of online signups for the party). If you were too late, you couldn’t go. There was one where I got accepted, but when I showed up, someone said “sorry we have too many registrations so we’re restricting entry to our existing customers”.
Parties are useful for “triangle marketing” - you run into the same people again and again, and that gives you opportunity for a conversation.
It makes sense to have the LinkedIn app. When you want to connect with someone, you can just flash your QR code from your app and let them scan you. That way, they send you an invite to connect, and you can just accept. At an earlier networking event in SF in February, I hadn’t got the app, and so I ended up being the person scanning, and some of the connection requests I sent didn’t go through.
At all these parties you have a bunch of people who land up just for the free food and drink. Quickly you figure out how to avoid those
Ok that’s a LOT of pertinent observations about something that happened over three months ago. So I’ll stop here.
This sounds like my idea of hell