Snowflake Summit Notes

I'm in San Francisco, attending the Snowflake and Databricks summits. Here are some random notes (primarily to myself) after the Snowflake event

I’ve been in San Francisco for the last one week. I’m here for another week before I fly back home on Friday evening.

I’m primarily here for the Snowflake (just concluded) and Databricks AI (next week) summits. This was the first time ever in life that I was attending a conference of this magnitude. Some twenty thousand people were registered, though I have no clue how many actually attended.

All I can say is that it was a sea of people and it was rather overwhelming. My company is too poor and resource constrained to afford an exhibition booth (which, after talking to some friends who exhibited, I realised, is a LOT of work), and so my plan was to go around talking to people.

With full benefit of hindsight, this was easier said than done. I had called his out in a LinkedIn post prior to the event, saying that there will be a LOT of “congestion”, and I will have a massive challenge in figuring out who to talk to.

And what I anticipated happened - the biggest takeaways for me from the conference were -

• how these conferences operate, so that I know how to approach them better next time (including if I’m putting up a booth)

• what some of the other companies in approximately my space are doing

The only meaningful conversations at the conference happened with people who I knew before and who I met at the conference.

Of course, during this week, I did meet some new interesting people, including potential customers and collaborators. However, 100% of all these people were discovered at afterparties after the conference. None at the conference itself.

I can think of a few reasons as to why this happened. This is pure speculation.

• at parties, people are more open to new conversations and talking to new people. That said, at three of the four parties I attended last week, I did notice a lot of people simply sticking to particular groups (possibly their own ingroups)

• parties are more intimate. Being in smaller spaces with a smaller number of people, you come directly face to face with someone much more often. And then you talk

• parties possibly have more curated (and self-selecting) attendance.

A couple of other orthogonal concepts related to some of my old theories.

One theory is that networks “grow exponentially” - the number of people you discover at an event is proportional to the number of people you already knew at the beginning of it. And the growth rate drops as the number of people at the party increases. And since I didn’t know that many people to begin with at the conference, my network didn’t grow by that much there.

I had written long ago about “triangle marketing” - that when you hear of something from two independent sources, you get really interested in it. And this is where I found the parties even more useful - even if I’d met someone at a party and not had a great conversation there, when we would bump into each other at the main event the next day, we would acknowledge each other and maybe stop to chat.

In that sense, if I were to do this event again (OK, I’m doing a "similar event” this week), here are some #learnings for me:

• Get to the event city early and make sure you have gotten over your jetlag. It is important that you have sufficient energy late in the evenings, when the parties happen (last week I skipped two parties because I was exhausted by the time they started)

• Conserve energy during the day, especially on the first couple of days. It is okay if you don’t do much at the conference itself then (it is also a good time to meet people outside the conference - you’ll be sitting down(!!) then), but you need to be in full form at the parties.

• Just talk to *everyone* you meet at the parties, whether you think they will be “useful” to you or not. “Lubricate” yourself adequately if that is a necessary condition for you to go chat up people. The objective of the party is to expand your network.

• Moreover, at a networking event, my experience is that people are more likely to talk to you if you are already talking to someone else (Matthew Effect!). If you are standing alone with your drink, people possibly think you are uninteresting.

As for talking to more people at the conference itself, I’m at a loss, and if you have any ideas, please put here.

Again, prior to the Databricks event, I’ve reached out to others who I know will be there (thanks to the event app), asking if we can meet. The good thing (so far) is that more people have responded positively than they did for Snowflake (both are still small numbers).

What else can I do, given that my brand is not already built?