When you are hustling to raise a seed round, you end up at some strange conferences. I was invited to speak at a VR conference last minute a few years back. It

When you are hustling to raise a seed round, you end up at some strange conferences. I was invited to speak at a VR conference last minute a few years back. It was a good opportunity so I flew out to SF (from LA) for the day. My company had just finished research that would be interesting to the attendees and, frankly, positioned my startup in a strong light in front of the niche investors who I hoped would be there. This was so last minute that I didn’t even have a deck completed. Instead of going to the first half of the conference I holed up in a coffee shop and worked on the presentation. When I get to the conference it is the end of the day so I don’t bother checking in. I head to the room where I’m to speak and watch the second half of that prevention. He leaves. It’s 5pm. The room clears out and I setup. I never like that small conference, self-service mad-dash to hook into HDMI and hope the connectors work, but all is well and I’m ready to go on time. No one enters. Literally not one person. I poke my head out and people are milling about, you can tell it’s time to go home. I notice the sign in front of the room that lists the presentations. I’m not on it. The one prior was the last of the night. So I wheel the TV out into the hallway and present to everyone and no one all at once. I’m good at projecting my voice and actually drew in 10 or so people for the entire presentation. I carnival barked at investors I recognized (from their LinkedIn. I made flash cards of them, we’d never actually met) and sort of captured their attention. Security thinks about saying something. I run through my talk, someone even asks a question and that was that. Somehow the organizers never actually booked me. They said they did, it just never made its way to the program. Had I gone to registration to get a badge I would have learned that fact earlier. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t. This story would have been awesome if I found a lead investor from it, but in the end that company didnt work out. It is my favorite conference story though, with my presentation to an entirely Chinese-speaking audience coming in second. Good times.