--- title: "Who Should Attend Conferences From Your Startup? Pick by Goal" description: "Who should attend conferences from a startup? Match each seat to one goal (sales, hiring, press, partnerships), give it a target, and leave everyone else home." author: "Shilika Jain" date: "2026-10-28T00:50:50.255+00:00" tags: ["conference marketing", "events", "startup marketing", "crypto pr"] canonical: "https://www.shilikajain.com/blog/who-to-send-to-crypto-conference-team" --- # Who Should Attend Conferences From Your Startup? Pick by Goal By [Shilika Jain](https://www.shilikajain.com/authors/shilika-jain) - 10/28/2026 Who should attend conferences from a startup? Match each seat to one goal (sales, hiring, press, partnerships), give it a target, and leave everyone else home. --- # Who Should Attend Conferences From Your Startup? Pick by Goal The people who should attend a conference from your startup are the ones who own a goal the event can move: closing deals, hiring, earning press or signing partnerships. Decide the goals first, then give each goal one owner, one number and one list of names. Anyone who can't be matched to a goal stays home, and that includes a co-founder who just wants to be seen. Most teams do this backwards. They pick the people who want to go, then hope the trip produces something. ## Why does the attendee list decide the trip before you land? A conference is a week where every hour is contested. There are talks, side events, dinners, back-to-back meetings and a hotel lobby full of people you half know. Whoever you send will fill that week with something. The question is whether they fill it with your goals or with their own curiosity. I've done conference weeks from three seats: as a marketer working the floor for a brand, as a journalist doing interviews for CryptoDailyUK at TOKEN2049, and as the PR lead running on-ground media support for clients. From every one of those seats the same thing was true. The person who arrived with a list got more done in a morning than the person without one got in three days. The workload is also heavier than it looks from the outside. I wrote this after a December of events: > being a crypto marketer is hard:( > > you gotta attend conferences,distribute merch, have ppl complete quests, explain your product 101 times, think of creative campaigns, network/converse with industry players > > [Shilika Jain on X, 6 Dec 2024](https://x.com/Shilika_jain/status/1864940710136578167) Every one of those jobs needs a person. If you send one founder to cover all of them, none of them gets done well. If you send six people with no assignment, they'll all do the fun ones. ## What are the four goals a startup can send people for? Almost every useful reason to be at a crypto or AI conference falls into one of four buckets. Name yours before you name anyone. 1. **Sales or business development.** You have a product someone at the event could buy, integrate or list. 2. **Partnerships and ecosystem.** You need an integration, a grant, a co-marketing deal or a closer relationship with a chain or foundation. 3. **Press and visibility.** You want journalists to know your founder, or you have news to time to the week. 4. **Hiring.** You're trying to meet engineers, researchers or senior operators who rarely answer cold messages. Fundraising usually rides with the founder and sits inside the partnerships seat, because the investors worth meeting at these events tend to be in the same small rooms as ecosystem leads. If you can only name one goal, send one person. If you can't name any, that's your answer too, and the sibling piece on [what to do with the budget if you skip](/blog/skip-crypto-conference-alternatives) is the better read. ## Who goes for which goal? The seat-to-goal roster This is the table I fill in with founders before anyone books a flight. Each row is a seat. A seat is only real when every column has something in it. | Seat | Best person | What they own | Target to set before the trip | What they skip | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Deals | Founder or head of BD | Meetings with prospects on a named list | A number of qualified meetings booked before landing, plus follow-ups booked within two weeks | Mass parties, most talks | | Partnerships | Founder, CTO or ecosystem lead | Integration and co-marketing conversations | A short list of teams, one specific ask for each | Booth duty | | Press | The founder, with PR running the calendar | Journalist briefings and on-ground interviews | A handful of briefings booked in advance, two or three opinions ready | Their own product demo, unless asked | | Hiring | An engineer or hiring manager, not a recruiter alone | Conversations with candidates and referrers | A list of people to meet and a role brief they can explain in a minute | Sales meetings | | Home base | Someone who stays behind | Shipping, support, community, inbox | Nothing breaks while the others are away | The flight | Two rows surprise people. The press seat belongs to the founder, but the person who books it is whoever runs PR. Journalists at these events want a founder with a view, and in my experience they're most interested in the regulation and market structure conversations, not a demo. When I've set up on-ground interviews for clients, such as the meetings with CoinDesk I arranged for Magna at Messari Mainnet, the founder showed up and talked. Everything around that, the outreach, the timing, the briefing notes, was work done weeks before, and it's the part of my [Web3 PR campaigns](/services/web3-pr-campaigns) that founders tend to underestimate. If your founder needs a short version of their story for reporters and programmers, my guide on the [founder bio journalists and conference programmers actually use](/blog/founder-bio-journalists-conference-programmers) covers it. The home-base seat is the one nobody plans for. Conference weeks eat calendars, and somebody has to keep the product and the community running. > working during conferences need some other world of superpowers ngl > > [Shilika Jain on X, 29 Aug 2024](https://x.com/Shilika_jain/status/1829025152270586116) Nobody has those superpowers for a full week. Name the person who stays, and tell the travelling team that the person at home is the reason they can afford to be offline. ## How many people should a startup send? Fewer than you think. Here's the logic I use, by stage, assuming one main conference and no booth. - **Pre-seed or a team under ten:** one person, usually the founder, carrying at most two goals. If press is one of them, PR support runs remotely or on-ground for part of the week. - **Seed with a live product:** two people. Founder takes partnerships and press. A BD or product lead takes deals. Hiring piggybacks only if one of them can explain the role well. - **Series A and up, with a booth or a hosted event:** three or four people, each on a separate seat, plus a clear home-base owner. A booth needs people who can explain the product properly, which usually means engineers or product leads on rotation, not interns. The test for adding a person is simple. Would the extra seat produce a goal the existing seats can't reach? If the honest answer is "they'd help out", that's a cost line, not a seat. The sibling post on [building a conference budget template](/blog/crypto-conference-budget-template-startup) shows how fast each extra traveller adds up once flights, hotels and ground transport are in. ## What target should each person carry? A target is what turns a ticket into a job. It should be small enough to hit and specific enough that you'll know on day four whether it's happening. Good targets look like this: - "Meet the eight wallet teams on this list, and leave with a next step from at least some of them." - "Brief three journalists who cover stablecoin policy before the opening keynote." - "Have coffee with the five protocol engineers our CTO already follows." Bad targets look like "network", "build awareness" or "see what's out there". You can't miss those, which means you can't hit them either. Each person also carries a short list of names, made before travel. The list is the thing that lets them say no to the eleventh party invite. The sibling piece on [booking meetings before the conference](/blog/book-meetings-before-crypto-conference) covers how to fill those lists in the four weeks before you fly. ## Should the founder always go? Not always. The founder should go when at least one of these is true: - Investors or strategic partners you need are attending, and they expect to meet the founder, not a deputy. - You want press, and the founder is the spokesperson. - The founder is speaking, which changes the week because the talk becomes a reason for every other meeting. The founder can skip when the trip is mostly deals and a strong BD lead can carry them, or when the company is mid-launch and the founder is the bottleneck at home. A founder who misses a week of product decisions to attend a conference where nobody on their list is going has made an expensive trade. There's also a softer reason founders go: to be seen. That's real, and occasionally useful, but it belongs in the brand budget and should be named as such. ## When does sending a big team make sense? There are cases where a larger crew is right. A team running a booth needs enough people to staff it in shifts without burning out. A team hosting its own side event needs hosts, a door person and someone working the room. A protocol with a big ecosystem presence may want several leads on the ground because dozens of partner teams will be there in one week. Even then, the roster rule holds. Each extra person gets a seat, a target and a list. Staffing a booth is a seat. Running the door at your dinner is a seat. "Coming along" is not. What doesn't work is the trip as a team reward. Morale matters, and a team offsite in a fun city can be worth it. Just don't book it against the event budget and then judge the event by its pipeline. The two goals pull against each other: people on a reward trip go to the parties, which is exactly what the pipeline seat should be skipping. ## How do product teams and service businesses staff differently? I've written before about how [products and services work a conference differently](/blog/token2049-field-notes-pr-marketing). Staffing follows from that. A product team needs people who can answer integration questions on the spot, so engineers and product leads earn seats. A service business, a fractional PR lead like me included, sends the person whose relationships the business runs on. There's no point sending a junior to "represent" a relationship business. People hire the person they had a good conversation with. ## FAQ ### Should interns or junior staff attend crypto conferences? They can, as long as they hold a real seat, such as running booth shifts or capturing content, and someone senior has given them a target. A conference is a good place to learn the industry, but don't put a junior in front of a journalist or a key partner without preparation. If the main reason is development, budget it as training rather than marketing. ### What if two goals need the same person? Pick the one that matters more this quarter and give the other a smaller target. A founder can do press in the mornings and partnerships in the afternoons, but not both at full intensity. Write down which goal wins when the calendar clashes, so the choice isn't made on the spot. ### Should we send someone just to attend talks? Only if learning is the goal and you'll use what they learn, for example a researcher scouting a technical track. Many talks are recorded or summarised afterwards, so attending them in person is rarely the best use of a seat. The hallway conversations are usually the part you can't get later. ### How do we judge whether each person did their job? Compare their target with what happened within two weeks of the event, not on the flight home. Count meetings that turned into a next step, journalist briefings that produced a quote or a story, and candidates who entered a process. Then decide whether that seat earns a ticket next time. *Planning who to send to your next conference? [Book a 30-minute call](https://calendly.com/shilikajain/30min/) and we'll fill in the roster together, seat by seat.* --- **Book a 30-min conference planning call with Shilika** - https://calendly.com/shilikajain/30min/ Canonical: https://www.shilikajain.com/blog/who-to-send-to-crypto-conference-team