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The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

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Re: The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

#41

Post by monkeydust »

cal_dent wrote: post #33
lesdeuxmagots wrote: post #28

The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals. Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often s…

I'd say this is true of almost all corporate conferences

I would strongly agree. Having been to a lot of industry conferences all over that world it's just the same.

Part of the problem is that the conference organizers open up panels to press and panellists (including me) are then very restricted on what we can say. The panel becomes a hash of corporate sound bites which no one likes.

To counter this increasingly panels are being requested to be under Chatham House by the companies paying to attend and sponsor.

Re: The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

#42

Post by fancyfredbot »

dr_ wrote: post #29

Seems like a subset of enthusiasts - early stage VC types, people working in product, people who write lengthy healthcare posts on LinkedIn, have been trying to position it as another HLTH, but that’s not what it is. It’s an investor conference that you need to be invited to. Wouldn’t be surprising if JPM somehow had taken a stake or done a deal with your company, combined with some government insiders. The digital h…

That's what they want you to think.

Re: The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

#43

Post by defalcon47 »

dekhn wrote: post #16

I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas…

> I've been inside the conference

Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.

Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.

Re: The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

#44

Post by Animats »

"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?"

The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]

"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."

That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.

The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGK_OaMVPUs

Re: The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

#45

Post by rbanffy »

Animats wrote: post #44

"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?" The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1] "There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and…

> The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.

Can't anyone donate them a retired Cesium clock? Or, at least, a GPS receiver.

Re: The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

#46

Post by rbanffy »

lesdeuxmagots wrote: post #28

The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals. Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often s…

> The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference.

In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.

Re: The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

#49

Post by baxtr »

lesdeuxmagots wrote: post #28

The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals. Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often s…

Many conferences work like that, yes.

There are even some companies that offer this style of conferences as meetings for money to vendors.

What I wonder though: How many deals are really made in these rooms? I always had the feeling that the conversion rates were rather low if not zero.

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