Articles written by
Ben Costantini

The AI industry runs on GPUs, APIs and Discord servers. So why is an AI insurance startup valued at $4 billion signing a lease for a 24/7 café in Shoreditch? Corgi, the San Francisco insurtech that raised three rounds in eight weeks this summer (TechCrunch, July 2026), already runs two 24-hour cafés in San Francisco and Atlanta. Its London location on Great Eastern Street opens this month, with five more planned including New York (Sifted, July 2026). The pitch: give founders a place to work at 3am, and sell them AI liability insurance while they sip a “Brexspresso.” Is it working? The Mercury News reported in April that the San Francisco café was running at a loss with zero conversions to the insurance business (via Wikipedia). Investors funded three more rounds anyway. That tells you something about what the market believes physical presence is worth right now. AI companies are becoming event organizers Corgi is the extreme case. The pattern is everywhere. Anthropic held its first Code with Claude conference in May 2025 as a single-day event in San Francisco. One year later, it became an international tour: San Francisco on May 6, London on May 19, Tokyo on June 10, with a second SF day added because demand from independent developers exceeded capacity (Anthropic). OpenAI’s DevDay returns to San Francisco on September 29. ElevenLabs ran its Global Hackathon across 30 cities simultaneously last December and launched its own Summit. Lovable’s community events page lists hackathons from Barcelona to Bradford to Tbilisi, funded with credits and swag. Stripe, the company that made online payments invisible, now runs two event franchises: Stripe Sessions at Moscone Center in April, plus Stripe Tour, a global one-day roadshow hitting Paris, New York and other major cities. Even the investors backing these companies have become organizers. a16z presents Tech Week, a decentralized conference series across New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles that reached more than 740 events in New York alone in 2024 (Tech:NYC). The firm also runs a16z Build, an invite-only program of private dinners and retreats designed to connect early builders. A venture firm operating a citywide event franchise and a curated dinner circuit is a firm that treats community as an asset class. These are field marketing budgets that would have gone to paid social five years ago. When every feed is flooded with AI-generated content, a room full of verified humans becomes the scarce asset. The companies building the flood know this better than anyone. The money agrees While AI companies build community from scratch, institutional capital is buying live events at scale. Liberty Media completed its €4.2 billion acquisition of MotoGP in July 2025, adding it to a Formula One Group that also includes F1 and hospitality business Quint (Liberty Media). KKR acquired Superstruct Entertainment, operator of more than 80 festivals including Sziget, Sónar and Wacken Open Air, in a deal reported at €1.3 billion (Music Business Worldwide, June 2024). CVC joined as co-investor a few months later. And Ari Emanuel raised more than $2 billion from Apollo, RedBird and the Qatar Investment Authority to launch Mari, a holding company built to buy events: the Miami Open, the Madrid Open, Frieze, Barrett-Jackson (Bloomberg, October 2025). This week, Mari agreed to acquire ATG Entertainment, owner of 70 theaters across Broadway and the West End, in a deal reported at $6 billion (Axios, August 2026). “Live has only grown more powerful,” Emanuel said in the announcement. Read that list again. Sports, festivals, art fairs, theater. The smartest money in media is converging on one thesis: attention earned in person compounds in a way digital attention no longer does. What this means for founders Here is the contradiction worth sitting with. The companies automating knowledge work are the ones investing hardest in rooms, coffee and handshakes. They understand that when intelligence becomes a commodity, trust becomes the product. And trust still gets built face to face. For startup founders, the lesson is practical. Your customers, your investors and your future hires are recalibrating where they spend their scarce in-person time. The events that win their calendar slots will be smaller, more curated and more expensive to ignore. Where the two worlds meet If you work at an AI company or a scale-up that just discovered field marketing, here is the uncomfortable truth: the event industry has been perfecting this craft for decades. The people who run Web Summit, VivaTech or MWC have solved problems you are about to encounter, from audience acquisition costs to sponsor ROI to the logistics of moving 100,000 people through a venue. That is the room Sesame Summit puts you in. It is the conference of conferences: our annual gathering in Biarritz where leaders from Europe’s top event organizers meet the startups, investors and tech companies betting on IRL. Disclosure: I organize it, so read this with that in mind. But if the smartest money in media is paying billions for audiences that show up in person, spending two days with the people who build those audiences seems like a reasonable shortcut. If your company is doubling down on events this year, what would you want to learn from the organizers who have been doing this for 20 years?

Picture this. A strategy director at a major exhibition calls with six weeks to go before the show. The brand new startup area has sold exactly one booth. The show runs on a multi-year cycle, so a failed launch means the whole concept probably gets cancelled before it gets a second chance. This is a composite of several conversations I’ve had this year, and the pattern is always the same. The organizer builds a startup area, assigns it to the existing sales team, waits, panics, then calls for help when the calendar has already decided the outcome. The diagnosis is simple: startup acquisition is a different business than exhibitor sales. Most organizers discover this too late. Here are the five reasons why. 1. They sell square meters to companies that buy outcomes A corporate exhibitor renews a booth the way it renews an insurance policy. There’s a budget line, a history, a floor plan discussion. The sales conversation is about location and dimensions. Startups have none of that. They buy pipeline, investor meetings, and proof that the show is worth their time. And their time is expensive: my rule of thumb is two full prep days for every event day, more if the team is small or the show is far. A founder deciding between your startup area and a customer roadshow is running an ROI calculation, and a rate card doesn’t answer it. A sales team trained on renewals and floor plans doesn’t speak this language. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s a different job. 2. They start the clock six months too late Startup areas usually get scoped after the main floor is sold. The launch lands a few months, sometimes a few weeks, before the show. Founders don’t work like that. They lock their event strategy two or three quarters ahead, because attending well requires prep: outreach, meeting scheduling, demo logistics, travel. A six-week sprint is competing against decisions that were made in the spring. The paradox is that organizers know this about their corporate exhibitors, who book 12 to 18 months out. Somehow the assumption becomes that startups, the most resource-constrained companies on the floor, can be converted on short notice. 3. They design the offer around what they can administer Here’s a real example, anonymized. One show’s main startup offer was a 60 percent discount, funded by a national grant. Great deal. One catch: only domestic startups qualified for it, at an international show. The offer wasn’t designed around the buyer. It was designed around available paperwork. The addressable pool shrank to a fraction of the relevant ecosystem, and everyone else got a full-price booth with no story attached. Startup offers that work are built the other way around: define which companies belong on that floor, then engineer the package (price, format, visibility, matchmaking) that makes their decision easy. Administration comes second. 4. They confuse margin kept with money made This one stings, because I’ve watched it happen twice this year. An organizer works with a partner on startup acquisition, hits targets, then decides to insource the next edition to keep the full margin. On a spreadsheet, it’s savings. In reality, the target gets missed, the area sits half-empty, and the organizer comes back mid-campaign asking for rescue. Some results are still possible at that point. The results a proper campaign would have delivered are gone. The full cost of insourcing shows up later: lost booth revenue, a weaker visitor experience in that zone, and a startup program that gets cancelled for “lack of demand.” Against that, the partner commission was the cheapest line on the P&L. 5. They run a program where they need a pipeline Startup acquisition compounds. Alumni come back. Competition applicants become exhibitors. Founders talk to each other, and a good experience at one edition sells the next one. None of that happens inside a one-off project. It requires a multi-year cadence: scouting, competitions, curated programs, follow-up between editions. Shows on two or four year cycles feel this the hardest, because a standalone approach means restarting from zero every single time, with a new team and no institutional memory. What compounding looks like JEC World, the composites industry show in Paris, is the counter-example, and yes, they’re our client, which is exactly the point. The startup work there is a bundle, built over multiple editions: a startup competition that lowers the barrier for first-time startup exhibitors, an Investor Day that brings capital to the floor and gives founders a concrete ROI reason to attend, and a startup village that gives them a curated home inside a very large show. Each piece feeds the others. Startups apply because clients & investors are there. Investors come because the startups are curated. And the ones that grow don’t disappear: they graduate into regular exhibitors. That’s the part most organizers miss. A startup exhibitor is just a first-time exhibitor. Treated well, they’re the cheapest exhibitor acquisition channel you’ll ever have. Treated as filler for a leftover corner of the floor plan, they don’t come back, and neither do the ones watching. The question for organizers If you run a show with a startup area, ask yourself one thing: is it a strategy or a floor plan decision? If the honest answer is the second one, here’s my prediction. The area launches late, gets staffed by a team hired to sell something else, underperforms, and quietly disappears from the next edition. The internal conclusion will be “startups don’t work for our show.” The real conclusion is that the approach didn’t. Startups work fine. They’re just customers who need to be sold to like startups. Disclosure: Sesamers sells startup acquisition and curation services to event organizers. JEC World is a client. Read accordingly.

The event calendar goes quiet in July and August. Deadlines don’t. This article assumes you’re an early stage founder, pre-seed or seed at most, without a marketing team. You are the events team. The next eight weeks are the only window of the year where you can work on your startup event strategy instead of running it. Here’s how to use them, roughly in order of urgency. 1. Search for calls for speakers Most Q1 and Q2 2027 conferences select their speakers in autumn, which means applications open now. SXSW PanelPicker is the obvious one and since it closes on July 26th they always lack submissions from Europe. But every major event runs some version of it, usually buried three clicks deep on their website. Before you apply anywhere, build a speaker one-pager: your topic, three talking points, a short bio, one decent photo, and links to any previous talk. Program teams review hundreds of proposals. Make theirs easy. 2. Apply to startup competitions Autumn competitions open their calls in summer: One warning from someone who reads hundreds of these applications every year: judges can tell when ChatGPT wrote your answers. Roughly 80% of the applications I review show obvious AI usage, and the low-effort ones go straight to the no pile. Use AI to structure your thinking if you want. Write the answers yourself. Sophie wrote a full breakdown of how startup competitions work from the organizer’s side. Read it before you apply. Knowing what organizers optimize for changes how you write. 3. Apply to your country’s delegation for major events CES, MWC, Web Summit: most countries send an official startup delegation, and the selection happens months ahead. For CES only: Netherlands, France, Hong Kong, etc. A quick LinkedIn search gives you tons of results.  Delegations get you a subsidized booth, press attention you’d hardly get alone, and a cohort of founders going through the same thing. The application effort is low compared to what you get. The catch is timing: CES delegations typically close applications in September. 4. Get feedback from founders who exhibited in your industry Summer is the one season when people answer cold messages. Search LinkedIn for founders who exhibited at the last edition of the trade show you’re considering using its hashtag. Ask for 15 minutes. Ask three questions: what did it cost in total, how many qualified conversations did they have, and would they do it again. Three of these calls will teach you more than most post-event reports the organizer publishes.  That’s what we learned interviewing ReSnack founders. 5. Run a pitch practice session with your peers, and moderate it Get five founder friends on a call or around a table. Everyone pitches, everyone gives feedback. You moderate. The pitching part is obvious. The moderating part is the underrated one: keeping time, asking follow-ups, managing the room. That’s a skill you’ll need on every panel you ever join, and nobody teaches it. As Lubomila Jordanova told us on the Selected podcast, small formats with harsh feedback are where you learn to hold an audience. 6. Volunteer at a startup event Unglamorous advice, and one of the best access you’ll ever get. Volunteers see how the machine works from the inside: how speakers get booked, how the VIP room operates, who actually makes decisions. You’ll meet the organizing team, and organizing teams remember people who showed up to work. An obvious one is Slush where 1,800 volunteers come together to produce one of the best startup events on earth: https://slush.org/audience/volunteers  7. Plan a side event for the back-to-office season Every ecosystem has a September event where everyone reappears. For example FDDay in Paris. Don’t compete with the main program. Host a breakfast before it opens or drinks after it closes, 20 to 30 people, one clear theme. Side events cost a fraction of a booth and put you in the host position instead of the badge-wearing position. Start planning now: venues and calendars fill up faster than you’d expect for the first week of September. 8. Budget your 2027 event strategy Nobody wants to open a spreadsheet in July. Do it anyway, because budget season at your company happens whether you participate or not. The mistake founders make is counting the ticket and the flight and stopping there. Every event day requires two preparation days: outreach before, follow-up after. That’s the 2:1 rule, and it changes the math on which events deserve a slot at all.  Pick a maximum of 5 events for 2027. Assign each one a job: sales, hiring, fundraising, or press. If an event has no job, it has no budget line. 9. Check if your summer festival has a business track A growing number of music festivals run pitching sessions or networking programs alongside the main stage. Tomorrowland even hosts a dedicated event around impact & social innovation: Love Tomorrow Summit.  Is the deal flow serious? Sometimes. Is it the most pleasant place you’ll pitch all year? Definitely. If you’re on holiday near one anyway, the marginal cost is a badge upgrade. 10. Rest The circuit restarts in September and doesn’t stop until Christmas. Slush alone will take a week out of your life, and that’s before the follow-up emails. Founders treat rest as a productivity hack, which slightly misses the point. Take actual time off. Turn off the notifications. The events will still be there in September, and so will everyone else, looking exhausted already. Don’t be them. Photo credit: Anik Labreigne on Unsplash + Gemini

This week I read about a hackathon claiming 6,000 attendees over a single weekend. The venues hosting it can’t accommodate more than 1,000 people. Nobody in the comments asked how the math worked. That gap between the claim and the room is what this article is about. For most event organizers, event metrics are marketing, not measurement. Once you understand how attendance numbers are built, why ROI stays a black box, and why matchmaking is often bad on purpose, you’ll read every post-event press release differently. Here’s a decoder. The vocabulary nobody explains to you The event industry has precise definitions. It just doesn’t advertise them. UFI, the global association of the exhibition industry, publishes calculation standards and auditing rules for all of them. Independent bodies like ABC audit against them. Here’s the short version. Visitor. One human being who came to the event. If I attend all three days, I’m one visitor. Visit. One entry through the doors. My three days now count as three visits. UFI accepts both figures in its audits, defines visits as visitors plus repeat visits, and requires the term used to be clearly indicated on the audit certificate. Guess which number ends up on the homepage. Attendee / participant. No standard definition. These are the marketing words. They can mean visitors, visits, registrants, exhibitor staff, speakers, press, students or the organizer’s own team, in any combination. When you read “50,000 participants,” you’re reading a number with no agreed method behind it. Registrant. Someone who signed up. Free registration events love this one, because no-show rates of 30 to 50 percent are common and registrations cost nothing to inflate. Exhibitor. Elastic too. UFI distinguishes direct exhibitors, who contract with the organizer, from co-exhibitors, who are part of a shared stand (think country pavilions). Both count. Daily exhibitor. A company present for a single day, typical in startup zones and rotating programs. A startup using a shared booth on day 2 only counts as one exhibitor, exactly like the anchor brand that paid for 400 sqm across the full show. Pavilion / delegation. A block of space booked by one entity, usually a national export agency, a region or a corporate, then filled with smaller companies. One contract, one invoice, 25 logos. Pavilions are how organizers cluster small booths into themed areas, and how “1,200 exhibitors” can describe wildly different realities. Net vs. gross exhibition space. Net is the square meters actually rented. Gross includes aisles, catering areas and that giant entrance arch. As a rule of thumb: net space is 50% of gross space at an average show.  The prosumer padding One more layer on the attendance side. Many events count audiences that are professional on paper only. Student groups bused in for the afternoon. Employees of a corporate partner who run one workshop on day 3. Startup founders’ plus-ones. Locals with a discounted badge. I’m not saying these people have no place at events. Some of the best energy on a show floor comes from them. But if you’re an exhibitor paying for access to buyers, a headline number that mixes procurement directors with second-year students is not relevant. Ask for the audience breakdown by profile. If the organizer can’t produce one, that tells you something too. The ROI black box Here’s the uncomfortable part: almost nobody wants to know if an event actually performs. CEIR, the research arm of the U.S. industry association IAEE, paused its exhibitor spend research for years and only resumed it in late 2025. Its 2026 Marketing Spend Decision Report finds that management evaluates exhibition ROI mainly on lead volume and post-show closed deals, and documents a gap between what practitioners track and what leadership actually cares about. The industry’s reference dataset on exhibitor spending had not been refreshed since 2017. Read that again: the largest B2B marketing channel went eight years without updated benchmarks. The exhibitor side confirms the fog. Vendelux’s 2026 B2B Events Survey of 120+ marketing and events leaders found that 86 percent can’t accurately attribute ROI to events, and 98 percent struggle to justify event spend to leadership. Yet 80 percent are maintaining or growing their sponsorships anyway.  Organizers benefit from this fog. Some only release their data points after the event is over, when your booking decision for next year is already locked in early-bird pricing. Others share nothing beyond the headline number. Try asking for the seniority breakdown of last edition’s visitors, or the ratio of buyers to service providers walking the aisles. I wrote before that founders systematically underestimate what events cost them, hence my 2:1 preparation rule. The other side of that equation is just as broken: they can’t estimate what events return, because the data to do so is withheld. The GDPR excuse When pushed, some organizers invoke GDPR as the reason they can’t share more. Let’s be precise. GDPR restricts sharing personal data: names, emails, badge scans tied to individuals. It says nothing about aggregated, anonymized statistics. “42 percent of our visitors have purchasing authority” contains zero personal data. An organizer who can’t tell you that either doesn’t know it or doesn’t want you to know it. Neither answer is reassuring. If startups are solving it, ask why organizers aren’t A whole category of companies now exists to answer a question organizers could answer themselves: was this event worth it? Full disclosure: at Sesamers we’re building mytradeshow.ai on this exact gap, so I have a horse in this race. Here are five others working the same seam: Sit with the logic for a second. Organizers gather and process the registration data, the badge scans, the floor plans, the exhibitor contracts. They are the best-placed actors in the world to measure event performance. If third parties have to reconstruct that picture from the outside, it’s because the people holding the data have decided that transparency isn’t always in their interest. Bad matchmaking is a feature One last thing, and it’s my favorite. Whenever an event’s matchmaking is mediocre, don’t […]

The second half of 2026 is packed. Between July and December, there are more than 30 confirmed events worth your time across Europe, the US, and the Middle East, covering everything from AI infrastructure to retail tech, cybersecurity, developer tools, and the full founder-investor circuit. This is not a list of every conference. It’s a selection built around a single filter: does this event put you in a room with people who can move your company forward? Use it as a planning tool, not a bucket list. A mediocre event on the right date still costs you more than three days OOO. GITEX AI Europe 2026 📍 Berlin, Germany  |  🗓 30 Jun–1 Jul 2026 GITEX AI Europe returns to Messe Berlin for its second edition, bringing together 25,000+ tech and business leaders, 1,400+ global enterprises and startups, and 600+ investors from over 100 countries. The event runs four co-located programs: AI Everything Europe for real-world AI applications, North Star Europe for startups with a €50,000 equity-free pitch prize, GISEC Europe for cybersecurity, and GITEX Quantum Expo for quantum commercialisation. The first edition in 2025 drew 21,650 attendees and 755 startups.gitexeurope.com RAISE Summit 2026 📍 Paris, France  |  🗓 8–9 Jul 2026 RAISE Summit 2026 brings together 9,000+ AI leaders, founders, investors and policymakers at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, with 350 speakers, enterprise AI discussions, a startup competition with a €10M+ prize pool, and an AI hackathon drawing 7,000 developers. The 2026 edition adds an invitation-only CxO Summit for Fortune 1000 executives, with closed-door sessions featuring executives from Mercedes, AXA, and Capgemini. Speaker lineup includes Yann LeCun, Mark Cuban, and representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA. raisesummit.com Love Tomorrow Summit 2026 📍 Boom, Belgium  |  🗓 23 Jul 2026 The fifth edition of Love Tomorrow Summit takes place on 23 July 2026 at De Schorre in Boom, Belgium, the same site as Tomorrowland, on the Thursday between its two festival weekends. The 2026 theme is the future of intelligence: exploring how AI, leadership, and human resilience interact as technological systems accelerate. The Summit brings together 7,000+ attendees across six programming pillars: Impact Entrepreneurship, Natural Intelligence, Science & Technology, Socio-Economic Perspectives, Health & Mindfulness, and Entertainment. There is no equivalent format anywhere on the calendar: a serious impact investing roundtable that ends with a festival. lovetomorrow.com LEAP 2026 📍 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia  |  🗓 31 Aug–3 Sep 2026 LEAP 2026 takes place at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center in Malham, bringing together global technology leaders, startups, investors, entrepreneurs, and government organizations from around the world. The 2025 edition hosted 201,000 visitors, 1,800+ exhibitors, and 1,900+ investors with a combined AUM exceeding $22 trillion. LEAP has grown into one of the few places outside Silicon Valley and Europe where you access truly deep pools of sovereign and institutional capital. Not a startup networking event in the typical sense. Worth the trip if MENA or Gulf markets are on your roadmap. onegiantleap.com TechBBQ 2026 📍 Copenhagen, Denmark  |  🗓 26–27 Aug 2026 TechBBQ 2026 takes place at the Bella Center Copenhagen on August 26–27, bringing together 10,000+ founders, investors, and innovators from across Europe and beyond. Forbes named TechBBQ one of the hottest startup events in Europe for 2026. The event features dedicated matchmaking, pitch competitions, and a strong life sciences program, particularly valuable given Denmark’s outsized position in European biotech and pharma. The format is known for its deliberately warm, hygge-infused atmosphere: the kind of event where meaningful conversations actually happen rather than badge-scan exchanges. Side events run across Copenhagen throughout the week. techbbq.dk IFA Berlin 2026 📍 Berlin, Germany  |  🗓 4–8 Sep 2026 IFA 2026 takes place at Messe Berlin from 4 to 8 September. In its 102nd year, one of the most established consumer electronics and home appliances trade shows globally draws 215,000+ visitors from 140 countries and 1,800+ exhibitors. IFA Next is the dedicated startup zone connecting early-stage companies with investors, global retailers, and tech media. For hardware founders, consumer tech builders, and anyone touching smart home, AI devices, or connected mobility, this is a commercial platform rather than a networking conference. The distinction matters: you come here to sell and to be discovered, not to collect business cards. ifa-berlin.com Infobip Shift 2026 📍 Zadar, Croatia  |  🗓 13–15 Sep 2026 Infobip Shift 2026 takes place September 13–15 in Zadar, bringing together developers and engineers from around the world. The 2026 edition welcomes confirmed speakers from NVIDIA and Apple, with central themes covering cutting-edge technology platforms, career growth in tech, and practical AI tools. The 2025 edition gathered 5,500 attendees from 40 countries. The format rewards founders building technical products who need direct access to engineering talent and developer community: the conference where a junior developer can have a casual coffee with a Netflix senior engineer. Relaxed Mediterranean setting, serious technical content. shift.infobip.com Big Data & AI Paris 2026 📍 Paris, France  |  🗓 15–16 Sep 2026 Big Data & AI Paris 2026 takes place 15–16 September at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, held under the High Patronage of the President of the French Republic. The event describes itself as the meeting place for IT and data decision-makers industrialising AI. The 2026 Advisory Board includes Chief Data & AI Officers from AXA France, Suez, and L’Oréal, alongside the CEO of Hub France IA. The program covers enterprise AI deployment, data infrastructure, and an Advanced Computing Village focused on quantum and HPC. Practical, enterprise-first, and with direct access to the senior buyer community in French tech: if you’re selling data or AI solutions into large organizations, the room here is more relevant than most. bigdataparis.com NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show Europe 📍 Paris, France  |  🗓 15–17 Sep 2026 NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show Europe returns to Paris Expo Porte de Versailles with more than 12,000 attendees from over 60 countries, 4,200 brands, 525 exhibitors, and 200 speakers across three days. The event includes a Startup Hub spotlighting the newest retail tech companies and a […]

Most startup founders treat events like they’re going travelling: count the days, block the calendar, done. But event tickets don’t come cheap, and the actual affair can eat into your budget in so many different ways, you’ll be left with a hole in your company wallet. You see, the problem here is a simple case of math: one can’t budget for unforeseen expenses. That’s why we’ve put together a simple formula that founders can tweak to suit their business needs. The 2:1 rule nobody talks about Here’s a simple rule: Every single day at an event requires two full days of preparation. This isn’t bureaucratic overhead, it’s the operational reality of doing events properly. Why does this ratio work? Because events operate on a timeline that’s fundamentally incompatible with how startups work. Most conferences lock speaker slots, booth spaces, and partnership opportunities months in advance. You can’t A/B test them or sprint your way in at the last minute. Scaleups and corporates have dedicated field marketing teams who start preparing months in advance for events. They’ve already mapped the venue, scheduled meetings, and briefed their booth staff. If you show up with two hours of prep, you’re invisible. But why should you set aside two days for every event day? You’ll fill them with research, targeting, outreach, scheduling, content, positioning, logistics operations, internal coordination, and post-event planning.  You can’t change your pitch deck the morning of your panel. Events punish improvisation because the stakes are live and all opportunity windows close fast. That’s why a 2:1 ratio is the minimum buffer you need to make showing up worthwhile. A three-day conference isn’t a three-day commitment; you’ll have to set aside at least six days before factoring in travel, team coordination, or what you’ll actually do at the event. Treat it as the baseline for local events that you’re only attending, too. And when you add distance, team members or booth logistics to the equation, that number explodes. The winning formula Here’s what no event organizer will tell you upfront: Total Time = (Event Days × 2) × Distance Factor × Team Factor × Activity Factor Distance multipliers Team size factors Activity type factors What does it look like in the real world? Let’s run an example scenario: Say you’re exhibiting at Web Summit with two co-founders. Calculation: (3 days × 2) × 1.5 (international) × 1.3 (team of three) × 1.5 (exhibiting) = 17.6 days That’s nearly four working weeks of founder time. Not calendar days — productive working days. An entire sprint. A fundraising cycle. A product release window. That’s before you account for the inevitable chaos: marketing materials might get delayed, or your booth might require a last-minute redesign, or one of your team might fall ill on day two. This matters more than you think Startups don’t fail because they attend too many events. They fail because they attended the wrong events and didn’t realize the true cost until it was too late. Most early-stage founders operate on razor-thin runways and even thinner margins. Losing 17 days to the wrong conference can mean missing a critical hiring window, pushing a launch back by a quarter, or running out of cash. The opportunity cost is immense. Three filters to help you decide Preparation is table stakes, but the real competitive advantage is selection. Before you commit to any event, run it through these three filters: 1. Are your top 10 target customers actually attending? Don’t settle for “the industry will be there,” or “it’s a great brand.” Will the specific people who can write cheques or sign contracts be in the venue? If you can’t name at least five confirmed attendees you want to meet, you’re engaging in speculation, and speculation is expensive. 2. Can you get time with decision makers? Networking is not the same as dealmaking. Conferences are full of people collecting business cards and having “great chats” that go nowhere. Look for pre-scheduled meetings, private roundtables, investor office hours, or curated dinners. If the event doesn’t facilitate structured access, you’re paying to work a room. 3. Does the timing align with your fundraising or launch cycle? Attending a major event two weeks before a funding deadline is fundraising malpractice. Exhibiting at a trade show when your product isn’t ready to demo is theatre, not business development. Timing isn’t everything, but mistimed events have the potential to burn capital and credibility in equal measure. The real decision Preparation is hard, but preparing brilliantly for the wrong event isn’t going to yield the results you’re looking for. The formula above isn’t meant to scare founders away from conferences. If you’re going to invest 17 days of founder time, you’d better know exactly what ROI you’re chasing and have a plan to capture it. Most founders wing it. The folks who don’t tend to be the ones still standing when funding dries up. At Sesamers, we’ve spent years inside the event ecosystem, watching startups burn time and capital on conferences that looked good on paper but delivered nothing. The startups that survive and thrive aren’t the ones who attended the most events; they simply skipped those that weren’t relevant, and attended the right events at the right time, with the right preparation. So before you book your next booth or confirm that speaking slot, do the math, and see if you can afford to go wrong.

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