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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

#61

Post by gadders »

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…

Aren't these conferences setup like this as they are tax write-offs so you get a holiday for cheap?

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

#63

Post by nradov »

potato3732842 wrote: post #56
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…

> 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. It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable. People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section s…

There's no need to deny anything. Many of the deals made at the conference will be publicly announced after lawyers sort out the details.

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

#64

Post by matwood »

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

Agreed. I go to many industry conferences and rarely step foot on the conference floor. It's a great way to get everyone I need to speak to in one place for a few days.

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

#65

Post by potato3732842 »

nradov wrote: post #63
potato3732842 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable. People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section s…

There's no need to deny anything. Many of the deals made at the conference will be publicly announced after lawyers sort out the details.

Of course there's business happening and it will be publicized in the normal ways. This is completely tangential to all the business not happening and all the other sharing of information that's not set in stone enough to be creating a paper trail over.

Like you can't just schedule a conference call with a bunch of important people at your competitors for the purpose of bitching about suppliers or something. You can do that at a conference.

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

#66

Post by abyssin »

baxtr wrote: post #49
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.

I've been told personally by the organizer of one of these conferences in the retail industry that illegal non-compete agreements and price-fixing agreements are made in the hallways. It was 10 years ago, and the whole conference existed for this reason.

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

#67

Post by simonw »

gadders wrote: post #61
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…

Aren't these conferences setup like this as they are tax write-offs so you get a holiday for cheap?

I've heard that a lot of medical conferences take advantage of the fact that doctors need to fulfill a quota of "professional development" every year, so they set themselves at very pleasant resort hotels.

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

#68

Post by davsti4 »

blitzar wrote: post #52
defalcon47 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference. I suspect you are thinking of burning man

Couldn't be burning man, because the people are dressed too nicely.

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

#70

Post by dboreham »

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…

Edinburgh has a similar concept: the "Binns Clock". Although Binns no longer exists, the clock is still there.
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