A Long Strange Loop
summary
A conference-origin story with numbers and failures not fluff: early shows scale 300 → 600 → 1100 then thousands, over 5,000 CFPs and ~1,000 talks, a theatrical collaboration with Douglas Hofstadter that hires a brass quintet and an aerialist and actually works, a grant program since 2015 that pays travel and grows future speakers, a year that sells out in 5 minutes sellout, near-bankrupt years, pandemic cancellations and the concrete tradeoffs that lead to ending the run.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:18Strange Loop origin
- 10:09Conference context
- 11:56Talk content power
- 17:40Wildest performance
- 23:04People at Strange Loop
- 27:47Attendance growth
- 33:45Diversity impact
- 44:44Future of conferences
- 51:05Why Strange Loop ends
