The reason most conferences are bad is that running a conference is scary. Yours can be better.
Dyno Therapeutics, a gene therapy company, wanted to take a powerful idea and build it into a movement. Here's how they ran an amazing first-time conference, and what you can learn from it.
This past fall, I helped my client Dyno Therapeutics organize the Genetic Agency Technology Conference. In under six months they went from never having done anything like this before, to running a tremendously successful event. In post-conference surveys, every single respondent rated “I met interesting people” a 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale. That didn’t happen by accident, it happened because they did a lot of things right. Here’s how they did it.
Background: Genetic Agency - going from an idea to a movement
Dyno Therapeutics are a genetic technologies company who use AI to find new ways to get gene therapies into patients. When I first spoke with Eric Kelsic, their CEO, he explained a broader vision: they developed technology, yes, but they had a change they wanted to bring about in the world. Eric wanted to help spur a movement around the idea of increasing Genetic Agency — an individual’s ability to take action at the genetic level to live a healthier life. He believed this was more than one company could do. He wanted to mobilize a community around a rallying idea, and turn it into a concrete movement of people taking action.
Six months of planning. One day to get it right. Yikes!
Eric put Tyson Bertmaring, a member of his executive team, in charge of making the conference happen. Tyson had a hard job. Running a conference involves a million decisions, and there aren’t many options for trial and iteration: you spend six months planning, then everything happens in one day. There’s enormous pressure to get things right the first time. And there’s often a lot of money involved.
Tyson was in a position I see a lot in my clients: his boss wanted him to organize a conference and wanted it to be great. But no one knew exactly what a great conference looked like. No one had run one before. Part of what makes this so hard is that many people have never even been to a truly great conference, because so many conferences aren’t great. (See my article: Everything you did to make your conference better actually made it worse.) If this sounds like your situation, you’re not alone.
All of this is made worse by the fact that there is enormous social pressure in running a conference. Dyno invited two hundred high-impact people: some of the most respected researchers in gene therapy, CEOs of the companies they do business with, competitors, investors. Making a conference great means inviting the very best people. And inviting the very best people increases the reputational risk: when you’re hosting all the people who matter most to you, you really don’t want to look bad in front of them. And not everyone who ends up running a conference is a natural extrovert. Tyson is a quiet, thoughtful guy with experience in the air force. He described to me various things they had to do during training, all of which would have been more or less impossible for me. But Tyson told me that for him, hosting this event was more uncomfortable than boot camp.
Underused first step for conferences: Know what you want to accomplish.
(Spoiler: this also works for things that aren’t conferences.)
Clients often begin our first call by asking me: How long should our conference be? What speakers should we book? How much should we charge? These are all “how” questions. People try to answer them before answering the more important question: why are you running this conference?
Once you know why you’re running the event and what success looks like, most of these questions get much easier to answer. But if you don’t know what you want, they’re impossible to answer well. You would be amazed how rare it is for people running a conference to be able to articulate why the conference should exist. A dispiritingly common reason I hear is: “It’s called our Annual Conference, and it’s been almost a year since the last time we did it.” This is not a solid scaffold for good decision-making.
Setting goals can be harder than it sounds: it can mean saying no to some things. It often means surfacing disagreements between stakeholders about what the conference is actually for. This stuff is uncomfortable.
Goals are often fuzzy and ill-defined. But Dyno had a great head start: Eric began with a strong vision. Over a series of conversations, we honed that vision into concrete goals. Eric wanted to strengthen the community in his industry, build the ecosystem, and create a movement around an idea. He understood that this required gathering people who don’t normally talk - industry people, researchers, AI entrepreneurs, regulators, patients - and getting them to have meaningful conversations and build relationships. This was a great starting point to build from.
Knowing your goals is not enough: you need to know their goals, too.
One of the top mistakes I see conference organizers make is they fail to recognize the differences between their attendees’ goals and their own.
One thing, for instance, that Dyno wanted was to increase their already-substantial profile within the gene therapy community. This was an important goal for Dyno, but a goal that almost none of their attendees would care about. A real danger could have been putting too much emphasis on that goal, which would have turned off attendees and made it seem like a sales pitch.
Eric’s primary goal was to build community around the idea of Genetic Agency. The idea was compelling, but most people did not come with a pre-existing interest in it. Each participant came with their own aims- Something they or their company were trying to do. These aims were often deeply compatible with Eric’s vision, but they were not the same vision. This is how communities actually form: not by forcing people into your cause, but by gathering people whose own goals naturally overlap and letting the shared purpose emerge.
This all can feel unsettling: When you start with your own clear goals, it can feel like incorporating other people’s goals means giving up control of the event. But it’s one of those paradoxes of life that loosening up that control is the only way to actually get the things you want. (Because no one will take part in your event if it’s just about you)
GATC participants came wanting to find collaborators, learn about new developments, and connect with peers. They wanted to do those things in ways that advanced their specific goals. How do I know what participants wanted? Because we asked them. Before we made any logistical decisions, we interviewed about a dozen prospective attendees. We asked what they hoped to get from an event like this, what had worked at other events they’d been to, and what they’d found frustrating. We also surveyed people after the event to find out what they found most valuable so we could build on that next year. We used all that to help make design decisions about the event.
How to stop 200 people from meeting each other
If you had 200 people in a room and you wanted to stop them from meeting each other, a good way to do it would be to give one of them a microphone and make the other 199 sit quietly and listen.
And yet, amazingly, that’s what most conferences do as their central activity. They call it “programming.” But people don’t meet each other while sitting in an audience. They meet during lunches, breaks, discussions, and cocktails. If connection is the goal, the program should be designed around the times people are actually talking to each other, not the times they’re sitting silently.
GATC was designed around this idea. Talks were kept short and treated as starting points for conversation, not as the main event. The schedule included long breaks, a generous lunch, and a cocktail party afterwards.
Connecting people is important. You can do better than just leaving it to chance.
Having lots of breaks and long lunches allows people to have all sorts of great chance encounters. But you can do better than just leaving this to chance: you can design to create the sorts of connections you want to have. GATC included structures that intentionally increased the likelihood of connection. There were open roundtable sessions where anyone could propose a topic and lead a discussion or working group. There was a morning session to match people up: Every attendee got a card and wrote down the topic they most wanted to discuss. Then they walked the room, cards in hand, finding others working on the same problems. Within minutes, groups were forming, and the energy in the room completely shifted, before 9:30 am.
For lots of people, it’s hard to connect with others at a conference. Having structures can make this much easier, which can be especially important for introverts and for people who feel like newcomers to a specific community. Getting people talking early, helping them get comfortable, creating connections, has payoffs throughout the conference. By lunchtime at GATC, everybody had met many people and had lots of people they wanted to talk to more.
In post-conference surveys, when we asked attendees what was most valuable, almost every single person said some version of the same thing: the people they met, the conversations they had, the connections they made.
Most conferences spend weeks choosing their speakers, and no time choosing their attendees.
If the point of your conference is to get people together, the most important variable is who those people are. But most organizers just open up ticket sales and hope for the best. They spend more time thinking about what appetizers to serve than about who will be there.
Dyno chose to make their conference invitation-only. Not enough conferences do this. They invited the best people they could find, and also had a small number of spots that people could apply for. They thought carefully about the categories of people they wanted and how many from each group. A lot of their invitations were aspirational. They reached out to people that it was slightly intimidating to reach out to. They especially focused on inviting groups who don’t normally talk to each other- industry people, policymakers, academics. Their choice to invite patients was especially powerful: many people in gene therapy are so immersed in the science that they lose sight of the people they’re trying to help. Many attendees reported that having patients and their families there was the most meaningful part of the conference.
Even with all the right answers, it’s still scary.
The most important thing I’ve learned working with clients is to have empathy with how hard this is. If you’re running a high-stakes conference, you are by definition inviting the people who matter most in your world. As humans, we really do not want to look bad in front of the people who matter most to us.
I think this is the number one reason most conferences are mediocre. If you run a forgettable conference, nobody blames you- most conferences are forgettable. Doing something different feels risky. There is a very strong pull to add more keynotes, to cut the group-discussion time, to make the conference more conventional. Putting people in seats while someone talks feels familiar and safe. Asking them to write topics on cards and march around the room holding them up feels like you might end up looking like an idiot. Eric and Tyson were both great at noticing when they felt the temptation to fall back into safe patterns. A big part of my job is to help people push back against that temptation. Eric and Tyson’s willingness to endure some discomfort was a huge part of what made the conference successful.
Community is not built in a day.
A conference lasts a day or two. The goals of most conferences are bigger than that. Dyno was not going to build a transformative ecosystem around genetic agency in one afternoon.
So they planned for follow-up. They made it easy for people to exchange contact information. They encouraged attendees to start working groups during the roundtable sessions — some of which are still meeting months later. And they’ve been experimenting with shorter, more frequent online events to keep the community alive between annual in-person gatherings.
Conferences matter. Yours can be great.
Conferences are incredibly important. There is an enormous opportunity for knowledge exchange, for collaboration, for relationship-building that can really only take place by bringing humans together in one place. They’re also expensive, they take months to plan, and they pull people away from their work and their families.
And most of them are forgettable. Not because the organizers don’t care, but because the default design optimizes for safety, not for impact.
Dyno didn’t use the default settings. They did the work of clarifying their goals, understanding their attendees, and designing for connection. They pushed through the discomfort of doing something new. They played on hard mode. And the results paid off: The survey responses were unreal. 97% of their attendees said they would come back next year. The same number said they would recommend it to a friend. People formed working groups. People stayed in touch. Dyno will be back in 2026 with an even more ambitious event.
If you’re planning a conference for your first time and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, I hope this helps.
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[Here’s where you can learn more about Dyno and their conference. Here’s where you can learn more about me and the work I do helping companies make their conferences better. Also, while the article doesn’t talk much about it, conferences involve a huge number of details, and the excellent folks at Shift-Alt ensured that everything ran without a hitch.]
This was so insightful