Hi, I’m Patrick Finley. I want to chime in here, because I think there’s a number of fairly ridiculous claims below about Future Forum (in addition to the original post). I also think Isaak’s response above is overly generous/conservative, and want to share my opinions on just how far the delta is between this post+comments and reality.
I attended Future Forum and it was easily the best conference/event I’ve been to in Bay Area in the vectors that matter (ie, quality of conversations, people, speakers, new connections, etc) and frankly its not close (I’ve been to EAGs & others). I don’t mean this as a knock to others (the standard at EA&adjacent events seems pretty good), rather this was unusually great.
The negatives I heard during the event and afterwards were about behind the scenes stuff that didn’t seem to affect the actual value to attendees much (including the below). Eg I was at a hotel, and had a nice comfy bus take me to a new venue bc of issues w/ neighborhood. Not sure how this makes the event worse if you’re talking about the purpose of the event vs things that don’t matter for attendees.
The event went from idea to reality in like 3 months. Isaak founded a team, fundraised and ran it in that time. IMO it was the most talent dense event I have seen. Isaak was 20 and had moved to the US like 2 months before founding. If your takeaway is “Isaak & team now have a bad reputation”, I think you need to re-examine your talent/reputation model.
“organizer asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work”—this seems to refer directly to Isaak. I watched most of the talks he mediated, and didn’t find this to be true at all. Perhaps this comes from, for example, experienced AI folks not realizing the questions needed to also cater to people new to AI. Something like ~half of FF attendees weren’t from an “EA” background.
FWIW I know some of the speakers and can personally attest the ones I know claimed to be personally impressed with Isaak. Anyone who’s spoken to Isaak knows he’s well capable of asking the right questions, and the take that he asked a bunch of dumb and basic questions can be debunked pretty quickly by talking to him for ~10m.
(also IMHO this is kind of an aggressive statement from someone who didn’t attend)
Doing great things tends to involve surprises and constant failures along the way, I think some folks below might be miscalibrated on what that looks like. Neighbors started a big fire, and the FF team moved the 300 person event to a big venue in San Francisco over night. When I heard this it was a massive positive update on the future forum team. That is seriously impressive.
The team pulling all-nighters to make this happen is exactly what building great things looks like—I’m confident if you polled the volunteers & core team you’d find a majority answer something like “it was one of the best experiences of my life” (this is a bold claim—fact check me). Note this is different from an unhealthy culture that tries to work people to death constantly for no good reason. It’s a strong signal that much of the team decided to pull an all-nighter to make the conference great. See https://patrickcollison.com/fast
“organizers were so bad, people had to step in to clean up their mess.
To me, event bad = the value was poor. ie, people didn’t show up, bad speakers, waste of time. This did not happen, and doubt almost anyone who attended would feel it did.
Comment below says people stopped showing up after day 1/many people didn’t return bc no value. This is not true, perhaps ask folks who attended. It’s normal for a conference to not have regular full-capacity attendance the whole time, especially when its 4 days. Future Forum seemed full & busy the entire time throughout to me.
Noting the neogenesis house has parties a lot, both before and after Future Forum. Given that data, the neighborhood complaints/police stuff were surprising, and not obvious to predict. Handled shockingly well. (At the time I thought, “eh, I would’ve seen that coming”, now having been to neogenesis many times, I would not have seen that coming—they have large gatherings a lot without issue. I admit the FF fire was surprising in retrospect)
Retroactive funding claim seems to be just false without any supporting logic? Unless I’m missing somewhere that might’ve led one to think there was retroactive funding?
Noting I also think retroactive funding when surprises come up is not necessarily some awful thing. If it had been that FF saw a big prob and desperately needed help, I think it makes total sense to help them (ie I think “let it fail” is a terrible approach) -- this is not the same as making it standard to expect bailouts...
Only gonna slightly chime in on original post’s main point—the whole relationships with funders thing—aside from like sexual relationships and other things mentioned, it seems pretty normal and good to have orgs build relationships with their funders… ie I don’t understand how the Holden<>Atlas thing above is an issue. I’m on board with the whole striving for a good culture thing, but some of these comments to me sound like utopia/not how the world works.
“Much more that went wrong”—just texted ~10 friends who went (many are now close friends I met at FF for the first time) and couldn’t find any other significant complaints, and all agreed venue change didn’t hurt the value to them.
Wrote this bc comments like “X had to step in and clean up their mess” seem incredibly off base. Bringing in help to put out a fire is exactly the right thing to do. Keeping in mind context—first time event, first time organizing team, incredible talent of attendees, incredibly good speakers, etc, its pretty shocking to me anyone’s takeaway could be “wow these guys made a mess and others had to clean it up for them”.
Again, IMO this was the best conference I’ve been to, but even if it weren’t, comparing this as a “mess” to EAG’s that have been going on for a long time (ie tons of experience) is kind of an odd take.
Hi, I’m Patrick Finley. I want to chime in here, because I think there’s a number of fairly ridiculous claims below about Future Forum (in addition to the original post). I also think Isaak’s response above is overly generous/conservative, and want to share my opinions on just how far the delta is between this post+comments and reality.
I attended Future Forum and it was easily the best conference/event I’ve been to in Bay Area in the vectors that matter (ie, quality of conversations, people, speakers, new connections, etc) and frankly its not close (I’ve been to EAGs & others). I don’t mean this as a knock to others (the standard at EA&adjacent events seems pretty good), rather this was unusually great.
The negatives I heard during the event and afterwards were about behind the scenes stuff that didn’t seem to affect the actual value to attendees much (including the below). Eg I was at a hotel, and had a nice comfy bus take me to a new venue bc of issues w/ neighborhood. Not sure how this makes the event worse if you’re talking about the purpose of the event vs things that don’t matter for attendees.
The event went from idea to reality in like 3 months. Isaak founded a team, fundraised and ran it in that time. IMO it was the most talent dense event I have seen. Isaak was 20 and had moved to the US like 2 months before founding. If your takeaway is “Isaak & team now have a bad reputation”, I think you need to re-examine your talent/reputation model.
“organizer asking the speakers really dumb and basic questions about their work”—this seems to refer directly to Isaak. I watched most of the talks he mediated, and didn’t find this to be true at all. Perhaps this comes from, for example, experienced AI folks not realizing the questions needed to also cater to people new to AI. Something like ~half of FF attendees weren’t from an “EA” background.
FWIW I know some of the speakers and can personally attest the ones I know claimed to be personally impressed with Isaak. Anyone who’s spoken to Isaak knows he’s well capable of asking the right questions, and the take that he asked a bunch of dumb and basic questions can be debunked pretty quickly by talking to him for ~10m.
(also IMHO this is kind of an aggressive statement from someone who didn’t attend)
Doing great things tends to involve surprises and constant failures along the way, I think some folks below might be miscalibrated on what that looks like. Neighbors started a big fire, and the FF team moved the 300 person event to a big venue in San Francisco over night. When I heard this it was a massive positive update on the future forum team. That is seriously impressive.
The team pulling all-nighters to make this happen is exactly what building great things looks like—I’m confident if you polled the volunteers & core team you’d find a majority answer something like “it was one of the best experiences of my life” (this is a bold claim—fact check me). Note this is different from an unhealthy culture that tries to work people to death constantly for no good reason. It’s a strong signal that much of the team decided to pull an all-nighter to make the conference great. See https://patrickcollison.com/fast
“organizers were so bad, people had to step in to clean up their mess.
To me, event bad = the value was poor. ie, people didn’t show up, bad speakers, waste of time. This did not happen, and doubt almost anyone who attended would feel it did.
Comment below says people stopped showing up after day 1/many people didn’t return bc no value. This is not true, perhaps ask folks who attended. It’s normal for a conference to not have regular full-capacity attendance the whole time, especially when its 4 days. Future Forum seemed full & busy the entire time throughout to me.
Noting the neogenesis house has parties a lot, both before and after Future Forum. Given that data, the neighborhood complaints/police stuff were surprising, and not obvious to predict. Handled shockingly well. (At the time I thought, “eh, I would’ve seen that coming”, now having been to neogenesis many times, I would not have seen that coming—they have large gatherings a lot without issue. I admit the FF fire was surprising in retrospect)
Retroactive funding claim seems to be just false without any supporting logic? Unless I’m missing somewhere that might’ve led one to think there was retroactive funding?
Noting I also think retroactive funding when surprises come up is not necessarily some awful thing. If it had been that FF saw a big prob and desperately needed help, I think it makes total sense to help them (ie I think “let it fail” is a terrible approach) -- this is not the same as making it standard to expect bailouts...
Only gonna slightly chime in on original post’s main point—the whole relationships with funders thing—aside from like sexual relationships and other things mentioned, it seems pretty normal and good to have orgs build relationships with their funders… ie I don’t understand how the Holden<>Atlas thing above is an issue. I’m on board with the whole striving for a good culture thing, but some of these comments to me sound like utopia/not how the world works.
“Much more that went wrong”—just texted ~10 friends who went (many are now close friends I met at FF for the first time) and couldn’t find any other significant complaints, and all agreed venue change didn’t hurt the value to them.
Wrote this bc comments like “X had to step in and clean up their mess” seem incredibly off base. Bringing in help to put out a fire is exactly the right thing to do. Keeping in mind context—first time event, first time organizing team, incredible talent of attendees, incredibly good speakers, etc, its pretty shocking to me anyone’s takeaway could be “wow these guys made a mess and others had to clean it up for them”.
Again, IMO this was the best conference I’ve been to, but even if it weren’t, comparing this as a “mess” to EAG’s that have been going on for a long time (ie tons of experience) is kind of an odd take.