Organizing ETHTaipei - a note on sponsorship and homage to my coorganizers

After the concluding meetings this week, I finally feel that the major dusts of ETHTaipei are settled and it is a good time to review and summarize my learnings for hosting the event. As this is the first time I’m hosting an international hackathon and international conference, everything is new to me. I’m happy with what we have accomplished, although there is certainly room for improvement.

During the event, we have more than 1000 people joined the event. ~300 builders joined us in the hackathon, 55 teams were formed, 40 projects were submitted. We started our twitter account from scratch and got 1312 organic followers. ~30 side events spawned independently. Qualitatively, we were quite happy about the quality of the talks and projects during the event - cutting edge stuffs are being discussed and presented. Most importantly, we had fun with our attendees.

How it started

The idea of hosting an event floated around when Hsuanting, Anton, and myself first met up in Lisbon, 2021 November. That was the first time I met Hsuanting, the second time I met Anton - but we had a blast. We were loving the dev focused event and said hey why we didn’t have one in Taiwan for a long time etc. We had a blast, laughing at interesting Defi gossips together, shitting on scammers in the space together, admiring the real devs and really looking forward to how the space and industry to grow together. After that we had little interaction - except I crashed in Anton’s rental place in Madrid for a week at some point.

But I have sensed that the values were aligned.

Officially, the event for me started from a telegram ping at the end of 2022 October. a “U up?”-style ping from Anton & Hsuanting. Since I had the strong sense that our values are aligned, I immediately said yes.

We soon formed a group of co-organizers. In no particular order - Yenwen, Hsiao-Wei, Anderson, Kimi, Anton, Changwu, Hsuanting, Hana, and finally, myself. To my delight, all these people are very self-less. There’s really no reason for these people to host such an event, except out of love of the blockchain space and the land Taiwan.

We quickly established that we are completely non-profit and not taking anything for ourselves personally. IF there is any profit for the event, it will only go to next year’s event and towards building local community.

Everyone was excited to do it but then we thought it was still early and discussed about high level ideas. The things started to get real around January - started the twitter with a midjourney generated logo, checked out the venue (Anton and myself joined online via webcam lol), and started to create a list of speakers and potential sponsors to reach out.

Decentralized Event Organizing..?

While we have decided a few key things such as the venue, the date, etc on January 2023, we did made progress and laid some foundation for the event, these were the things that we had:

• A set time and form: April 21 - 23 Hackathon, April 24 - 25 Conference
• Surveyed and decided on Hackathon platform (TAIKAI) and ticketing platform (Unlock)
• The ETHTaipei website in its nascent form. (It was live literally on Feb 23th)
• 8 confirmed speakers, 2 from ourselves and 2 very close connections.
• A drafted sponsorship deck - sent to some set of people’s but no real responses yet.

However, we’ve realized that we have been discussing a lot about different ideas but not really executing and following up, especially on the sponsorship and speaker invites. We forget the context from time to time and oftentimes feels like discussing in a never ending loop. This is quite natural as all of us co-organizers are actually fully occupied with our full-time job. By Febuary 2023, things were not progressing as hoped and all of us were getting worried.

These were the issues we were facing:

• People forgetting context. Different set of people discussing the same set of things over and over again.
• People missing deadlines, as there were no reminders and no one chasing. We wanted to invite speakers and sponsors but we were really busy and oftentimes forgot to reach out.
• No priorities. So many tasks, what are the key things to do first? It easily became one would think of some idea and one would execute some part of the idea - but that oftentimes are not the most important thing to do at the time.

All of us were fully aware of the situation and some of us proposed to hire a PM to keep ourselves in line and be in the loop of all the detail execution.

Such an event needs a full-time PM. An Amazing one.

I was lucky enough to notice that my old friend Amazing (yep that’s her name) posted on social media that she is now up for part time tasks. We haven’t caught up for like 8 years, but I knew - thanks to modern stalking technology social media - that she has always been up to interesting projects. I’ve worked with her 10 years ago at the same social enterprise (helping out spinal cord injury group), hosting events etc, and then she went on to become an achieved writer.

I had an intuition that she might be able to manage, so I messaged her and we met up to discuss this opportunity.

These were my main criteria for the PM:

• Think on one’s foot.
• Not intimidated by unknown and willing to ask a ton of questions.
• Able to do a draft plans before all things are clarified. Structured but also extremely flexible, able to embrace unknown.
• Have one’s own judgement. Able to push back and say no in a very direct way - but still in a very strategic and polite way.
• Shows signs of going for the extra mile, goal oriented to get things done.

I had high confidence that she’ll be able to handle the task after the first meeting, this bet stemmed from the questions she was asking and also from how she is willing to do the preparation before she is officially hired. Important note that this does not always work out, and the first impression is ofc not necessarily accurate. but I’m always refining my model / questions to be able to probe these personalities and hopefully to be able to predict the future performance more accurately

There were some objections internally in the beginning as we were also tight on budget, and the quote Amazing gave was substantial for us at the time. But I believed in the value that she’ll be able to provide, so I took the bet. I promised to cover at least half of her salary myself in the case of ETHTaipei is not profitable at all, so the weight on the group as a whole is relieved and we hired her. This move is also to gain more trust within the ETHTaipei group, as it is natural to question the motivation when a person is bringing on his friend over to be hired.

And this, this was already at the end of February 2023.

Ideas are free, but execution is key It was fun to work with these co-organizers, partly because these are extremely creative people who have tons of ideas all the time.

“hey how about having a rotating selfie stand? it’s pretty cool!” “wouldn’t it be fun to do a bubble tea stand?” “wouldn’t it be fun to have a Taiwanese fried chicken stand in the venue?” “we have a designer volunteering, how can we incorporate their work?” etc.

But in reality, we have limited resources. The real limited resources are:

• Time
• Funds

Funds are sort of covered. First, we made a budgeting plan and have a very rough idea about how much we want to spend. At some point, some of us also came together and confirmed how much funds we are willing to donate personally just to make this event happen. We confirmed that we are willing to meet the worst scenario - us losing a substantial amount of personal funds, but to make the event happen. Not ideal, but it does unblock the funds issue from the planning stage.

Time is the resource that is critical to be managed. Once the deadline is set, time was ticking and there’s no negotiation with the universe about the lost seconds. The time was at the end of February, and we practically had only 8 weeks to pull this whole thing off.

On this, Our PM Amazing has done a wonderful job of defining key tasks, prioritizing, and saying no to wild and literally popup ideas from us co-organizers. The priorities were sponsorship and speakers.

During the preparation phase, I was in charge of the sponsorship, hence I’ll be writing from this perspective.

Event is a compounding game

In the beginning, we thought that inviting speakers and sponsors should not be too hard. The co-organizers have been in the space for quite a while, surely there are connections that we could pull — but that was completely wrong! People had connections, but since ETHTaipei is in its first edition, there were no reference of the event. It is understandably hard to gauge how an event would turn out to justify a team putting in resource.

Since I was the one who drafted the sponsorship deck, I was the main point of contact when it comes to sponsorship. We finally ramped up on our sponsorship effort in the beginning of March, every week we have roughly 6-8 calls with potential sponsors.

In my opinion, we have made one key decision correctly in the beginning, which is to host ETHTaipei one week after ETHTokyo. That has enabled some great teams to visit us right after ETHTokyo and got some easier “yes”.

What we’ve realized, is that getting speakers and sponsors is a compounding game.

After getting some initial support from great friends, with more speakers and sponsors, the calls got a lot more easier as teams know what they are getting into. When having a call, these are some of the things I’ve learned:

• The more information about the speakers and sponsors the better it is for sponsors to decide.
• Every sponsor has different needs. Some wanted to tap into the local developer community; some wanted to have people build on top of their project / chain; some wanted to have more presence during the conference and get in touch with projects that are mature; some are here for recruiting.
• The different needs might be fulfilled by other sponsors. So revisiting a rejected sponsorship is possible.
• Booth requires physical presence and also man power, it is not necessarily preferred.

Sponsorship plans are flexible, but the flexibility changes as the need for the event shifts The other interesting thing I’ve learned on the event hosting side is how our flexibility on the sponsorship has changed over time.

The deck itself is really just a reference for pricing, but we’ve tried to tailor the plan and help out the sponsors to fulfill their needs - if the sponsors is eager for connection, I try to get them and keep them posted on networking opportunities and arrange meetings / speech time close to the ones they want to interact with, if the sponsors are interested in developers, we get them more exposed and adjust the perks so that they get more exposure on that side.

In the beginning, we were quite flexible. We are extremely appreciative of the early sponsors who have helped bootstrapped us so we also try to help them out for their goals as much as possible. But that is not the only reason! A responsible sponsorship plan should not be just a money grab: Sponsorship is actually related to underlying resources that you have, the limited resources that are visible to the sponsors are:

• Speaking slots
• Conference Workshop slots
• Hackathon Workshop slots
• Booth slots

Other limited resources that are not directly visible to the sponsors are:

• Organizers’ time
• Organizers’ extra attention

All these things decreases as more sponsors joined, hence it is sometimes not possible to fulfill the need of late sponsors. As I am also sometimes on the sponsor side, this provides me two important alpha —

• The earlier you sponsor, the more it is possible for the organizer to tailor the plan to your needs!
• The earlier you sponsor, the more attention and time would go into your sponsorship, this is natural as the organizer would be quite thankful of your early support.

On the flip side, we have received lots of sponsorship request very close to when the event start date and simply could not take care of those and had to reject them.

Another important alpha is that it is super obvious when a potential sponsor is genuinely supporting the event v.s. a potential sponsor who just wants to extract value. It works in the opposite way — as event organizers, I know we did as much as we could for the ones who are genuinely supporting us.

• Genuinely support an event and the event organizers would reciprocate accordingly.
• Pushing and negotiating hard does not necessarily work in one’s favour. The negotiation has to match each other’s needs and not just one-sided!

Core Value - Quality first, Buidler focused

What I’m really proud of is that all of the co-organizers really care about the quality of the event. This is reflected in some details of our sponsorship plan:

1. We have limited the number of sponsored slots for speaking and workshops - this forces us to handpick the other empty slots (either by invite or by approving application) and have more control on the quality.
2. We were quite picky on the sponsors and rejected easy money.

These decisions did make it harder for us to fulfill the sponsorship need, but seeing how the event turned out, I believe we have made the right decision.

As event organizers who are not looking for profit, the main objective is to host the best experience for all the attendees. I learnt that there are different needs for the event organizers when we are seeking for sponsorship.

In the beginning, the main sponsorship / partnership need is to cover the cost for the event itself. Once this is fulfilled, it shifts to others such as “marketing”, “hackathon bounty”, “optimizing event experience”, etc. At later stage, we would sometimes exchange resources with partners - providing some sponsorship perks in exchange for some resources we needed at the time.

It is very interesting to observe how our own mentality changed and how it affects the sponsorship and all other aspects when the cost for the events are covered.

Closing Note

Other than sponsorship, I’ve also learnt a lot about the execution at the time. I’ve hosted the opening and the demo day of the hackathon, getting into the execution detail of hackathon, hosted a panel - there are more notes just for my own learning. But this is getting too long and I want to close it off to why I really wrote the post - to pay homage to the ones I admire.

The event went smoother than I expected, with a few flaws to improve on - but I feel that we were very lucky to be able to produce such an event. The sponsors we had were marvelously supportive, the speakers were insightful, and the attendees were also quite engaged. Some of my NYCU students asked for conference tickets when they are in the middle of hackathon - it felt great to see that the event has further inspired their interest in the space. One of my student even started to engage in a project due to a conference workshop!

All of my co-organizers are very talented and contributed in their unique ways. Hsuanting provided legal entity to sign for the event and provided ideas and discussion everywhere. ChangWu, Yenwen, Hsiao-Wei had key connections that brought in important resources. Anton were good at shitposting and creating fun experience for attendees. Others were the execution power engines - let it be website updates (Anderson, Annie), planning and making marketing / PR post (Hana), scheduling and interacting with speakers (Kimi). And of course our amazing PM who actually manages our key resource and allocate all of those wisely to made this an successful event.

While I listed out the main tasks people are in charge of, what made this event hosting experience wonderful is that everyone is selfless and supported each other when things need to be done. Everyone jumps in anywhere when things are needed - no bullshit. And remember this is in addition to the full-time job that everyone has plus no one is taking any profit home.

Working with these people reminds me of why we are working in this space - there are these selfless people trying to make the world a better place. I love working in Quantstamp exactly because of this, and I love working with my ETHTaipei co-organizers as well.

Cheers friends, ETHTaipei is coming back next year. Till then, let us keep crushing and move the space forward, in a decentralized manner.

See you around the world!

Note: published on Mirror