It’s more about functionality and capacity than anything else. For the Bay Area, the Google campus isn’t something that’s publicly available and you need to have a way in somehow. I’m not entirely sure how we managed to get it in 2015 (that was before my time). My understanding is that EAG 2015 only had ~400 attendees, and from chatting to people who were there, it seems pretty clear that the space they had couldn’t host much more than that (though perhaps the complex has other rooms/spaces that can be used).
Re UC Berkeley, I’ll note that I still see this one as a near-viable option — the space has a bunch of issues but could work for something EAG-like in the future. With EAGs current setup it seems like it’d be tricky to fit 1500 people or more — we’d have to cut down on a lot of the sit-down seating and the number of session rooms. It’s also challenging in other ways, as a large event there could only be held at specific times of the year when school isn’t in session and the venue is also spread across several different buildings and levels. When it was used in 2016 one of CEA’s staff was a student at the university, so we got better access and reduced pricing that would be hard for us to get now. (But to clarify, I’m still somewhat excited about UC Berkeley as an option in the future.)
Re the Harvard campus, my understanding is that couldn’t fit 1500 people either — IIRC EAG Boston 2017 only had 300 people or so.
the Google campus isn’t something that’s publicly available and you need to have a way in somehow.
I expect this is true for a lot of potentially cheaper venues: because they don’t normally rent the space out to the general public you need a connection. On the other hand, there are EAs at a lot of different companies and universities, so this seems like it would often be practical?
My understanding is that EAG 2015 only had ~400 attendees, and from chatting to people who were there, it seems pretty clear that the space they had couldn’t host much more than that (though perhaps the complex has other rooms/spaces that can be used). …
My memory is that it was at the Quad campus, which has four nearly identical buildings, and we used part of one of the four? I attended a bunch of internal conferences at Google, and while none of those were quite as big as we’re talking about there were a range of different spaces. Less sure about this in the future.
Re the Harvard campus, my understanding is that couldn’t fit 1500 people either — IIRC EAG Boston 2017 only had 300 people or so.
Harvard is pretty big: we were using maybe half the Science Center. I’d expect many universities to have some place large enough for a 1500 person gathering? For Harvard, maybe Klarman Hall? But in Boston it’s probably cheaper to go with one of the less fancy universities.
I do wanna note, I thought the experience of using the google campus was much worse than many other EAGs I’ve been at – having to walk 5-10 minutes over to another part of the campus, hope that anyone else had shown up to the event I wanted to go to (which they often hadn’t) eventually left me with a learned helpnessness about trying to do anything.
There are EAs at lots of different companies/universities, but they don’t work for CEA itself. Perhaps we should be asking around to see if we could still pull this off, but I do expect coordinating with an external party to be kinda tricky and unreliable (e.g. when we used UC Berkeley, the university really didn’t want to talk to anyone at CEA other than the student in question).
I also have reservations about working with something that’s not an explicit venue-for-hire — I expect their staff to not be experienced at things like working with AV, catering, loading and unloading policies, and so on (example annoying scenario: we randomly get kicked out at 8pm because that’s when the security team close everything down but this was never communicated to us even when we asked about it).
I’m not too sure about the Google campus, and perhaps we should look into this further. I do think lots of these options would involve multiple different spaces separated by ~10 minute walks. This might be fine for veteran EAs but might come across as wacky to any more external experts we were trying to engage with.
For the Harvard campus, my understanding is that the Science Center couldn’t stretch to much more than a thousand. But yes in theory we could use multiple venues across the campus — this would likely involve coordinating and contracting with multiple parties (often the venues are managed by different groups) which is possible but not trivial. Klarman Hall appears to just be a large theater — generally schools are great at offering those but tend to be lacking in large networking/catering spaces.
However if any of the above options would be sufficiently cheap, then these downsides might be worth it, and I take your point about exploring more unconventional venue setups if it would save money (this is something that we’re planning to explore in the future).
Thanks! I appreciate you taking my questions, and I apologize for being somewhat out of touch here—I haven’t attended an EAG since Boston in 2017 and I’ve heard they’ve changed a lot.
I talked some yesterday with a friend who works in venue negotiation for conferences (mostly on the hotel side, though) and in addition to the four places you mentioned other Bay Area places he thought might work included: Fort Mason, Moscone (too big, but commonly split), Yerba Buena (but looking now seems too small), and the South San Francisco Conference Center.
Fort Mason kinda works but has a similar issue of having lots of spaces kinda spread out over a wider area (some of which are kinda hard to find). The main networking area it has is the Festival Pavilion, which is huge but is also just an empty warehouse and would probably need to be built out a bit with lighting and furniture. This venue is weird and annoying enough that I’d only go for it if it was notably cheaper, but my understanding is that it’s sort of similarly expensive to some of our other options.
Moscone is great but yeah it’s too big. To host an event there you need to commit to something like >1000 hotel rooms at their partner hotels. As you mention, you can apparently split the venue or like sub-let out rooms if a bigger event is going on. We tried investigating this for 2024 but it seemed risky (you’d sort of be at the larger events whim, and perhaps only getting confirmation very close to the dates themselves). I would be keen to investigate this further, but my guess is that it’s not likely to be worth it (unless our event got much bigger).
Yerba Buena is too small as you suggest.
South San Francisco Conference Center is also a bit too small (but closer to the necessary size than Yerba Buena). They only have three proper rooms (though these can be subdivided with air walls), the largest of which can only fit 1200 people. I would be down to use this venue if it was sufficiently cheap (we’d have to limit capacity and change the event structure a fair bit), but my sense is that it’s not quite worth it. There is an adjacent hotel (Hilton DoubleTree) that we could run a combined event with to have more session spaces, but my understanding is that this wouldn’t let us go up to 1500 people either. And then I do think the location of these two venues isn’t optimal — they’re in South San Francisco and are difficult to get to by public transit, but I’d say this is a minor concern overall.
Are the agglomeration effects such that it’s better to run a much more expensive 1500 person event rather than 3 500 person events which cost less? Maybe they wouldn’t actually cost less?
It’s still a bit unclear to me at this point whether a 1500 person event would cost less per person than three 500 person events. My current sense is that it is, but I don’t have massive confidence in our investigations here.
Re agglomeration effects, I think basically yes it’s better to run a larger event all things equal — the main benefits that come to mind are staff time and making it easier for people to coordinate and meet in larger groups (i.e. everyone you want to meet is going to the same event).
Narrowly scoped response: Harvard (primarily science center but spread to a variety of buildings a <5 min walk north) hosts a multiple-day event with over 1000 attendees every year. That event has costs that are much much much lower than what you stated here, but I have no idea if the Science Center would be willing to work with an external client.
Is this just a guess or do you have information on the actual costs of the event? (Just from their website, they seem to have various sponsors who are likely covering a substantial amount of the costs, and yes, their venue costs might be very low (or even close to zero) because Harvard/MIT are likely not charging them commercial rates, but that doesn’t give any info of the actual costs and why they would be lower than EAG costs.)
Yes I know the exact costs (from a few years ago), happy to DM. They’re charged the rate for internal use of the venue, but “internal” effectively means “there is a formal group at Harvard that plays an organizing role in your event”
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the main conclusion of this is: You can run an event much cheaper of you find an organisation that has a good event space and collaborates with you, so they charge the ‘internal’ rather than the commercial rate.
It’s more about functionality and capacity than anything else. For the Bay Area, the Google campus isn’t something that’s publicly available and you need to have a way in somehow. I’m not entirely sure how we managed to get it in 2015 (that was before my time). My understanding is that EAG 2015 only had ~400 attendees, and from chatting to people who were there, it seems pretty clear that the space they had couldn’t host much more than that (though perhaps the complex has other rooms/spaces that can be used).
Re UC Berkeley, I’ll note that I still see this one as a near-viable option — the space has a bunch of issues but could work for something EAG-like in the future. With EAGs current setup it seems like it’d be tricky to fit 1500 people or more — we’d have to cut down on a lot of the sit-down seating and the number of session rooms. It’s also challenging in other ways, as a large event there could only be held at specific times of the year when school isn’t in session and the venue is also spread across several different buildings and levels. When it was used in 2016 one of CEA’s staff was a student at the university, so we got better access and reduced pricing that would be hard for us to get now. (But to clarify, I’m still somewhat excited about UC Berkeley as an option in the future.)
Re the Harvard campus, my understanding is that couldn’t fit 1500 people either — IIRC EAG Boston 2017 only had 300 people or so.
I expect this is true for a lot of potentially cheaper venues: because they don’t normally rent the space out to the general public you need a connection. On the other hand, there are EAs at a lot of different companies and universities, so this seems like it would often be practical?
My memory is that it was at the Quad campus, which has four nearly identical buildings, and we used part of one of the four? I attended a bunch of internal conferences at Google, and while none of those were quite as big as we’re talking about there were a range of different spaces. Less sure about this in the future.
Harvard is pretty big: we were using maybe half the Science Center. I’d expect many universities to have some place large enough for a 1500 person gathering? For Harvard, maybe Klarman Hall? But in Boston it’s probably cheaper to go with one of the less fancy universities.
I do wanna note, I thought the experience of using the google campus was much worse than many other EAGs I’ve been at – having to walk 5-10 minutes over to another part of the campus, hope that anyone else had shown up to the event I wanted to go to (which they often hadn’t) eventually left me with a learned helpnessness about trying to do anything.
I experienced this at EAG London 2022 as well, as that event was spread out over multiple buildings and streets.
There are EAs at lots of different companies/universities, but they don’t work for CEA itself. Perhaps we should be asking around to see if we could still pull this off, but I do expect coordinating with an external party to be kinda tricky and unreliable (e.g. when we used UC Berkeley, the university really didn’t want to talk to anyone at CEA other than the student in question).
I also have reservations about working with something that’s not an explicit venue-for-hire — I expect their staff to not be experienced at things like working with AV, catering, loading and unloading policies, and so on (example annoying scenario: we randomly get kicked out at 8pm because that’s when the security team close everything down but this was never communicated to us even when we asked about it).
I’m not too sure about the Google campus, and perhaps we should look into this further. I do think lots of these options would involve multiple different spaces separated by ~10 minute walks. This might be fine for veteran EAs but might come across as wacky to any more external experts we were trying to engage with.
For the Harvard campus, my understanding is that the Science Center couldn’t stretch to much more than a thousand. But yes in theory we could use multiple venues across the campus — this would likely involve coordinating and contracting with multiple parties (often the venues are managed by different groups) which is possible but not trivial. Klarman Hall appears to just be a large theater — generally schools are great at offering those but tend to be lacking in large networking/catering spaces.
However if any of the above options would be sufficiently cheap, then these downsides might be worth it, and I take your point about exploring more unconventional venue setups if it would save money (this is something that we’re planning to explore in the future).
Thanks! I appreciate you taking my questions, and I apologize for being somewhat out of touch here—I haven’t attended an EAG since Boston in 2017 and I’ve heard they’ve changed a lot.
I talked some yesterday with a friend who works in venue negotiation for conferences (mostly on the hotel side, though) and in addition to the four places you mentioned other Bay Area places he thought might work included: Fort Mason, Moscone (too big, but commonly split), Yerba Buena (but looking now seems too small), and the South San Francisco Conference Center.
(Fine to stop engaging if I’m not being helpful)
No problem, all good! Re those venues:
Fort Mason kinda works but has a similar issue of having lots of spaces kinda spread out over a wider area (some of which are kinda hard to find). The main networking area it has is the Festival Pavilion, which is huge but is also just an empty warehouse and would probably need to be built out a bit with lighting and furniture. This venue is weird and annoying enough that I’d only go for it if it was notably cheaper, but my understanding is that it’s sort of similarly expensive to some of our other options.
Moscone is great but yeah it’s too big. To host an event there you need to commit to something like >1000 hotel rooms at their partner hotels. As you mention, you can apparently split the venue or like sub-let out rooms if a bigger event is going on. We tried investigating this for 2024 but it seemed risky (you’d sort of be at the larger events whim, and perhaps only getting confirmation very close to the dates themselves). I would be keen to investigate this further, but my guess is that it’s not likely to be worth it (unless our event got much bigger).
Yerba Buena is too small as you suggest.
South San Francisco Conference Center is also a bit too small (but closer to the necessary size than Yerba Buena). They only have three proper rooms (though these can be subdivided with air walls), the largest of which can only fit 1200 people. I would be down to use this venue if it was sufficiently cheap (we’d have to limit capacity and change the event structure a fair bit), but my sense is that it’s not quite worth it. There is an adjacent hotel (Hilton DoubleTree) that we could run a combined event with to have more session spaces, but my understanding is that this wouldn’t let us go up to 1500 people either. And then I do think the location of these two venues isn’t optimal — they’re in South San Francisco and are difficult to get to by public transit, but I’d say this is a minor concern overall.
Are the agglomeration effects such that it’s better to run a much more expensive 1500 person event rather than 3 500 person events which cost less? Maybe they wouldn’t actually cost less?
It’s still a bit unclear to me at this point whether a 1500 person event would cost less per person than three 500 person events. My current sense is that it is, but I don’t have massive confidence in our investigations here.
Re agglomeration effects, I think basically yes it’s better to run a larger event all things equal — the main benefits that come to mind are staff time and making it easier for people to coordinate and meet in larger groups (i.e. everyone you want to meet is going to the same event).
Narrowly scoped response: Harvard (primarily science center but spread to a variety of buildings a <5 min walk north) hosts a multiple-day event with over 1000 attendees every year. That event has costs that are much much much lower than what you stated here, but I have no idea if the Science Center would be willing to work with an external client.
Is this just a guess or do you have information on the actual costs of the event? (Just from their website, they seem to have various sponsors who are likely covering a substantial amount of the costs, and yes, their venue costs might be very low (or even close to zero) because Harvard/MIT are likely not charging them commercial rates, but that doesn’t give any info of the actual costs and why they would be lower than EAG costs.)
Yes I know the exact costs (from a few years ago), happy to DM. They’re charged the rate for internal use of the venue, but “internal” effectively means “there is a formal group at Harvard that plays an organizing role in your event”
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the main conclusion of this is: You can run an event much cheaper of you find an organisation that has a good event space and collaborates with you, so they charge the ‘internal’ rather than the commercial rate.