The Bandwidth Conference - Part 1

Last Thursday I flew up to San Francisco to moderate a panel at the annual Bandwidth Conference. There is the long version of my day or the short version. I'm going to post the short version for now.

Let's just say at 4am in the morning on Thursday I was trying to figure out how NOT to be in San Francisco for this conference. I had been sick for nearly a week and by this hour on this day I was still awake and the stress of knowing that I was going to be in NO shape to moderate the opening panel at this event was absolutely crippling me. I went downstairs to my computer and started trying to think of how to tell Ashli at the conference that I couldn't make it. Then I tried to rack my brain to think of who could cover for me. My first thought was Noah. Noah used to work for me at Fanscape until he moved to San Francisco 3 weeks ago to pursue a job in the technology space. He was going to be at the conference anyway to help me out. But to my knowledge Noah had never done anything close to leading a panel in front of a few hundred people. That would be so unfair to do to Noah. I remember the first time I was ever on a panel at a conference, I didn't sleep for a week. How would he deal?

Then I thought of Jason. Jason Feinberg runs a company called On Target MediaGroup. Basically Jason's company is like Fanscape, but Fanscape five years ago when we worked solely on music campaigns. Jason was going to be at the conference any way and I knew he could do it, but I would need to get a hold of him. It was 4am, too early to call. I wrote him a note instead asking him simply what time his flight to SF was and which airport was he flying out of. I figured if he was flying from Burbank like me, I could run over to meet him in the morning and give him my notes.

With that email sent, I stumbled back upstairs and tried to sleep. And sleep I did, for a whole hour and a half.

But magically at roughly 6am, I awoke and I felt ok. Good enough to fly. In the middle of the night, that was my first fear. I was sure that if I flew in my condition, my head would explode. But I had to give it a try. And by 7am I was in my car on the way to the airport to what I was sure would be a major disaster.