I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas go to be funded and then die). Then there are the sharks, cruising around looking for easy pickings.
My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."
All the action at PSB happens in the hot tub discussions. I didn't spend any time in them, as I was too junior and didn't know the right people, but PSB did get me some good post doc options!
Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.
(Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).
Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.
Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.
For some reason this rings a bell - is there an article/blog/post/message in a bottle about Lynn Conway at that conference (and how it’s not really conference; lol?).
> The conference has six focuses: AI in Drug Discovery, AI in Diagnostics, AI for Operational Efficiency, AI in Remote Healthcare, AI in Regulatory Compliance, and AI Ethics. Every single theme of this conference has converged onto AI as the only thing worth discussing.
I experienced the same situation at the human factors and ergonomics society (HFES) annual conference a few months ago. This was fine for me because I'm part of the (relatively small) AI/ML group at my company, which has traditionally focused on developing human factors engineering solutions and services. In fact the reason I was sent to HFES was to help bridge my background (phd in computational neuro) to the broader company mission. And to be honest I was looking forward to hearing (what I assumed was going to be) a wide diversity of talks. I mean, ergonomics... there will probably be like companies presenting next generation office chair designs or some shit, I thought. Instead I estimate that 50% of the talks were on one of three topics: AI trust, Explainable AI, or Human-AI teaming. Another 30-40% were on some other AI related issue, with the remaining 10-20% accounting for all other possible topics related to human factors and ergonomics.
I wonder what will be the repercussions from this current hyper-obsession with AI, and the resulting neglect to many other viable areas of research. I foresee a near future where chairs are packed with AI features, and are the source of much back pain.
The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.
All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.
> The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference.
In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.
I would strongly agree. Having been to a lot of industry conferences all over that world it's just the same.
Part of the problem is that the conference organizers open up panels to press and panellists (including me) are then very restricted on what we can say. The panel becomes a hash of corporate sound bites which no one likes.
To counter this increasingly panels are being requested to be under Chatham House by the companies paying to attend and sponsor.
Similar thing happened to me at a surf competition at an anon place. People were flown in from everywhere, my surfboard arrived too late because the plane sucked.
But as me, everybody just gathered at the hot tub, nobody took part at the real sports event, we just fooled around and were happy to meet people from all around the world. Brazil, Hawaii, Germany, Canada, US. Really nice event. No idea if there even was a winner at the event. Maybe they did put something onto the web page, but nobody cared.
"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?"
The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]
"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."
That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.
The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
> The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
Can't anyone donate them a retired Cesium clock? Or, at least, a GPS receiver.
I got power schmoozed once. Why they mistook me for being worth the investment in time was beyond me. It's a strange feeling being led into the presence, assumed to have knowledge and power, and be offered.. something intangible to help them do .. something unclear.
Maybe my failure to read latent signals is why this doesn't repeat. When you do get to the elven castle, you don't remember much that happened inside, but now you're back on a quest and your donkey has more food.
I do think this stuff happens. Side deals which move markets, people who taste test in lowly techs and then advise private equity buyers to move or not. You aren't the talent, your information value informs the talent going to do their job with bigger fish.
Not surprising. Take any conference and look at the schedule of some CEO or other “socialite” attending said conference. They’re not in the building, they’re running around town attending meetings. At JPMHC everyone is a “socialite”
Seems like a subset of enthusiasts - early stage VC types, people working in product, people who write lengthy healthcare posts on LinkedIn, have been trying to position it as another HLTH, but that’s not what it is. It’s an investor conference that you need to be invited to. Wouldn’t be surprising if JPM somehow had taken a stake or done a deal with your company, combined with some government insiders.
The digital health community, however, has used it to start off the new year with a bang. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
> The Sirens of Titan [1] is a comic science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., first published in 1959. His second novel, it involves issues of free will, omniscience, and the overall purpose of human history, with much of the story revolving around a Martian invasion of Earth.
The website linked in the article appears to not be _the_ website (to be fair, tfa only calls it _a_ website). The website actually hosted by JPM is very sparse, but even mentions that such unofficial websites exist.
The conference sessions aren't what matters. The important thing about these kinds of industry conferences is the ability for investors, leaders, regulators, journalists, and others to meet with each other in a neutral zone. Multiple M&As are being negotiated, IPOs being considered, funds trying to raise a new vintage, and companies starting press junkets in preparation for a roadshow.
> it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart. And that this is the primary organizing focal point for both the location and entire reason for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
Moscone Center tends to be the primary hub for industry conferences in the City (eg. RSA, Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld way back in the day), and more niche executive events are in the Four Seasons or St Regis. My hunch is that JPM has a multi-year deal with the Westin to host the conference at the Westin.
If you want to actually talk with people about some of your thoughts on the industry, I'd recommend just going to a hotel bar, grab a pint, and just spark a conversation.
from my understanding, it's a healthcare investors conference where investors meet companies (both public and private), esp those looking to fund raise.
My wife was there last year. There are a lot of investment opportunities. Plenty of dinners and meetings away from the conference. It's the whole drinking from a fire hose as there is too much to see and do.
I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas go to be funded and then die). Then there are the sharks, cruising around looking for easy pickings.
My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."
All the action at PSB happens in the hot tub discussions. I didn't spend any time in them, as I was too junior and didn't know the right people, but PSB did get me some good post doc options!
Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.
(Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).
> I've been inside the conference
Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.
Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.
> Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.
I suspect you are thinking of burning man
Ok, sure, but were you also involved in dosing the creature that lives under the Westin St Francis?
For some reason this rings a bell - is there an article/blog/post/message in a bottle about Lynn Conway at that conference (and how it’s not really conference; lol?).
> The conference has six focuses: AI in Drug Discovery, AI in Diagnostics, AI for Operational Efficiency, AI in Remote Healthcare, AI in Regulatory Compliance, and AI Ethics. Every single theme of this conference has converged onto AI as the only thing worth discussing.
I experienced the same situation at the human factors and ergonomics society (HFES) annual conference a few months ago. This was fine for me because I'm part of the (relatively small) AI/ML group at my company, which has traditionally focused on developing human factors engineering solutions and services. In fact the reason I was sent to HFES was to help bridge my background (phd in computational neuro) to the broader company mission. And to be honest I was looking forward to hearing (what I assumed was going to be) a wide diversity of talks. I mean, ergonomics... there will probably be like companies presenting next generation office chair designs or some shit, I thought. Instead I estimate that 50% of the talks were on one of three topics: AI trust, Explainable AI, or Human-AI teaming. Another 30-40% were on some other AI related issue, with the remaining 10-20% accounting for all other possible topics related to human factors and ergonomics.
I wonder what will be the repercussions from this current hyper-obsession with AI, and the resulting neglect to many other viable areas of research. I foresee a near future where chairs are packed with AI features, and are the source of much back pain.
The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.
All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.
> The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference.
In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.
> It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.
I'd say this is true of almost all corporate conferences
I would strongly agree. Having been to a lot of industry conferences all over that world it's just the same.
Part of the problem is that the conference organizers open up panels to press and panellists (including me) are then very restricted on what we can say. The panel becomes a hash of corporate sound bites which no one likes.
To counter this increasingly panels are being requested to be under Chatham House by the companies paying to attend and sponsor.
Similar thing happened to me at a surf competition at an anon place. People were flown in from everywhere, my surfboard arrived too late because the plane sucked.
But as me, everybody just gathered at the hot tub, nobody took part at the real sports event, we just fooled around and were happy to meet people from all around the world. Brazil, Hawaii, Germany, Canada, US. Really nice event. No idea if there even was a winner at the event. Maybe they did put something onto the web page, but nobody cared.
Many conferences work like that, yes.
There are even some companies that offer this style of conferences as meetings for money to vendors.
What I wonder though: How many deals are really made in these rooms? I always had the feeling that the conversion rates were rather low if not zero.
This is how RSA works, too.
"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?"
The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]
"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."
That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.
The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGK_OaMVPUs
> The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
Can't anyone donate them a retired Cesium clock? Or, at least, a GPS receiver.
I got power schmoozed once. Why they mistook me for being worth the investment in time was beyond me. It's a strange feeling being led into the presence, assumed to have knowledge and power, and be offered.. something intangible to help them do .. something unclear.
Maybe my failure to read latent signals is why this doesn't repeat. When you do get to the elven castle, you don't remember much that happened inside, but now you're back on a quest and your donkey has more food.
I do think this stuff happens. Side deals which move markets, people who taste test in lowly techs and then advise private equity buyers to move or not. You aren't the talent, your information value informs the talent going to do their job with bigger fish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy
1. Do you know anybody from "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?
2. Have you ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?
3. Do you know anybody who has ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?
Spent new years in bielefeld. The place is so generic and forgettable I’m not surprised it was picked for the saying
Remember Moab!
Glad someone is taking up the mantle left by Hunter S. Thompson’s demise.
This sort of writing is what AI will take from us.
There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?
> and how late is it open?
And to whom.
Not surprising. Take any conference and look at the schedule of some CEO or other “socialite” attending said conference. They’re not in the building, they’re running around town attending meetings. At JPMHC everyone is a “socialite”
Damn I would read a whole book in this writing style
This would make a pretty decent premise for an SCP article.
The financial system is definitely an Archon.
Seems like a subset of enthusiasts - early stage VC types, people working in product, people who write lengthy healthcare posts on LinkedIn, have been trying to position it as another HLTH, but that’s not what it is. It’s an investor conference that you need to be invited to. Wouldn’t be surprising if JPM somehow had taken a stake or done a deal with your company, combined with some government insiders. The digital health community, however, has used it to start off the new year with a bang. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
That's what they want you to think.
Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut - what a wonderful and absurd article
What is the Vonnegut-esque in your view?
> The Sirens of Titan [1] is a comic science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., first published in 1959. His second novel, it involves issues of free will, omniscience, and the overall purpose of human history, with much of the story revolving around a Martian invasion of Earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirens_of_Titan
What an incredible read.
Seriously the way it slowly goes from totally coherent, to slightly coherent, to flat earth, is as another commenter said; “absolute cinema”.
It really is a masterpiece.
I can tell you that this conference for sure exists because I am here for unrelated reasons right now and the hotel prices are ridiculous this week.
Absolute cinema
The website linked in the article appears to not be _the_ website (to be fair, tfa only calls it _a_ website). The website actually hosted by JPM is very sparse, but even mentions that such unofficial websites exist.
https://www.jpmorgan.com/about-us/events-conferences/health-...
(tfa is a fun read, regardless)
Sounds a lot like Davos
I just finished reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and this could have been one of the chapters.
Ha, funnily enough I just bought it after hearing about it on that thread with the 90's 'strange website'. Not cracked it open yet, it's quite a tome.
Skip the Johnny Truant bits and its half the length with hardly anything of value lost.
Don't read it, unless you're in for psychological trauma. That book is messed up
The conference sessions aren't what matters. The important thing about these kinds of industry conferences is the ability for investors, leaders, regulators, journalists, and others to meet with each other in a neutral zone. Multiple M&As are being negotiated, IPOs being considered, funds trying to raise a new vintage, and companies starting press junkets in preparation for a roadshow.
> it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart. And that this is the primary organizing focal point for both the location and entire reason for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
Moscone Center tends to be the primary hub for industry conferences in the City (eg. RSA, Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld way back in the day), and more niche executive events are in the Four Seasons or St Regis. My hunch is that JPM has a multi-year deal with the Westin to host the conference at the Westin.
I will investigate these other locations!
If you want to actually talk with people about some of your thoughts on the industry, I'd recommend just going to a hotel bar, grab a pint, and just spark a conversation.
lol best thing I read all day
from my understanding, it's a healthcare investors conference where investors meet companies (both public and private), esp those looking to fund raise.
My wife was there last year. There are a lot of investment opportunities. Plenty of dinners and meetings away from the conference. It's the whole drinking from a fire hose as there is too much to see and do.
Makes me wonder if this how the creature under California feels.
We are the creature