In Conferences and Customer Service, Don't Forget the Humans
Three things (among others) happened this past week:
- Registration opened for PyCodeConf.
- EJ's Airbnb nightmare went viral.
- PyOhio.
Let’s connect some dots.
PyCodeConf is an exclusive, high-end conference put on by Github. It’s at a swanky hotel in Miami’s South Beach. Registration is $600, plus the $179/night (which is dirt cheap, considering). Local companies are talking about the roof-top parties they’re going to throw. Github is billing it as a meeting “with the thought leaders and visionaries that will drive the Python community over the next year.” Guido is noticeably absent. So are Raymond, Alex, Ned, Jacob, etc., etc., etc. Titus and Graham are actively confused. Interestingly, Jesse Noller is involved. He’s the chair of PyCon, which, if I’m not mistaken, is the actual meeting of thought leaders and visionaries that will drive the Python community over the next year.
I have no doubt that PyCodeConf will sell out as Github promises. And I have no doubt that the attendees will have a blast drinking on South Beach roof-tops. That actually sounds really fun. But I think Github has miscalculated the character of the Python community.
PyOhio is much more in keeping with the Python ethos. It’s free for attendees (thanks to the volunteer organizers and the corporate sponsors). It’s held in a nice, but not flashy, facility (the student union at Ohio State University). And it displays real diversity on the often-overlooked spectrum of coolness. You know who I want to go to conferences with? Yes, the people doing Cool and Interesting Things—the Googlers and the Facebookies and the people with startup stars in their eyes and the people who are the startup stars. I want them there. But I also want the quirky dude who loves writing really bad Tkinter games with his kids and can say to an audience, with absolute unselfconscious genuineness, “I like helping people.” That shit is beautiful. I want that at my conference, and I love Python because it’s full of that.
In the fine print for CodeConf (the general conference that is the pattern for PyCodeConf), there is this reminder:
While at GitHub Inc. events or related social networking opportunities, attendees should not engage in discriminatory or offensive speech or actions regarding gender, sexuality, race, or religion.
They forgot coolness.
One more dot to connect. Airbnb is a Cool and Interesting Thing. It’s a Y Combinator-backed startup with a billion dollar valuation. Now news is breaking about people who were lulled into a false sense of security by Airbnb’s brand (with Craiglist, you know to be careful): EJ and Troy rented their apartments to derelicts who trashed and robbed them. Yes, the hosts could/should have been more careful. But Airbnb has whiffed on customer service in their follow-up, in a situation much more drastic than the Google customer service hiccup from a couple weeks ago. It took a Hail Mary to Vic Gundotra, but Thomas Monopoly did get his account back in under a week. After a month, Airbnb is mostly posturing.
The connection I want to make is that if we forget about humans in our rush to be “thought leaders and visionaries,” then we’ll build companies that also forget about humans. Customer service is expensive and hard. In the rush to do Cool and Interesting Things, it’s a tempting corner to cut. Let’s do better.
