All at one time

What to do at a corporate conference.

Look once more, just around the riverbend.

I used to think that professional conferences were for learning, then I thought they were for networking, and then I thought they were for nothing at all.

I mean, they should be educational. Most conferences are centered around a program of dozens of talks by industry experts and luminaries, who condense the most important lessons of their lives into a twenty-minute sizzle reel. They’re Bohr with five key takeaways about the atom, Planck with a PowerPoint on quantum theory, and Einstein explaining general relativity with dank memes, all in the morning session before lunch.¹ It’s a parade of giants, offering their shoulders for us to stand on. We should probably walk away a lot smarter than we started.

And yet, bizarrely, we usually don’t, not really. For as much experience as there is behind most conference talks, we typically leave them leave with a few forgettable notes and no lasting wisdom. Nearly every talk starts with hard-earned lessons learned; more often than not, we still make the same mistakes. Nearly every talk ends with actionable advice; we rarely action it.² Instead, most talks are treated as a mutually beneficial charade: The presenters aren’t there to teach, but to be recognized and celebrated; the audience isn’t there to become enlightened, but to feel enlightened. The presenter gets their fawning audience, the audience gets their cosmetic education, and everyone goes home feeling good about themselves.³

Seasoned conference veterans will say all of this is obvious. Conferences aren’t about learning; they’re about networking. They’re a three-day annual MBA: We don’t attend them for the classes, but for the break from the office grind, for the LinkedIn connections, and for the parties. 

But after a handful of conferences, it’s easy to sour on the parties too. The social events of every conference follow the same rhythm: Happy hour in the vendor hall. A sponsored dinner; cocktails at six, with a seated meal at seven; space is limited so please RSVP early. The after-party goes from 8:30 pm until late. The bar will be packed; everyone will be wearing backpacks; the barback will be struggling to wind their way through a packed bar full of backpacks. 

The events themselves also all rhyme. A dinner will be hosted at some place called barn&barley, or The Farmer’s Daughter, or Finch. The person you wanted to see won’t be there this year. The person you wanted to avoid will be standing between you and the bar. Please take your seats; dinner will be served shortly. A welcome toast; a reminder that there is no agenda, no sales pitch; this is just about having good conversations with good friends. We’re so glad you could make it. Dinner will start with burrata and seasonal vegetables. Dinner will be family style. Dinner will be a barrage of offensively under-seasoned farm-to-table classics: a sage ravioli; seared salmon served over a bed of greens; bavette steak. Dinner will be plausibly healthy—Brussels sprouts, carrots with a balsamic demi-glace, a grilled pork tenderloin with a red wine jus. Dinner will keep coming, one relentless plate after the other, enough food to serve the 40 attendees plus 40 more. Unless you’re a vegetarian; for vegetarians, dinner will be cheese noodles; spring greens and olive oil; a glass of ice water; a raw potato. 

Everyone will be full. The steak is half eaten; at least one whole chicken will be completely untouched. Tea? Espresso? Another glass of the white? Dessert this evening will be a blueberry cheesecake and our house compote; it will be a pistachio ice cream, with a pistachio crumble; it will be a little jar of chocolate goo, topped with vanilla goo. Nobody will be hungry, but the twenty desserts will come anyway, followed by forty small spoons. 

Thirty-nine people have trickled out. Alan is still here. Alan wants a little more red. Alan is from the UK; Alan has two kids; Alan is finally away from his two kids; Alan won’t leave. It is just the hosts, Alan, and several plates of pistachio ice cream, melting into the tablecloth. Alan is kind of drunk; Alan didn’t drive, did he? Alan is finally calling an Uber. 

It’s novel at first; then, merely fun. And eventually, every dinner becomes the same miasmic blend of new American cuisine and late-stage capitalism: Soft selling, done with a signature old-fashioned; introductions and icebreaker questions and bad jokes that elicit that polite office laugher—the golf clap for corporate comedians—over a little gem salad; LinkedIn QR codes, shared with with a slice of flourless chocolate cake.

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It’s easy to become a cynic about the entire thing. It's easy to sleepwalk through conferences, to go through the motions and say they’re all mostly meaningless, and to shoot spitballs on Substack and social media. Pessimism is cool these days.

I think that's a mistake. Sure, there are perfunctory rituals at every conference; there are boring talks and off-the-shelf happy hours. But among them—and in many ways, because of them—there is something deeply useful. You just have to pay close attention to see it. 

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Tim Urban reminds us that the hallowed ground of our lives is not the trail behind us, but the open field in front of us:

This maze of opportunity is both freeing—there is so much we could do; there is so much possibility out there—and paralyzing. Given the splintering timelines in front of us, how can we choose which one to pursue? How do we order from an endlessly scrolling menu? How do we navigate through an eternal fractal of tributaries, when we can’t even see what’s around one riverbend?

By going to conferences. For all of their nihilistic ills—the thinly-veiled sales pitches, the repetitive dinners, the performative enthusiasm—professional conferences have at least one profound virtue: They can give us a glimpse into our own future. 

Because, by the end of it all, most of our lives and careers won’t be that unique; we will do something, in rough measure, that someone else has already done. Whether we mean to or not, we are all following in someone’s footsteps. And if we sail with the current of our present careers; if we take the promotions that we’re offered; if we apply to the jobs for which we’re comfortably qualified; if we respond to the recruiters who email us; if we stay in this arena; if we let our lives bounce like the puck on a Plinko board, moving from one adjacency to the next and never jumping to some distant discontinuity—if we live our professional lives like that, the person who we’re following—and more pointedly, the person who we’re becoming—isn’t just out there, somewhere in the world. They’re in here, among us, at this conference.

In other words, conferences aren’t just our professional connections and friends, all in one place; they’re also our parallel lives, all at one time. They are the potential destinations of the mazes that are in front of us. The 40 people at the vendor dinner, the 200 people at happy hour, the 1,000 attendees in the audience of the keynote, the single person on stage presenting the keynote—for better or for worse, these are our options. 

There will be people who became managers; people who become executives; people who became CEOs. There will be startup founders, venture capitalists, independent consultants, “fractional CXOs,” “serial entrepreneurs,” and “LinkedIn Top Voices.” There will be people who became junior executives, prioritized their professional ambition, and are rich and recently divorced. There will be people who became middle managers, prioritized their life outside of work, and spend every evening with their kids.⁴ There will be people who had one more startup in them; people who went back into school; people who returned to Apple after trying to build a startup studio. There will be people who are on their tenth job and people who’ve been at Microsoft for 30 years. There will be lifelong marketers, career academics, and burned-out founders. There will be engineers turned product managers; analysts turned data engineers; baristas turned sales VPs; MBAs turned CEOs; CEOs turned baristas.⁵ 

Who are you drawn to? Who are you jealous of; whose shoes would you be proud to walk in in ten years? Are you inspired by the former marketing VP who took a pay cut to become a PM, and is now a chief product officer? Are you enchanted by the life of an engineer working on open source projects inside of Google? Do you envy the woman who works at LVMH, the man who works for the Detroit Lions, the person who was the chief data scientist of the United States? Do you wish that you were one of the scrappy founders selling themselves to a panel of VCs at the conference’s “Startup Battlefield?” Do you wish you were one of the VCs? 

Or do you wish that you were a million miles from all of it, and retch at the thought of still being here in ten years?

That’s what conferences are for: For showing us how wide-ranging a profession can be, while reminding us it is not infinite. If necessity is the mother of invention, boundaries are the mother of intention. It's hard to know what you want to eat without a menu; it's hard to know what you want to be without options. That's what we're sharing over our rosemary gin and tonics: The career paths that are available to us. And that's what the speakers on stage are teaching us: Who we will become if we're successful. Choose your fighter.

Most of the time, the winding rivers in front of us are hidden from our view. They are borderless and undefined, a gradient of uncertainty that we can only look around one riverbend at a time. But from the skies above places like Las Vegas, Orlando, and Austin, we can catch a glimpse of the entire river basin. We can see each professional tributary; we can see the people who are rafting down them; we can see where they each lead; we can decide which one we want to take, or if we'd rather change everything and spend our one precious life exploring a new watershed. 

So as you leave, open the plane’s window. Look back; pay attention. Who are you becoming? Who do you want to become? 

1. It could’ve happened!

2. I’m sure I will get emails telling me I’m wrong. Which, great! I’m not saying every talk is forgotten, or that there isn’t somebody out there who took a picture of a slide and then actually did something useful with it later. I’m sure that this happens, and it happened to me at least once. But it seems like the exception and not the rule.

3. Is this cynical? Absolutely. But c’mon, we love this sort of stuff. We build apps to summarize podcasts and emails; we want to learn physics via TikTok; we carry around books around for the brand. We are lifelong learners, so long as the learning doesn’t take more than 30 seconds or 280 characters. As SBF said, in a point that I suspect a lot of people quietly agree with, “I’m very skeptical of books. …I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” 

4. There will be Alan, who became a middle manager, prioritized golf and free corporate dinners, and spends as few evenings with his kids as possible. 

5. Pretty sus, tbh.