Agenda

• [A] Manifold’s overall take — super, super positive & grateful. This went amazing, and likely wouldn’t have happened at all without Lightcone
  • Venue was great ofc, decor, setup, “Conferences are about corridors and the venue was corridor++” from feedback form
  • Having people stay over was great (like having a conference at a hotel, but not stuffy)
  • Having a bunch of logistical details worked out through hired staff (ZeroCater, ServiceStaff) was great, reduced scope of volunteers
  • Lightcone team was super supportive over the weekend for miscellaneous tasks
  • Austin’s Feedback for Lightcone
• [O] My overall take – Overall loved the event, and had a great time when I had time to participate in the event. We had some stress on our side with M feeling overwhelmed with a bunch of campus responsibilities + other things in her life, so that created a bunch of stress on our side, but I think that wasn’t downstream of things you did.
  • I really liked the non-self-conscious vibe of the vent. Felt like a celebration of a bunch of things I really care about, whereas a lot of events in the EA space often feel like people acting out of obligation.
  • The security stuff was definitely quite costly on our sanity and time, but not sure what to do about it. I think we roughly made the right tradeoffs, though with these kind of tail-risk loaded things it’s hard to get calibrated.
  • I think stress wise, only knowing which rooms you need for the event on Tuesday before was somewhat costly. Made it harder for us to ensure we have adequate rooming, and made game-planning for the event worse.
  • We ended up investing a bunch more staff time than I had originally budgeted into this, partly because we were excited about this event, and partly because we wanted to leave a good impression with attendees which could help jumpstart the venue. This did cause additional costs that means we’ll overall have very close to 0 profit margin on the event (though like, the effects on future revenue will very likely be quite positive, so in-expectation this still checks out in terms of profit, though I would have preferred the world where we end up immediately jumping to a more sustainable level)
• [s]
  • my overall take is “anything is possible with competent people” — i just had an overwhelming sense of competence almost every time i was working with y’all. that made almost everything else much, much easier, more effective, and generally less stressful. some examples:
    • orange man
    • when checking guests into their rooms wasn’t working, y’all fixed it like instantly
    • ehssan was amazing at getting me stuff when i needed it
  • the venue itself is fucking gorgeous. i heard something like that ~2/3 of the time as i was walking guests of honor in & giving them a tour. something like “wow, how did you find this place?” or “damn, you guys got a good spot.”
  • it was a little unclear to me exactly what was expected of manifold to do, and exactly what was expected of lightcone to do. this seems like it was a result of each of our first times running an event like this, which seems pretty reasonable. i also don’t think this ended up being significantly bad — at least not for the manifold team, but it might’ve been for the lightcone team.
  • it felt like there were a lot of small hiccups wrt this being the first event that LH has run of this size; these didn’t feel like overwhelmingly bad things, more just things that were a bit annoying. some examples:
    • not having any maps for attendees to wayfind (and not letting us make any, which is fair, but nonetheless annoying)
    • not having a system set up for checking guests in to their rooms
    • not clear comms (slack? discord? walkie-talkie?)
    • photo policies
      • [O]: Curious what photo policies we actually settled on in the end.
        • [sm] same — even the fact that neither of us are completely sure is kinda annoying for both of us!
      • [A]: My understanding is roughly “photographs will be taken and posted online; some participants with a no-photo tag on badges are requesting not to be photo’d; we’ll wall off sections that shouldn’t be photo-ed”
  • i’m like almost certain that the same is true of this being the first event that manifold has run of this size, but i’m sure oli will have more insight into examples & how bad it was that we didn’t have tons of experience in event-planning with stuff of this size.
  • small thing, but: it was pretty awkward to use the ward house & gardens. it felt like there was ~1/8th of the grounds that we just… barely used. i think a good chunk of the reason this is the case is that it was really annoying for guests to access it — they’d have to go behind E (which is like impossible to find) or through E (which rarely was possible, since all the main talks were going on in E). this feels like something lightcone might want to figure out re: making the gardens (which are absolutely lovely!) more accessible from the main area.
  • all of the ^above^ is like 75% of my thoughts. i’ll make a discord thread to capture my remaining thoughts in the next week-or-so, and share the details when i remember them all.
• Feedback for Manifold?
  • I think Manifold having not run conferences of this size wasn’t a huge problem for actual competence on day off, but I think was part of what created confusing interfaces for who was owning what responsibilities. It’s really helpful to be able to concretely point to the interfaces that other spaces provided, and to be able to say “yeah, we are going to provide a similar service level to that”, which is much easier to point to than to actually break down all the individual responsibilities.
  • Last-minute afterparty was pretty costly for us, but IMO worth it for you. Just meant that we needed to have someone stay up pretty late, and Sunday-night is particularly risky in terms of noise complaints. Seemed overall fine, but would have been a bunch more chill with more advance planning.

Discussion

• Cause of some badness
  • Much larger than usual number of handoffs. Oli ⇒ M ⇒ Oli
  • Sat morning: M — too much going on, I’m clocking off
  • Th/Fri/Sat: M reduced responsibilities, to see what might work
• In the weeks leading up to the event, Who was Saul talking to? [S] “Honestly don’t remember”
• Oli: set up goal of making breakeven from room bookings.
  • Would like to use more rooms as bedrooms for profit, but have enough rooms to know to run the event
  • Timing costed effort in the last week
  • Knowing 5 days earlier would have been helpful
• [S] Felt like we were figuring out structural things “what kind of events, etc” last minute
• Good: 2-3h sync up on stages.
  • Didn’t happen because Oli was busy doing product redevelopment

Next steps

• Settling on payment total
  • 15k agreement
  • -2.5k journalist policy
  • 2k Cleanup
  • 3.4k on Sun afternoon, Snacks
  • ~15-20k Payment for Guests of honor rooming
  • ~2k on guards
  • (anything else?)
• damages
  • lightcone owns general wear & tear damages. for any significant damage that’s due to poor organization/etc on the part of manifold, lightcone consults with manifold to figure out damage policies.
• Promoting Lighthaven?
  • Get up a website with basic pieces of info
    • Oli to post a link to website so people can reach out
    • Most promotion will happen by word of mouth. People live in bay, talk to friend, reach out
  • Respond if someone asks —
  • Austin to write a testimonial at some point

Random

• Is Lighthaven going to be profitable…?
  • Seemed actually expensive for all this nice stuff
  • Novelty might wear off?
  • Not that much marketing going on
  • [Oli] SERI MATS - 600k
    • 1.7m total costs, goal to bring in 1m revenue, 700k loss (including campus staff time, serviceleader time)
    • How to help Lightcone: conference space is heavy-tailed and expensive. if any corporate org had run this event, probably paid around 400-700k.
    • If we hit those events, 5-10m of profit seems possible (though unlikely). Will this happen?
• Lighthaven vs Lesswrong focus?
  • Plans for Lighthaven set back — 1-2y had a concrete vision for an in-person community, based on Bay Area EA culture. Post-FTX, not going to accelerate that as much
  • Focus on Lesswrong — that’s the cultural anchorstone, to make a positive difference, make a stronger cultural seed
• The space is kinda too big a lot of the time
  • [Oli] Bought too much food
  • Definitely could have fit 600, maybe 1000 comfortably
  • Also — walking around finding people seems kind of bad