Last weekend marked the inaugural Emergent AI Venture Conference at Brown University, and I was on the eight-person team that organized the whole event. This post is a behind-the-scenes look at the lessons I learned along the way, including the top five priorities that you can implement to run a successful conference of your own.

Some background first. Emergent was the brainchild of Sam Shulman, a senior at Brown who I met last semester. At the end of December, she asked if I’d like to join the organizing team for a new AI startup conference at Brown, and of course I said yes. Over the following three and a half months, our small team of eight worked tirelessly on the conference, and I think the results speak for themselves. Our team…

• Brought in 25 speakers, moderators, and workshop leaders from the AI startup world, including nine from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, and AWS
• Sold out our 300-person auditorium within 18 hours of ticket launch
• Raised a $10k sponsorship to host a mini-hackathon event during the conference

Along the way, our team also learned a lot about conference organizing, both from our successes and our mistakes. This blog post aims to document those learnings in the form of five key takeaways for anyone who wants to organize a similar conference.

Note: While all of the opinions in this post are my own, organizing Emergent was a team effort. As with any well-executed group project, the credit for much of what I’ll describe below — like assembling our group, coordinating sponsorships, and running marketing — belongs to members of the team other than myself.

I’m writing this post from my view of what went well for our team and what didn’t, and I hope it’ll allow others out there to bring together more new conferences of great minds. But remember that no single person could do everything I’m about to list in this post. Just like with Emergent, it’ll always be a team effort.

With that in mind…

1. Assemble your dream team

Whenever you’re building something from nothing, the result will live and die by the team that’s building it. So recruit the best people you know.

Organizing a conference is a big project that requires collective knowledge across several domains, so make sure to cover all your bases. At minimum, your team’s expertise should span:

• Event planning/logistics
• Interpersonal networking (for speaker and sponsor outreach)
• Marketing
• Web development
• Visual design (for marketing materials)

Even though you’ll need a lot of domain knowledge, resist the temptation to grow your team too big. A small team means everyone will be more invested in the conference, and there’s something magical about working with a tight-knit group of go-getters who are firing on all cylinders to build something new.

As you start working, embrace the philosophy of “divide and conquer” — each person should work on the parts of the event they’re best at. But you probably shouldn’t assign titles outright: It’ll be good if your team members feel like they can move from one task to another if necessary. We found it helpful to keep a relatively flat “hierarchy” within the team: Besides Sam as our founder, there were no official titles for different positions within the group, and we all took on the role of Organizer.

Make strategic partnerships

This last team-related consideration is particularly relevant if you’re organizing an event within a university or other similarly bureaucratic organization.

At Brown, it’s much easier to get approval for a whole host of event-related facilities — like reserving auditoriums, ordering catering, booking A/V services, and much more — if you’re affiliated with an academic unit or a registered student club. There were many reasons not to run this event within a club, so an academic unit was the way to go.

From the outset, we partnered with Brown’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship to coordinate Emergent. They handled some of our bureaucratic university processes, and they also provided us a small sponsorship at the very beginning of the planning process to get us started. While the Nelson’s support came with a few university-mandated strings (e.g. how we could process external sponsorship money), the partnership was well worth these minor inconveniences. Emergent wouldn’t have been the same event without their help.

2. Don’t put the cart before the horse

When organizing a conference from scratch, you have nothing up front: No speakers, no sponsorships, no attendees. Each of these stakeholder groups is vital for a successful conference, and you have to recruit them in a specific order:

1. Speakers are the first priority. High-quality speaker commitments are the “currency” of the conference game. The more and better of them you have, the easier the rest of the organizing process will be, because the speakers’ credibility will drive interest from both attendees and potential sponsors. (To recruit speakers, you’ll likely do a lot of outreach, which I’ll describe in section 3 of this post.)
2. Attendees come next. Attendees care a lot about who’s speaking, and sponsors care a lot about who’s attending — so you have to get attendees on board after the speakers and before the sponsors. (To attract attendees, you’ll have to use marketing, which I describe in section 4.)
3. Sponsors come towards the end of the process, since their willingness to support you depends on all your previous planning, namely the quality of your speakers and the number of attendees (at least as measured via an interest form, if not fully signed up). If you play your cards right, sponsorship payments can be arranged surprisingly quickly — so it’s okay to save this part of the process until the end.¹

Note: Implementing this order may lead to some odd-feeling intermediate stages in the planning process (e.g. opening attendee sign-ups for a daylong event before you’ve received enough sponsorships to order catering). But unless your sponsors are extraordinarily generous or your attendees are very trusting, the speakers–attendees–sponsors order emerges as a necessary consequence of each group’s priorities.

3. Keep processes to essentials only

As you’re building a big event, your team needs some internal processes to keep track of the work you’re doing… but not so many that you get bogged down in unnecessary work and forsake the unique advantages of a lean team.

The most important whole-team processes are weekly meetings and speaker outreach, which I’ll discuss below.²

Meetings

If your team’s schedules are anything like ours were this semester, you’ll do most of your organizing work asynchronously and only have an hour-long meeting each week to sync up on your progress. This hour is invaluable for its potential to accelerate your team’s progress through collaboration, so it should be treated as such.

To make sure you use your meeting time effectively, I’d recommend creating an agenda a few days before each meeting and distributing it to your team members, encouraging them to add items they want the group to discuss. At the beginning of each meeting, go through the agenda and decide which items are the most essential for the whole team during that hour. Any topics you didn’t get to during a meeting should be taken offline, to be addressed by the relevant team members over the following days.

Speaker outreach

By now, it should come as no surprise that speaker outreach is one of the first and most important processes for your team to tackle. Therefore, a good system for tracking outreach across different team members is essential.

I recommend a spreadsheet where you keep the potential speakers sorted by company name, so that nobody accidentally reaches out to the same person twice. Some other good pieces of information to track for each speaker include:

• Which team member is in contact
• What method of communication you’re using with the speaker (email, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Status of the outreach so far
• Date you last made contact
• Notes about your interactions

This info helps your team follow up appropriately with speakers who haven’t responded to your emails, which can be make-or-break in scoring important names for your conference. (The speakers who excite your team the most are probably very busy people, so they might not always respond to the first message you send!)

4. Market aggressively

Despite how it may seem after you’ve worked on your event for two months, your ideal attendee base won’t “just know” that the conference is happening if you don’t market it to them. More bluntly, your marketing strategy will entirely determine how many attendees you bring in, so marketing must be a core competency within your organizing team and a top priority leading up to the conference.

As a demonstration of the importance of marketing, take a look at how our interested attendees found out about Emergent:

Of the 482 people who filled out our attendee interest form, only 103 heard about us by word of mouth — and of those, just 36 specifically mentioned one of our organizers’ names in their response. The other 446 heard about the event from someone other than the eight of us. In other words, over 90% of the interest in our conference came from marketing.

For Emergent, the most successful marketing channels were cross-promotions with relevant student clubs and physical postering around campus. While results will be different for every event, my guess is those top channels generalize pretty well — at least for conferences in a university setting.

And although we did sell out the conference’s 300-person auditorium, it’s possible that we still didn’t do enough marketing! After the conference, several close friends expressed that their only critique of Emergent was that not enough people knew about it. I also heard cases of people who squarely fell within our target demographic not finding out about the event until after it already happened. Despite all our marketing, we clearly hadn’t reached everyone in our audience. For future conferences, it’ll be worth exploring additional channels like departments’ email lists and announcement boards.

5. Stick the landing

At this point, all the pieces are in place. You’ve recruited an excellent group of speakers, sold out your auditorium, and gotten sponsorships to cover your costs. You’ve ordered food for everyone to eat and merch for everyone to wear, organized the logistics for attendees to move between conference spaces, and done a million other small things to prepare for the big day.

Now, all that’s left is to nail the execution. Here are a few suggestions:

Assign each speaker a point person from your team. Ideally someone who they’ve talked to during the organizing process, but it can really be anyone. Speakers will appreciate having their point person’s phone number and email in case they need to get in touch for any reason. (This is especially true for speakers who may not be familiar with your campus/venue.)

Assemble an army of willing volunteers. Your volunteers will be your “event staff,” taking care of the responsibilities that need a lot of hands on deck — such as checking attendees in and directing them between conference spaces during the event. To ensure that your volunteers have a good experience:

• Make their jobs as clear and simple as possible. Each volunteer should know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing at any point throughout the day.
• Assign one point person from your team for the whole group of volunteers, in case any questions come up.
• Treat your volunteers well! They plan an integral role in making sure the event goes smoothly — so slide them some event merch and make sure they have the opportunity to grab some catering during the lunch period.

Get ready… Get a good night’s sleep before the big day. Breathe — You got this!

Go! Deliver your opening remarks and set the day in motion. Since your volunteers are taking care of tasks like checking in attendees and picking up catering from restaurants, your organizing team will be free to manage the big picture of the day and put out any fires that arise. Because our event was spread across two buildings on Brown’s campus, our team also found it helpful to location-share throughout the day-of, so we could quickly tell who was where at any given time.

Celebrate! (And post-mortem)

Congratulations — You just organized an awesome event! You’ll probably be very tired at this point, so first and foremost take a day to relax and recover. Then, have your team send out thank you cards or emails to all the speakers, volunteers, and everyone else who made the day possible. You can even thank each other :)

Once you’ve adjusted back to your normal schedule after working overtime on the conference during the days and weeks leading up to the event, take some time with your team to celebrate the victories. You should also hold a post-mortem meeting to cement your learning for iterations of the conference yet to come. Our post-mortem is coming up in a few days.

After that, you’re done! Cherish the good times you spent with your team planning the conference, and take pride in the fact that you just put on an awesome event and made memories for hundreds of people.

Are you organizing a conference, or just curious to hear more about the process behind Emergent? Please get in touch — I’d love to chat!