Faster than you can say “Can I borrow your copy of ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People,’” it’s tech conference season again. There hasn’t been a week during the month of May where I haven’t attended a tech conference or traveled to something tech conference-related. And judging by Techmeme’s events calendar the state of affairs only gets worse as we get deeper into summer.
Between Disrupt NYC last week, D10 tomorrow, NY Founders and Le Web London in June, Allen & Co, Sun Valley in July, the CrunchUp in August and TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September, the tech community is pretty much spending the next couple of months checking in and out of airports on Foursquare, Path, Instagram or whatever their social/mobile/local drug of choice currently is.
In between this barrage of formal tech conferences, I briefly popped into F50 earlier this month … Founders Fund’s first attempt at a tech conference, F50 is the ultimate “un-conference,” where fifty of the technology industry’s “most promising” engineers and entrepreneurs were brought together on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Founders Fund partner Bruce Gibney called it “intellectual exchange without the structural nightmare that’s gone up around it” and INC magazine dubbed it, “The Most Exclusive Tech Conference Ever?”
The elite group of fifty technologists were hand-selected by the Founders Fund partners and sent invites to save the dates between Friday May 11th and Sunday the 13th. Those from out of town were flown out to SF and put up for Thursday night at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, and both the East Coasters and the West Coasters were picked up by black car or bus and taken to Oakland’s Private Airport on Friday.
There they met the other F50ers for the first time, in addition to about a dozen Founders Fund friends and mentors, and all traded in their fancy steel invites for a spot on one of two planes. None of the attendees knew exactly who else was on the trip or who they were flying with prior to their arrival and the group didn’t even know their destination as they boarded the jets.
The seating on the private flight was arranged, and upon each seat was a personalized engraved iPad, complete with a .pdf deck of photos and bios of the rest of the attendees. While Founders Fund won’t let me publish the full list, it was very thorough and ran the gamut of world-changing innovators — from a guy with a serious plan to cure Cancer to a rocket engineer to a 3-D printer with a gaggle of rockstar computer scientist thrown in for good measure.
Also worth noting: Founders Fund footed the bill for the entire fifty, turning the traditional model of “conference as a business” onto its axis (Note: As the only press invited I flew in coach and Aol paid most of my way). “Invest early and often” at its most extreme.
Aboard the incoming flight, the menu was geek-themed, and guests could choose from the paleo friendly “Contemporary Nerd” (Filet Mignon and Tomato Basil salad), “Classic Nerd” (Pizza Pockets, Chicken Nuggets, Pringles and Red Bull) and “Vegan” (Pasta with Grilled Vegetables in an herbed Olive oil) meals. I guess whoever set up the menu thought vegan was nerdy enough to stand on its own.
In order to encourage interaction between the attendees, Founders Fund made everyone switch seats halfway through the flight. In addition, Founders Fund partner Auren Hoffman, who has an obsession with questions apparently, had written out an ice-breaker question tailored to each attendee’s interest next to the iPads, like “What could be invented if energy were freely available everywhere?,” How will the human body change over the next thirty years, and how should we change it?” and “What turns human passion into money?”
(Mine, which Hoffman handed to me the next night, was appropriately enough, “What makes you weird?”).
After the very informal in-flight networking, the plane landed on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, and, finally finding out their destination, the fifty were driven to the Four Seasons, where they disembarked and picked up a simple swag bag filled with orange flip-flops and F50 t-shirts. They then were herded to a dinner where the conversations between these brilliant young minds were spearheaded by either a Founders Fund member or mentor at each table.
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