Boston Tech Week with Rose Johnson on Building AI Boston

About this episode

Rose Johnson discusses the innovative format of Boston Tech Week and its impact on the local tech community.

Traditional conferences put everyone in one venue and hand them a ticket. Tech Week flips it: hundreds of events across a city, hosted by whoever wants to host, all on a single calendar. Rose Johnson thinks this format gives the power back to creators, and Boston is about to find out what that looks like. Rose is a marketing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads Tech Week, a16z's decentralized conference series that started in LA in 2022 and has expanded to four cities. Boston is the newest. They set an internal goal of 500 events for the debut. They blew past 600. We recorded ahead of Boston Tech Week (May 26 to 31), which runs back-to-back with New York Tech Week so attendees can do both. This is a conversation about why Boston was the next city, what a "platform not organizer" model actually looks like, and what to expect when 600 plus events take over a town that's never done this before. We dig into: The origin story of Tech Week, from a post-COVID LA experiment in 2022 to a four-city circuit Why the decentralized format works, and why "power back to the creators" is the whole point Boston's response, well past the internal 500-event target, with deep tech and…

People in this episode

Guest: Rose Johnson

Topics covered

• decentralized conferences
• Tech Week
• event hosting
• Boston's tech scene
• collaboration
• creator empowerment

Keywords

• Boston Tech Week
• decentralized format
• Andreessen Horowitz
• event hosting
• tech conferences
• collaboration
• creator empowerment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Andreessen Horowitz

Places: Boston, LA, New York

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