Really? My mental model is that the value of the conference lies entirely in network effects. That is, it's valuable for people deep in topic X to go to a confe

Really? My mental model is that the value of the conference lies entirely in network effects. That is, it's valuable for people deep in topic X to go to a conference for X because they expect many other people who are also deep in topic X to go to that conference. The speakers are just a means to an end, to get the initial core group interested and start the quadratic snowball going.