Conference season is once more in full swing in Asia, and as anyone worth their salt in the industry will tell you; the dirty little secret is that the core value of any such event lies not in the conference itself but in the side parties. As with any conference, the real value is to be found in the tangential side party events around the main conference that people begrudgingly attend for one of two reasons:
- Their company is paying them to attend it and they need some evidence thereof
- They are speaking at the event to boost their profile
A third outlier being married people that need photographs from the event for their spouse to cover the fact that they too are here to cut loose at the side parties.
With that established, we can progress directly to the main course: the boozy side party events thrown by companies either using it as a veneer to have a good time on their investor’s dime, or actually rich companies that want to throw a rager with likeminded people in some cool far flung venue.
With the lived experience of a decade of these dog and pony shows behind me, and fresh from such an event this evening, I feel a compelling obligation to synthesise my thoughts on these events that 10 bintangs and a 30 minute motorbike ride home fermented up in my mind to share with you.
The Invite
Invariably there will be some conference adjacent app that you are shanghai’d into downloading which corrals the multitude of side events in one place and you are encouraged to hand over your contact details into, in order that you can be remarketed to for the rest of your days by email.
Thereafter you can scroll the list of events and apply for the guestlist and answer a plethora of screening questions – typically: who are you? what do you do? for which company? And more importantly what are your socials?
The subtle implication being that if you’re a somebody with a following, you stand a better chance of passing the digital screening to get in.
Often, a box for who do you know that is influential or an organiser of the event. This is the best bypass for the previous screening questions.
The Entrance
You pass the invite screening, and if you don’t immediately then you message someone you know that can pull some strings to get you the invite.
It starts at seven, but you’re not going to be there at seven because you’re busy and even if you’re not you’d not respect anyone that wasn’t busy enough to be there at seven.
If you got the invite without pulling any strings, because you’ve none to pull, you’re going to be there at six thirty. Which is also why nobody worth speaking to will be there before seven thirty at the earliest.
So you show up at eight with your crew and there’s no parking and already a crowd milling around the entrance.
“Event is at capacity, no more entries” the hired security tells the crowd after you park illegally out front. “That doesn’t apply to me” tells everyone to themselves, as you and the crew pull out your phones and message the organisers and people that put you on the list. A coterie of Indian guys mill around a little too close to the entrance uncouthly protesting that they should be allowed in. This provides a focal point for everyone else to feel superior to as they continue to message and call their guy that will square away the entry problem for them.
One of your crew makes eye contact with the guys inside and has a brief nonverbal chat that says “you guys are cool, just let us clear this away first.”
The crowd thins and some of the crew get waved in as the rest follow, half get stopped at the entrance before demurring that they’re with the guys that just got waved in. The event is over legal capacity, allegedly, but nobody is going to make the social faux-pas of splitting up your group and so lets them in.
The door is firmly shut behind you but the whole group is now in, you made it.
The Event
As you shuffle slowly inside, it’s immediately apparent that this is some multi-million dollar villa straight out of “Narcos” or some 1970’s Ian Fleming novel. Before you can snap out of this temporal shift, a team of uniformed domestic help shuttle into view and amble around the drinks and open buffet. Some busybody associated with the event asks to scan your invitation QR code from your phone for the event. You go through the motions to find it, knowing you never bothered to sign up, for a few seconds, long enough for someone adjacent to your group to pull rank on them to tell the person checking to knock it off because “they’re good.”
You scan the crowd, clocking two or three people you recognise. Make some idle small talk with the guy that swatted away the overzealous check in attendant about how long you’ve known one of the hosts and some asinine anecdote about the last time you guys hung out.
You’re clear, you’re fully inside now and nobody can raise any issue, as one of the hosts escort your group inside.
The ice baths are downstairs, next to the gym, before the padel court. Drinks and food are in the pantry, just by the large courtyard and beyond the LED illuminated marble clad pool.
You pick up some beers and cheers with the lads, deciding if you have the social battery left to speak to new people or just want to have some casual beers with your guys you see every few months since you live in different cities.
The People
You crack open a bottle and see a guy you know. You don’t know his name, but you know he knows yours. You know because 4 months back he approached you at the airport when you were flying somewhere and started talking to you like you were friends.
A chance to further show you are someone in the crowd, you wander over and greet him as he’s mid conversation with someone. “Hey, man, been a while,” you say, avoiding any social requirement to mention his name, or job, or anything about them none of which you remember or care to.
Conversation goes quickly nowhere, and you wrap it up with “see you tomorrow at the event!” Anyone watching, which people are, now knows you’re something of a someone.
Someone starts a conversation with you which you entertain, mostly because you have no idea who they are and if they may be someone in the event pecking order that you’d be remiss to be seen to be rude to.
As you peel off for another beer or a bite to eat, the full complement of Asia crypto party people slowly drift by to chat, either in groups or individually.
The core breakdown of any such event is typically as follows
- 10% Rich people – They have money, sometimes their own.
- 10% Smart people – Top executors – actually know & do stuff.
- 30% Women
- 50% Straight grifters.
If you immediately want to jump on that breakdown as misogynistic, question why you excluded women from the first two brackets, rather than seeing that I’m actually just excluding them from the bottom bucket.
The grifters are almost entirely male.
As you make headway on the free beers, you cross paths with various types.
Very socially awkward European or Chinese tech guy that’s so deep in his own tech solution to something it defines his whole persona. You chat a little showing you understand the tech stuff and ask a few pointed tech questions you don’t really want to hear the answer to but as a social hand wave that you’re across the technical side of things too. Some throwaway responses how you know a few companies working on similar things.
Russian real estate girl keen to get your contact to sell you a villa. You exchange contacts out of social politeness whilst bemoaning that you’re supporting the idea that sending you five photos of a half million dollar villa, an address, and meeting you there to point at it and say “you want buy this?” is self evidently a service worth invoicing you $25,000 for.
Ukrainian 28 year old with sharp undercut hairstyle, designer sunglasses and silk shirt unbuttoned to the navel, with a gold chain, who sides up to tell you about the investment fund he’s run from Bali for 3 years and talk about deal flow.
The beers at the event run dry and you reconnect with your crew and make plans to get on your rented motorbikes and head back home for the night.
Back to the conference by mid afternoon to show your face and see some of the same old faces you see at every conference, then decide which crypto event party you’ll while away time at again that evening.
What passes for networking is just the same carousel of grifters, builders, and borrowed money spinning under new neon lights. Different villa with a different sponsor’s logo on the napkins. The conferences change, the panels blur, but the parties never do. That’s the crypto circuit in Asia: rinse, drink, repeat.
Network your way past the villa security, or you’re posting sponsor-booth selfies to LinkedIn. There is no middle class here.