You realize pretty fast that, if you do things a certain way, there is a lot of money to be made on events like this. It’s honestly not that hard to run huge profits. When you have this kind of demand, where tickets to the first NodeConf sold out in 10 minutes and tickets to JSConf sold out in one second, it’s hard not to make money. This is hard work and there’s nothing wrong with making money.
But, here’s the rub. I don’t want to go to the conference that is being run to make someone money. I don’t want to be a product. I want to attend, or speak, at a conference to build community. That’s what I get off on. I’ve got money, I make a good living, so I don’t need to run conferences that I wouldn’t like to attend myself.
Once you run a conference, you can’t look at conferences the same way again. For better and for worse.
