This founder's wildly successful virtual tech conference could be a model for future tech events as coronavirus continues to spread
- Entrepreneur Guillermo Rauch, a popular figure in the web development world, held a successful virtual tech conference as the coronavirus crisis was just getting started in December.
- The Zeit conference is now seen as a model for tech events, as the pandemic leads to the cancellation or postponement of major gatherings.
- One of those events is Reactathon, which was supposed to be held in San Francisco in late March but which just cancelled due to the pandemic crisis.
- Reactathon organizer Ben Dunphy said he has consulted with Rauch on his startup's successful virtual conference, which he expects will be a major trend on the tech circuit.
- "I think that we will see a kind of Renaissance in taking events online," Dunphy told Business Insider. "I hope I'm wrong, but from the signs I'm seeing right now, it looks like it will devastate the conference circuit in 2020."
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Tech entrepreneur Guillermo Rauch led his startup's first big conference in December just as the coronavirus crisis was getting started.
One participant was actually from Wuhan, China where the COVID-19 pandemic first began - a member of Rauch's own team, who was later placed under quarantine. But Rauch, CEO and founder of Zeit, which builds cloud-based tools for developers and designers, didn't have to worry about attendees having been exposed to the virus: The gathering was entirely virtual, and held over video streaming.
It was a resounding success, and could point the way forward for the tech world as it reels from a wave of cancelled events due to the pandemic - Google, Facebook, Amazon, and many others have called off their events or turned them into online-only affairds. Rauch suggests not only that this might be the new normal, but it's better in some ways because it means that literally anybody can attend from anywhere with an internet connection.
"We're a remote company, remote friendly company," Rauch told Business Insider. "We were certainly ahead of the curve. And it really stemmed from realizing that our community was very global. And organizing an event in San Francisco or New York wasn't cutting it."
In fact, Rauch has been sharing that experience with organizers of Reactathon, who were forced this week to cancel the major San Francisco conference, dedicated to the Facebook-created React development framework, due to coronavirus fears.
"I think that this is kind of the trigger that's going to send online events to the stratosphere," Ben Dunphy, organizer of the Reactathon conference which was supposed to take place in two weeks, told Business Insider. "I think that we will see a kind of Renaissance in taking events online. I hope I'm wrong, but from the signs I'm seeing right now, it looks like it will devastate the conference circuit in 2020."
Zeit sets the stage
Rauch's team capped 2019 with an upbeat event. About 1,500 people, mostly front-end developers, attended the Zeit event, called Backendless Conference, focused on Next.js, the open source software framework Rauch developed, which helps developers build faster applications.
Rauch's team found ways to jazz up the gathering with help from tools such as Slack and Zoom, and giving participants more ways to be part of the action. At its peak, 1,300 of the attendees were "concurrently chatting," Rauch said. And they found ways to make the chats and other interactions engaging.
"We thought: how cool would it be if throughout the event, people could react and share where they were?" he said.
"We created a little bot on top of this Slack community so that they could share where they were and share a quick gif, making a gesture waving or reacting to the events. It's kind of like what you see on Japanese TV shows where the host shows a picture of himself reacting."
'Some people were having breakfast and some people were having a beer'
Most of the participants were in different time zones, which led to some quirky images of what they were doing while taking part in the event: "Some people were having breakfast and some people were having a beer."
And these conversations and the presentations proved to be valuable beyond the event itself. "We were able to create online content that to this day, they're able to reuse and repurpose."
The cost of staging the event was a fraction of what Rauch's team typically spent on tech conferences. Sending a team member to a convention in a place like San Francisco or New York could cost $14,000 including airfare and hotel accommodations. That's roughly how much Zeit spent total for the virtual event.
'It was the hardest thing he's ever ever had to live through in his life'
Coronavirus was not yet big news when the Zeit conference happened. But in a twist of fate, the pandemic eventually had a serious impact on Rauch's team.
One of his team members is from Wuhan, and he actually took part in the event from the Chinese city where the pandemic started. He was among those who subsequently got quarantined.
"He's one of our best engineers, and he was quarantined for over 50 days," Rauch said. "He said it was the hardest thing he's ever ever had to live through in his life."
But things have gotten better for the Wuhan engineer, Rauch said. In fact, it was through him that Rauch's team got some good news when he reported via Slack "that in his particular district in Wuhan, they announced that there had been zero new cases on that day."
Other conferences take a step back
Rauch is known as a kind of rock star in the web development world, which led Dunphy, the Reactathon organizer to invite him to be one of the event's major speakers when they met for the first time late last year.
"I thought, wow, this guy's super smart, super knowledgeable," Dunphy said. "He's super well respected."
Rauch eventually also became a valued adviser to Dunphy, especially as the coronavirus crisis hit San Francisco. "As things have progressed, I've sought his counsel and what he thinks like before I make a lot of big decisions," Dunphy said.
Ironically, Rauch actually could offer him an in-person perspective since he lives in San Francisco. When Dunphy, who lives across the San Francisco Bay in the East Bay, checked to ask about the situation, he said Rauch responded: "Ben, not good."
Eventually, Dunphy opted to postpone the event, especially after Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in San Francisco, and California called for the cancellation or postponement of events involving 250 people or more.
Dunphy said he's still reviewing the options for Reactathon.
"I'm a big believer in in-person events," he said. "That's why I do them. And I'm monitoring the situation for now."
He's been consulting with Rauch on his experience with virtual events which Dunphy sees as part of Reactathon's future.
"It's almost a certainty now that I'm going to invest in online events," he said.
The coronavirus crisis eventually will end, but then there's the looming recession which could also mean bad news for the tech conference circuit, he said.
"If the economy is in a recession, organizing events is really not something that's going to be viable and is one of the first budgets that gets slashed," he said.
Besides, Dunphy said, organizing a big tech event only to be forced to call it off two weeks before it's supposed to start is a kind of stress he's not keen on going through again soon.
"I think that even if this situation doesn't get as bad as we think it could, and in-person events continue going forward, like starting this fall, which would be great," he said, "I think there may be some PTSD in the minds of organizers, attendees, sponsors involved in this conference, and people will start taking online events more seriously."
Got a tip about Zeit or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentel or send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.