- Wrap-up discussion on 2024 events and their impact.
- Budget strategy for 2025 events.
- Classification of events into three budget tiers.
- Overview of planned events for 2025 across all quarters.
- Feedback and community input on proposed event plans.
- Logistics, merchandise, and community engagement.
- Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2024
- Time: 10:00 AM PT (Pacific Time)
- Recording
- Transcript
- Amanda Keay
- Adam Wozney
- Zach Horn
- Robert Del Rey
- Tyler Wright
- Julius Haus
- Joao Luna
- Pavlo Dereniuk
- Maxime Beauchamp
- Forbes Analos
- Damir Simpovic
- Rodri R
- B.S.
- Amanda Keay began with a welcome and an overview of her transition into leading event initiatives in 2024 after Adam’s paternity leave.
- Reflected on the success of 2024 events, which included 13 main conferences and six to seven sponsored booths.
- High-value conversations and robust community support were highlights.
- Budget allocation was uniform across events, which provided insights for optimizing in 2025.
- Events are categorized into three tiers:
- Tier One: High-budget, maximum presence with larger booths, sponsorships, and additional activities like side events. Example events include ETH Denver and NVIDIA Conference.
- Tier Two: Moderate sponsorships with speaking engagements and smaller booths.
- Tier Three: Low-budget attendance with speaking opportunities but no sponsorships.
- Budget concentration for tier-one events aims to maximize impact without significant budget increase.
- ETH Denver and NVIDIA in California, both categorized as tier-one events.
- Plans include larger booths, side events, and professional content creation (videography/photography).
- Token 2049 Dubai, Permissionless in Brooklyn, and Super AI Singapore.
- Introduction of "Akash Accelerate" in New York City leading up to Permissionless.
- ICML Vancouver (AI-focused), ETHCC in France, and Korea Blockchain Week.
- Token 2049 Singapore, NeurIPS (AI), KubeCon, Masari Mainnet, and Cosmoverse.
- Additional budget reserved for last-minute, high-value opportunities.
- Encouraged feedback on the event plan before finalizing in December.
- Robert Del Rey suggested including the Consensus event, which was noted for consideration.
- Discussed involving Akash insiders and community members in events.
- Emphasis on maintaining the "Akash is everywhere" sentiment at events.
- Plans for new merchandise ideas, including themed items for booths and community giveaways.
- Total budget aligns closely with 2024.
- Strategic focus on high-impact events while maintaining visibility at smaller conferences.
- Unused funds to return to the community pool.
- Amanda Keay expressed enthusiasm for 2025 and gratitude to participants for their contributions.
- Highlighted the importance of collaboration in maintaining Akash's visibility and impact at events.
- Encouraged ongoing feedback through GitHub, Telegram, or direct messages.
- Amanda Keay:
- Finalize event tiers and calendar post-feedback.
- Coordinate with community members and stakeholders on merchandise ideas.
- Ensure budget alignment with planned activities.
- Zach Horn:
- Draft GitHub discussions for community input by end of November.
- Prepare Q1 proposals for on-chain approval.
- Robert Del Rey:
- Provide additional details for the Consensus event for evaluation.
- All Participants:
- Share feedback on the proposed events and any new event suggestions.
- Suggest creative merchandise or booth ideas.
Amanda Keay: All right, welcome everyone to our 2024 working events working group. I wanted to just come on here today as we're wrapping up 2024 events and talking about 2025. wanted to just come on here give a little update of what we have done and what I've worked with passing things up from Adam to me and to moving on into the next year. that's kind of where I wanted to begin.
Amanda Keay: So, I kind of came on really May, I guess when Adam went on paternity leave in June. and we kind of did a whole slew of events. I think we hit a total of 13 different main conference events in 2024. it was a really big success from so many of you that were able to come as insiders as well as just community support on Twitter and Discord. we had a lot of really good conversations. We were able to sponsor booths. I think we had six or seven different booths in the past year. and all those conversations, we went really big on 2024, hitting everything. pretty much having a budget that was equal to each of those events.
Amanda Keay: And post 2024, we wanted to take all those things that we learned from those conferences and adjust the budgets accordingly to conferences that we thought meant a lot more to the team. we had a lot really good conversations based on attendance and on. So 2025 we have I guess three different tiers of budgets that we're going to be working with. tier one is going to be our biggest one. We're planning on bringing the most amount of people to those conferences. we're going to be sponsoring the main conference, having an extended and bigger booth usually. we've been doing 10 by10 booths and it's been really good. It's been packed, but we're getting to the point of needing to expand a little bit. so we're trying to go to a larger booth, have a bigger presence at some of these tier 2 events are also going to be sponsored.
Amanda Keay: So, we're going to have speaking engagements, sponsorships, booths, side events, the whole shebang. roughly looking between five people to attend those conferences. And then lastly, our tier three event is going to be no sponsorship. We're going to come and take those conferences, apply for speaking engagements, but, kind of just attending the events instead of the ones sponsoring. So, we're going to be using those smaller events, the ones that are close to New York City or some of them in Europe and things that are close to use those opportunities to just have a smaller presence. not as much budget not as much overhead is going to be needed for those events. So, that's kind of what Zach and I along with some more of the core team have put together as far as our tiers for moving into 2024.
Amanda Keay: I'm going to share my screen in a second so that I can share which events we plan on hitting into 2025. But while I do that, Zach, do you have anything to add before
Zach Horn: No, I think that was a great overview. I mean, that's generally the high level strategy and I think what as you're pulling up the document, you'll see how we've broken these things out. by far the largest, tier two coming in much lower than that, and then tier three is really tertiary, very small.
Amanda Keay: They're not in order of when we're attending.
Zach Horn: The general idea is that, this year we did this huge range of events. We did everything right. But what we felt like going into next year is that we can concentrate the budget that we have towards these larger tier one events that we know are really high value and then take some budget away from some of these smaller events that are worth attending but maybe not having a huge presence. So let's jump right into the doc and just I would run through all the events we're going to go through Amanda and then we can jump into the tiers as well.
Amanda Keay: I started off the first quarter. So we're going to be attending ETH Denver and Nvidia Denver is obviously in Denver. Nvidia is going to be in California. both of those are going to be in the first quarter. They're our largest tier. So we're doing a bigger booth sponsorship bringing out a bunch of people.
Amanda Keay: We're going to have speaking engagements. insiders are obviously coming out as well. We're going to be doing side events and all of that. So, the budget for tier one, as you can see, is 283 roughly around there. with bigger booths, it comes more money. With spending more people also, it's just naturally you're going to be spending a little bit more. we also have budget in there that for some of these side events or an official summit in a correlation to a big conference. We'd like to have an AV team come and shoot some really good content. so we have that in the budget as well. I'm not saying we're going to do it for every conference and of course those funds will be returned back to the community pool if we don't use them. So, those are the first two events for quarter 1. I guess I can go to quarter two.
Amanda Keay: It's kind of out of order. Sorry guys. Token 2049 Dubai is going to be in quarter 2. Permissionless. Super AI Singapore, those are all quarter 2 events. I think Permissionless is going to be in Brooklyn this year. So, that's exciting. We're planning on also for those of you who attended or heard about Akos accelerate, we are going to be doing AOS accelerate in New York City in correlation or just leading up to permissionless. So that's really exciting. So looking to do that in June. The dates are not set yet, but that'll be a totally different proposal.
Amanda Keay: moving on to quarter three, if I can see, ICML Vancouver, that is an AI conference similar to what we're going to be doing, in just a few weeks, with Nurips. it's going to be a very academic developer focused AI event. So, we're planning on hitting that one in quarter 3. ETHC, which is going to be in France this year, and Korea Blockchain Week. So those are the main conferences for quarter 3. And then for quarter four we have the two big moving back to the top. We have token 2049 Singapore which was really good this past year. So we wanted to expend our budget a little bit for that as well as nurups. that's the other AI conference that we're going to be attending. And then CubeCon, Masari mainet and Cosmoverse. I'm not exactly sure when Cosmoverse is going to be this year.
Amanda Keay: So, I have it in quarter four, but that's just based on the last few years. It's been roughly around the end of quarter 3, quarter four. and then at the end, you can see in line item 15, we have an overage amount. That's going to be kind of up to community and core team members to decide if there are any conferences or anything that we would like to attend. so often things get presented to us last minute. So it's not something that we can plan for if a Stanford blockchain week we wanted to go out there we have those funds in order to do So we have a little bit of budget there to bring community members out to attend hackathons. yeah the one-off conferences that are maybe in SF or Austin or New York City that we feel like would be a really good thing to attend but it's just not presented to us with months in advance.
Amanda Keay: I guess after that I will take a little break and see if anyone has any questions based on this. And also please raise your hand if there's a conference on here that you would like to potentially see us going to. this is a working document. We're not planning on putting anything on chain until after Thanksgiving for the US holidays. So we have some time to work through this and would love to get your feedback for those of you who attended or community members who are joined us today. I see thumbs up, which is good. anyone have any vocal opinions? I love talking, but okay, Robert.
Robert Del Rey:
Robert Del Rey: Yeah, the list is very solid. like you say, I guess it's better to focus on those big events and those events that the audience can have a bigger impact for a cashache as far as reach goes and also a cash can have a bigger impact on those events since they are crypto and AI. I just noticed that on the list you don't have a consensus added.
Amanda Keay:
Robert Del Rey: I don't know if they're going to do that in 2025, but yeah, overall it looks really solid.
Amanda Keay: Yeah, thank you.
Amanda Keay: We don't have consensus on the list. I know that was one that It was based in Austin in the last few years. It's moving up to Toronto this year. Let me actually check. I'm not sure what's the date on that. it might be. But I will write that down. and if it's one that it's May 14th through 16th. but I'll definitely keep that in mind. Thank you, Robert. Does anyone else have anything? No. Zach, do you have anything to add?
Zach Horn: Yeah, I would say the one point that's worth highlighting here is you see that the total budget that we're looking at for next year is roughly in line of our budget for this year. It's a little bit more but not an order of magnitude bigger or anything like that. what essentially we're getting out of this is because we're concentrating budget towards these tier one events, our presence when we go to Denver, when we go to GTC, right, is going to be significantly larger. we're bumping up to a whole different sponsorship tier. We're going to have a much larger booth.
Zach Horn: We're going to have professional videography and photography and all those things, So, basically what we're doing is we're concentrating the budget, right, without pushing the total budget significantly. So, we're essentially doing more with roughly the same amount of funds, which one I think is going to be great for the community.
Amanda Keay:
Zach Horn: And then as Amanda was saying, this budget just gives us room to do a lot more of the things we need to be doing, but for whatever reason we end up short of the budget, all of that goes back to the community full. So, there's nothing no wasted funds.
Amanda Keay: One other thing,…
Amanda Keay: if you look over onto the event mix, one of our goals for 2025 was to try to get to a more even split of blockchain conferences and AI conferences. Right now we're at 33 and 60%. So it's getting close. we are planning on this weekend we're sponsoring a hackathon with Meta and Cerebral Valley. So that would kind of fall under the AI sort of events. So we'd like to try to keep that split a little bit more even rather than just solely focusing on blockchain conferences.
Amanda Keay: that's why we're planning on attending and doing the larger tier events for Nurups, for NVIDIA and all the ones that are listed here. as well as trying to build out our presence a little bit more, in SF and trying to get connected there with AI developers and some hackathons. So I know Adam is working with the community and with hackathons. So, we've been talking and we're going to continue to, be aligned on that and try to make our budgets stretch as far as we can. I know a lot from the community when I've been attending the conferences, people from the community have come to me and said it's a cautious everywhere, which I love to hear. So, we want to continue that. I don't want to ever scale back that and now it looks like we're not attending. So, that's why we have pretty much the same roughly the similar budget.
Amanda Keay:
Amanda Keay: We're attending 14 conferences with potentials in between with that overage funds. So We still want to have that sentiment of everywhere we look a cautious there without wasting money and focusing our efforts we want on the ones that we think will be the best for the company. So that is where we are at right now. not really sure how to end this.
Amanda Keay: If
Zach Horn: Just real real quick,…
Zach Horn: Amanda, I saw maybe someone else just joined. we were talking a little bit earlier if there was any feedback or any other events you think we should attend. So, not to put you on the spot, Julius, but if you have any questions, comments, happy to hear them. I'll take one emoji. I'll take that. by the way, Julius, not to derail this meeting, but the AOSGen roll out was fantastic. So, I'll give you a little public shout out even though it's not on topic for this meeting. Tyler, go ahead.
Tyler Wright:
Tyler Wright: Yeah, I think we got great feedback or at least opportunity for people to give feedback. I think there'll be a discussion that will go up so people can provide additional feedback. the only thing I'll remind people is typical those that want to go to these events, can go through the cash insiders program and then from there again there will be signups throughout the year for those that want to participate in these events. So, just a reminder to folks, that maybe joined sick community call yesterday,…
Amanda Keay: Thanks.
Tyler Wright: and heard the plan from Adam about the community efforts for 2025 and just how folks can get more involved in events like this,…
Tyler Wright: etc. So, amazing work, sorry, not guys and gal. All y'all.
Zach Horn: Yeah. Yeah.
Zach Horn: What's the plural of All y'all.
Tyler Wright: Yeah, exactly.
Zach Horn: That's That's right. in terms of timeline, what we're thinking at this point is that we're going to wait to get through Thanksgiving, then we're going to put this on GitHub discussions. So there's going to be a chance to drop in notes or feedback or anything else async if you want to do that on GitHub. That'll be up for a month through the end of the year or so. And then I think the last plan I heard was Huie is that we're going to do the Q1 prop on chain. So that'll be next year. But look, we'll make sure you guys have the link once it's on GitHub. And if you want to drop any feedback there, definitely feel free.
Amanda Keay:
Tyler Wright: And otherwise we can end early.
Amanda Keay: Yeah. No,…
Amanda Keay: thanks, Zach. does anyone else have anything to add?
Tyler Wright: That's all we wanted to cover is just like the plan and then folks can see the discussion and give their feedback live, get their feedback via the discussion and then we can move forward.
Amanda Keay: Yep. Awesome.
Tyler Wright: Appreciate it.
Amanda Keay: Thank you everyone who showed up today. and looking forward to killing it in 2025. I'm super excited. I have a lot of great ideas for events for next year and it brings me a lot of joy. and I like meeting all of you, too. So, yes, I do have Okay, hold on. We're not that is happening. I know this is recorded. I used to hate on Crocs. Sorry about this, guys.
Amanda Keay: I own three pair and I'm going to get a fourth and then get the little aos things to go on it. So yes, that's the plan. Thank you Luna for bringing that up. We got to have the koozies too for Adam. I know it's ridiculous, but got to bring those out. so love the community ideas, too. So keep them drop them to me if you think of anything that's cool that you'd like to see at the booth or for swag. that's a whole other discussion that falls under the merchandise side of things, which we're planning on doing a lot of really cool things moving into next year as well. So if there's anything that you guys want to add, please u my DMs are open both on Twitter and Telegram and everywhere. So thanks for coming everyone and look forward to seeing some of you guys soon.
Zach Horn: Awesome. Thanks,…
Rodri R: Thank you guys. Bye.
Zach Horn: guys. Take care.
Tyler Wright: That
Joao Luna: Thank you.
Robert Del Rey: Thank you. Bye-bye.