
Emergent Ventures's Unconference vs. normal academic conferences - jseliger
https://www.craigpalsson.com/2019/09/16/unconference-more-like-funconference/
======
shafyy
Thanks for the write-up, Craig!

I'm an EV grantee as well and what was interesting is that all of the grantees
were kind of "fringe" in what they were doing, and I think that's on purpose.

It was a great atmosphere, and as Craig described it didn't matter if you were
18 or 50 years old, or if you had a PhD from Harvard or were a college drop-
out author.

I imagine that this is what the first couple of YC batches also must have felt
like (of course I can't know :-) )

I'm excited to see what this group of people will go on to do, and think that
Tyler picked the grantees exteremly well.

------
mlthoughts2018
I don’t like conferences or unconferences. But I find conferences at least
bearable whereas unconferences are egregiously unbearable. The scale of
political gamesmanship and signalling is just exhausting especially when it is
dressed up in so much self-unaware insistence that it’s totally not just
political networking or signalling. It has the same vibe to me as cultish
start-ups.

Conferences are often quite bad too. But I’ll take the structured interaction
any time. The structure and scheduled topical constraints make it better, not
worse. The problems that mainstream conferences have are not things that self-
organizing look-how-salt-of-the-earth-we-are-just-having-a-potluck-or-hacking-
in-a-garage “enlightenment” attitudes can solve.

