Big stages, smaller impact.

For years, the tech industry equated success with scale. Bigger stages, larger crowds, more logos, more panels, more noise. Five thousand people became ten thousand. Ten thousand became the goal. Somewhere along the way, that stopped making sense. Founders and executives didn’t announce a boycott. They simply stopped showing up. What we see today is not a rejection of events, but a correction in how people who actually run companies choose to spend their time. The shift is subtle, but con