The Event Industry Is Being Confronted By Its Napster Moment

There’s a case to make here, which I see being spitballed around on the Internet a lot, that the old way of doing things is over. Our year of remote-only will dispel the familiar rituals and expose our expensive addictions to these things. And after this is over, we’ll have a harder time with casually approving $4000 of flights, hotels, and lost ti... See more

Online events remind me a lot of ecommerce in about 1996. The software is raw and rough around the edges, and often doesn’t work very well, though that can get fixed. But more importantly, no-one quite knows what they should be building.

The business event industry is a trillion-dollar game. People are willing to pay a lot to be part of an event. For example, the early-bird ticket for WSJ Tech Live, the Wall Street Journal’s premier technology event, starts at $6,500 a head. The economic impact on the Austin economy from SXSW in 2018 was $350.6 million. Burning Man and Coachella ar... See more

The rise of Web 2.0 was heralded as an advancement by not just allowing people to read and write content and do transactions but to connect with each other in new ways. That gave rise, eventually, to Facebook and other social networks, along with a raft of “sharing economy” companies that peddled a fantasy of building community at the heart of busi... See more

What does this mean? All of the infrastructure and services that were once optimized for physical SMBs / mom-and-pops need to be overhauled to accommodate internet-first businesses. If you were a YouTuber and you walked into Bank of America asking for a small business loan, you would be met with a quizzical look followed by a polite but firm dismis... See more