Well said!
Unfortunately, I think the uncertainty we all face goes even deeper. There’s no EA sorting hat, and there’s also no one who can tell you whether you really made the right call or had the kind of impact you wanted to have. No one will find you after your career, shake your hand and offer you an impact scorecard.
Maybe it’s a bit easier to figure this out, because you can look at the work you’ve done, estimate some counterfactuals and weigh it up yourself, but I also see some people saying things like “I got the EA-aligned job someone recommended, so hooray I’m now having a bunch of impact”. Maybe! But hard to say, and I recommend getting comfortable with that uncertainty.
Good question! Yes, TL;DR large venues in major US/UK cities are more expensive per-attendee than smaller venues in other cities.
Eli covered this a bit in our last post about costs. There aren’t that many venues big enough for EA Globals, and the venues that are big enough force you to use their in-house catering company, generally have a minimum mandatory spend, and significantly mark up the costs of their services. Our best guesses at why (from Eli’s post):
I suspect straightforward lack of competition also plays a role. As an extreme example, if there’s only one venue in a city large enough for conferences and you want to run a conference there, they can basically charge what they want to.
Meanwhile, venues that can host 200–600 people (EAGx events) are easier to come by. EAGx organizers often secure university venues which are cheap but often more difficult to work with. Location does play a role, of course. You may not be surprised to learn that Mexico City, Bangalore and Berlin are cheaper than Oakland, London and Boston. But we also hosted events in Sydney and Copenhagen this year, so I think the above cost vs. size factor / availability of space plays a bigger role.
I do want to add that we are consistently impressed by EAGx and EA Summit organizers when it comes to resourcefulness and the LTR scores they generate given the lower CPA. The EA Brazil Summit team, for example, had food donated by the Brazilian Vegetarian Society. The bar for hustling in service of impact is continuously being raised, and we hustle on.
(Other team members or EAGx organizers should feel free to jump in here and push back / add more details.)