Thanks for writing this up Amy! You and the EA Global team did an amazing job.
One comment/question on location and finance, sparked by Luke’s comment.
My girlfriend (Gina) organized a one day vegan Fest with 4,000 people here in Madison Wisconsin, for which the venue (including AV) was around $5,000. The event was one third as long as EA Global, but there were three times as many people; eyeballing your graph above and assuming those factors cancel out would imply that events in the Bay Area cost eight times more. Let’s just be conservative and say it’s a 5X increase, which would change your $150,000 food and venue budget to $30,000 for a savings of $120,000.
If 10% of the conference is people who lived in the Bay Area and wouldn’t otherwise come to EA Global, you could buy them round trip plane tickets to come to Madison (currently around $300 each) and still have a savings of $90,000. (You could actually buy them all first class tickets, and still save money.) And of course lodging would similarly be a lot cheaper etc.
I don’t think Madison is particularly unusual – I would guess that most medium-sized cities have venues which can hold a couple thousand people for similar prices.
The EA Global team did an amazing job: if you hadn’t put in a lot of work doing things like partnering with the student group the price difference would probably be way more. But there’s only so much you can do while still being in the bay – have you considered a lower cost location?
Thanks for the feedback! We’d absolutely be open to holding the event in a low-cost location if community members indicate that they are willing to make the trip and it makes sense in terms of expected savings (I have added this to the survey form). Based on my experience running events in various locations—NYC, Bay Area, SLC, and Michigan—the 5X estimate seems high, but there is definitely a meaningful difference and this could be a good idea. I live in Detroit, Michigan, and I expect that with my connections in the local community I would be able to get access to venues and catering at reduced rates. Aside from the fear that EAs would not make the trip, my biggest concern with having an event here, or in another medium-sized city with a relatively low number of EAs, is the cost to the EA community in terms of lost time spent traveling. Oliver Habryka has done Fermi estimates on the costs and it seems that even with conservative estimates of the value of each individual’s time, the costs likely outweigh the potential savings.
Time spent traveling ~ 20 hours per person (Seems a bit high)
Value of time: $30 per hour (this seems high to me, though I know others claim $50-100. Either way, your conservative estimate shouldn’t be higher than $30, I would think.)
Total: $60,000
It still seems like you’d be saving money according to Ben’s calculation.
(It’s definitely possible though that the time costs would discourage people from attending, resulting in less applications/attendees.)
I would expect that if we were to hold the event in Madison or a similar location, that a much larger percentage of the attendees than 10% would have to travel. My rough guess based on the distribution EAs around the globe, is that if we would want to get a good share of the community to attend, then at least 50% of attendees would have to travel to Madison.
My usual estimates in time costs usually ran into something around the $200,000 - $400,000 range for having the event in a more remote location, usually with a fairly low bound on how much people value their time (i.e. $20 or so), which would fit well with your estimate, when you increase the percentage of attendees who would have to travel.
I would also expect in practice that because of the heavy-tail distributed nature of income in the community (and the population at large) that the actual value of the average person’s time would be a good bit higher than the value of the median person, which is where my $20 intuition would come from. So I am not that sure whether $30 is actually high. My guess is that it would still be an underestimate, though I wouldn’t be confident. (E.g. if Dustin Moskovitz wants to attend, he is pretty justified in valuing his time at something on the order of $1,000 - $10,000 an hour, and weaker version of this are true for many other high-earning members of the community.)
I do think that ~20 hours in travel costs seems a bit high, but something on the order of ~10 hours is probably correct.
But remember nearly everyone who does not live in the Bay Area would have to travel a shorter distance. What about Denver, which is low-cost location and also low-cost flights?
One thing I noticed while trying to find a city for a meeting of a group of people scattered across the US and UK: smaller cities are more expensive and more time-consuming to fly to from outside the country. For example, there are no nonstop flights from Berlin to Denver. Even places that are airport hubs within the US, like Atlanta, are not particularly good destinations if you’re coming internationally.
It’s much easier to find cheap, nonstop flights between major cities. Not that this is a dealbreaker, but it is something we consider.
The question isn’t “How many people have to travel”, but “How many people have to travel who otherwise would not have to”, which basically reduces to “How many people are coming from the Bay Area”. I’ll admit that I don’t really know that number, but it seems implausible that it’s 50%.
(I could believe that it’s 50% for the last EA Global, but I expect that a lot of people showed up because it was so close to them, and so we’d get less of those people but more of other people who live closer to the chosen venue.)
In addition, as Denkenberger said, any participants from the US East Coast or Europe would travel less.
Good point about the heavy-tail distribution for time value, I hadn’t thought about that. I agree that taking that into account $30 may not actually be too high. (Although travel time is not completely wasted, you can work along the way.)
Thanks for writing this up Amy! You and the EA Global team did an amazing job.
One comment/question on location and finance, sparked by Luke’s comment.
My girlfriend (Gina) organized a one day vegan Fest with 4,000 people here in Madison Wisconsin, for which the venue (including AV) was around $5,000. The event was one third as long as EA Global, but there were three times as many people; eyeballing your graph above and assuming those factors cancel out would imply that events in the Bay Area cost eight times more. Let’s just be conservative and say it’s a 5X increase, which would change your $150,000 food and venue budget to $30,000 for a savings of $120,000.
If 10% of the conference is people who lived in the Bay Area and wouldn’t otherwise come to EA Global, you could buy them round trip plane tickets to come to Madison (currently around $300 each) and still have a savings of $90,000. (You could actually buy them all first class tickets, and still save money.) And of course lodging would similarly be a lot cheaper etc.
I don’t think Madison is particularly unusual – I would guess that most medium-sized cities have venues which can hold a couple thousand people for similar prices.
The EA Global team did an amazing job: if you hadn’t put in a lot of work doing things like partnering with the student group the price difference would probably be way more. But there’s only so much you can do while still being in the bay – have you considered a lower cost location?
Thanks for the feedback! We’d absolutely be open to holding the event in a low-cost location if community members indicate that they are willing to make the trip and it makes sense in terms of expected savings (I have added this to the survey form). Based on my experience running events in various locations—NYC, Bay Area, SLC, and Michigan—the 5X estimate seems high, but there is definitely a meaningful difference and this could be a good idea. I live in Detroit, Michigan, and I expect that with my connections in the local community I would be able to get access to venues and catering at reduced rates. Aside from the fear that EAs would not make the trip, my biggest concern with having an event here, or in another medium-sized city with a relatively low number of EAs, is the cost to the EA community in terms of lost time spent traveling. Oliver Habryka has done Fermi estimates on the costs and it seems that even with conservative estimates of the value of each individual’s time, the costs likely outweigh the potential savings.
10% of attendees = 100 people
Time spent traveling ~ 20 hours per person (Seems a bit high)
Value of time: $30 per hour (this seems high to me, though I know others claim $50-100. Either way, your conservative estimate shouldn’t be higher than $30, I would think.)
Total: $60,000
It still seems like you’d be saving money according to Ben’s calculation.
(It’s definitely possible though that the time costs would discourage people from attending, resulting in less applications/attendees.)
I would expect that if we were to hold the event in Madison or a similar location, that a much larger percentage of the attendees than 10% would have to travel. My rough guess based on the distribution EAs around the globe, is that if we would want to get a good share of the community to attend, then at least 50% of attendees would have to travel to Madison.
My usual estimates in time costs usually ran into something around the $200,000 - $400,000 range for having the event in a more remote location, usually with a fairly low bound on how much people value their time (i.e. $20 or so), which would fit well with your estimate, when you increase the percentage of attendees who would have to travel.
I would also expect in practice that because of the heavy-tail distributed nature of income in the community (and the population at large) that the actual value of the average person’s time would be a good bit higher than the value of the median person, which is where my $20 intuition would come from. So I am not that sure whether $30 is actually high. My guess is that it would still be an underestimate, though I wouldn’t be confident. (E.g. if Dustin Moskovitz wants to attend, he is pretty justified in valuing his time at something on the order of $1,000 - $10,000 an hour, and weaker version of this are true for many other high-earning members of the community.)
I do think that ~20 hours in travel costs seems a bit high, but something on the order of ~10 hours is probably correct.
But remember nearly everyone who does not live in the Bay Area would have to travel a shorter distance. What about Denver, which is low-cost location and also low-cost flights?
One thing I noticed while trying to find a city for a meeting of a group of people scattered across the US and UK: smaller cities are more expensive and more time-consuming to fly to from outside the country. For example, there are no nonstop flights from Berlin to Denver. Even places that are airport hubs within the US, like Atlanta, are not particularly good destinations if you’re coming internationally.
It’s much easier to find cheap, nonstop flights between major cities. Not that this is a dealbreaker, but it is something we consider.
Boston does pretty well on the metrics of cost-to-fly and ease-of-flying from various places in the US and Europe.
(Not that I’m biased or anything...)
Sorry, totally missed the response here.
The question isn’t “How many people have to travel”, but “How many people have to travel who otherwise would not have to”, which basically reduces to “How many people are coming from the Bay Area”. I’ll admit that I don’t really know that number, but it seems implausible that it’s 50%.
(I could believe that it’s 50% for the last EA Global, but I expect that a lot of people showed up because it was so close to them, and so we’d get less of those people but more of other people who live closer to the chosen venue.)
In addition, as Denkenberger said, any participants from the US East Coast or Europe would travel less.
Good point about the heavy-tail distribution for time value, I hadn’t thought about that. I agree that taking that into account $30 may not actually be too high. (Although travel time is not completely wasted, you can work along the way.)
Interesting, I hadn’t thought about the cost of time spent traveling. Thanks!