The recipe for a festival with a median score of 10/10
How a “tiny company can produce such a big good conference in a short time very cheap” — mqp
- Pick the right venue: Lighthaven
- Manifest only happened because Lighthaven existed. I’d been at the Berkeley ACX Meetup May 6th at the venue, and at some point thought “huh, it’d probably be pretty easy to do a conference here”, so reached out to Oli to see if it’d be possible.
- “The best part of conferences are about the corridor and Lighthaven is corridor++” — lots of nooks and crannies
- Rob Miles: The Lightcone team dogfoods Lighthaven, they work there every day
- And we also get the incredible Lightcone team as partners
- Pick the right organizers
- Saul Munn. Took a chance on Saul since he presented as very competent in 2 video calls, extraordinarily so for a college freshman. One of my best bets ever.
- Up until a month before, was just Saul + Austin both planning this in our spare time
- David Chee. I’m not sure if I ever formally asked for help, David just stepped up once it started looking like things were expanding beyond our original vision
- Any event is a lot of work! Good to have 3 co-organizers all pitching in
- Rachel Shu. An experienced videographer with high context on both prediction markets & the Lighthaven venue; irreplaceable expertise.
- Brooke Bowman. We brought her on as a way-overqualified community contact person (having the CEO of Vibecamp helping with ops is like having Stephen King writing your website copy), and then she served as pinch-hitter when things got busy
- Invite the right guests
- The people make the conference. Seriously though, I spent like 70% of my Manifest time prep time on just contacting folks and pleading with them to come.
- Speakers: had a huge list of “huh, I obsessively read this person’s writing, wouldn’t it be awesome if they showed up?”
- The speaker bios then build up a ton of excitement (another learning from Future Forum)
- Discretionary invites: all of the cool folks I’d met in SF & Berkeley who I thought should meet each other, even if they knew nothing about forecasting. I spent like a day just going through all my personal contacts and seeing which might be good fits
- Manifold & prediction markets are catnip for interesting folks, and has a strong network of folks on the site and Discord
- Make a festival for Austin
- “Make a product you yourself would want to use” - In this case, the event I myself would want to attend
- “Halfway between EAG and Vibecamp”. Intellectual, but also fun.
- Reflects the broader Manifold site — sometimes serious forecasting and sometimes rationalussy
- Decentralized ethos, lots of attendee participation
- Key learning from running Future Forum - attendee-run stuff was awesome, make sure to facilitate that
- People can be more creative than you can be
- Lots of space & time for people to just hang out in small groups and chat
Manifest drama
Manifest fun in photos
- ??? orgy?
- Wrestling match
- Aella’s sex market
- Ball pit