Fully agree on your comments regarding tiny startups attending conferences. Thank god we didn't pay for anything. 7.5 days is the actual raw amount of man-days

Fully agree on your comments regarding tiny startups attending conferences. Thank god we didn't pay for anything. 7.5 days is the actual raw amount of man-days lost. In reality it was much more than then. Each time I wasn't in the office, I couldn't make much progress in some areas (like the content extraction platform, which I am in charge of). That held progress on the API which my teammates @govind201 is working on. So in reality it was close to 2 weeks of productivity that was lost forever. Anyway as one of the commenters mentioned above, 'wasting time' is a lesson every one doing a startup has to learn in some point of their journey.