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.
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.