Thread by @DavidFBailey

Some inside baseball:
@TheBitcoinConf cost us $30m+ to produce. That’s effectively a Series C funding round spent over 4 days 🤯🤮. We were def ripped off on some things, but w/o our team’s creative problem solving we could have easily spent $50m… some lessons worth sharing:

1. Economies of scale don’t exist past a certain point. We doubled attendees but 4x costs! Few vendors are capable of scaling that big, they need more lead time to execute, they can’t float you so most expenses are prepaid, regulations have a price tag and are strictly enforced…

2. Inflation, broken supply chains, and labor shortages are rampant. All these issues are made worse with magnitude and they compound each other. In one case we were forced to pay upfront nearly $200/hr for unskilled union labor and they didn’t even show up! Insane!

3a. Forecasting is hard, especially with limited data and the unpredictability of Bitcoin. Forecast too big, go bust. Too small, huge opp cost/bad margins. On $30m budget, 20% error=$6m… almost an entire year of payroll for us. If you’re gonna make big bets you…

3b. You gotta have the balance sheet to handle margin for error, otherwise you can’t assess risk and “small” decisions become bet-the-company decisions. We wagered our entire balance sheet to host #Bitcoin2022. If we’re gonna 2x again next year we need to 4x our treasury… YOLO

4. Cash flow is king. Daily cash management sharpens your focus and drives hard convos. We scheduled out all our payables, scrutinized every outbound wire, and reworked product elements so we could balance money in/out. We collected 99.5% of receivables before Day 1 of the conf!

5. Collectively this event had tens of thousands of invoices and line items. Unbelievably proud of what our team, vendors, sponsors, speakers, community pulled off. Especially thankful for @jadooch23 for executing one the worlds largest events in 3 years with ZERO event exp. ❤️❤️