Isaac Saldana doesn’t get out to a lot of conferences and hopefully, I’m not the reason.

When I saw him recently, I knew I needed to ask the SendGrid founder an uncomfortable question.

After some pleasantries and memories of the good ol’ days—this guy stood on the platform of the New York Stock Exchange while his developer startup went public—I floated the query:

What’s the worst SendGrid event you ever did?

This is a guy who had to pitch a company first called SMTP API (Sim-At-A-Pie, to those in the know). Surely there were worse than…

Quickly, his mind went to the same one I was thinking of:

In San Francisco…

But far away from everything…

Multiple, sprawlingly large buildings…

And it was dead.

When his talk came up, the room was nearly empty.

I’m just thankful I didn’t have to see it: I was on the other side of the event campus, talking to another room of bare chairs. Yeah, the organizers had put two people from the same company on at the same time.

Isaac flew up from Los Angeles. He stayed overnight. He prepared a talk. This was a colossal misuse of his time.

I remember visiting sponsor booths in the early afternoon. They were packing up. It had been a waste for them, too.

This event had oversold itself and its attendance. Thousands, they claimed.

You’re probably thinking about what events to attend in 2024. Maybe you even want to convince someone in your company to speak.

​Read this first.

It looks at the dangers of “large events,” what staff you should send, and ways to make it meaningful for your company.

Consider How to Choose Developer Events, then let me know where you’ll be this year—I want to go somewhere good!