The website linked in the article appears to not be _the_ website (to be fair, tfa only calls it _a_ website). The website actually hosted by JPM is very sparse, but even mentions that such unofficial websites exist.

https://www.jpmorgan.com/about-us/events-conferences/health-...

(tfa is a fun read, regardless)

The conference sessions aren't what matters. The important thing about these kinds of industry conferences is the ability for investors, leaders, regulators, journalists, and others to meet with each other in a neutral zone. Multiple M&As are being negotiated, IPOs being considered, funds trying to raise a new vintage, and companies starting press junkets in preparation for a roadshow.

> it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart. And that this is the primary organizing focal point for both the location and entire reason for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

Moscone Center tends to be the primary hub for industry conferences in the City (eg. RSA, Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld way back in the day), and more niche executive events are in the Four Seasons or St Regis. My hunch is that JPM has a multi-year deal with the Westin to host the conference at the Westin.

from my understanding, it's a healthcare investors conference where investors meet companies (both public and private), esp those looking to fund raise.

lol best thing I read all day

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What an incredible read.

Not surprising. Take any conference and look at the schedule of some CEO or other “socialite” attending said conference. They’re not in the building, they’re running around town attending meetings. At JPMHC everyone is a “socialite”

Absolute cinema

Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut - what a wonderful and absurd article

I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas go to be funded and then die). Then there are the sharks, cruising around looking for easy pickings.

My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."