Excerpt from a YouTube video (Oct 19, 2022) by Ricardo Molina discussing event organization philosophy: maintaining free community Meetups (sponsored, with pizza) as an organic pipeline for new speakers, while running paid conferences in higher-end venues (e.g., symphony halls). The speaker emphasizes a continuum from informal, free community events to ticketed, curated conferences.
Chapters
And James, just to be clear, so you always charged for your events, you've always asked for a ticket to be paid for. Meetups have always been buying for the community. They remain for free. They've always free. And essentially we look for commercial partners to just host them and provide pizza basically. Okay. And we've always viewed it as being a continuum. It's like the community end is the product tank. Meetups, they're free, have a pizza. The level of talks, sometimes they're an absolute smash hit. Sometimes they're people doing their first ever public talks. There's a few nerves along the way and a few mishaps. Right. But that's the whole sort of organic end of things. Right? And that's great. Speaker pipelining for us is finding those new voices. We've always intended for the conferences to be at the other end of the scale. So yes, it's a paid for ticket but you know, we don't host them in sort of stripped out warehouses or things like that. We use symphony orchestra venues with fantasy.