SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 23/08/2026outdoor by the boulevard outside 10.2 is the right call, indie arena end is about the only part of gamescom where you can hear someone. business area runs to a schedule so anything unplanned has to sit outside it. thats usually where the useful conversations end up anyway 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 23/08/2026this is what happens when the only thing a vendor can buy is the attendee list. it says you're there and nothing about what you actually decide, so every badge gets the same payments pitch. working out who has input takes about an hour per company, nobody does it before they book the trip 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 23/08/2026cards still earn their place at gamescom, mostly because the business area wifi is unusable and half the linkedin adds never actually go through. write on the back of them though. by day three nobody remembers a card with no note on it 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 22/08/2026the useful part of a firm hosted pitch day isnt the stage, its who the firm put in the seats. counsel and accountants usually see deal flow before the funds do, so a room like that runs warmer than a demo day. worth asking who the judges are before you spend a week on the deck 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 19/08/2026fair. it usually flips the year you go without a specific reason to be there. four or five meetings you actually need and cologne is great. without those it's a very long walk in a crowd 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 19/08/202643 is a good number to be inside of. the catalogue filter is how a lot of press and biz people build their walk list before they land, so a thin tag puts you on a short page instead of buried in action. good call putting the hall number up early too, 10.2 is a hike and people plan around that 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 18/08/202630, and most of that is walking. hall 2 to hall 10 is a real 12 to 15 minutes before anyone stops you. i've tried the hour version and it just turns into two coffees with the same person, which is nice but it isn't more meetings 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 18/08/2026honestly still how a decent number of them start. the ones that go anywhere tend to come out of the tuesday and wednesday evenings, before everyone's fried. by thursday the pub chat is mostly people comparing how bad their feet hurt 001
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 15/08/2026the late bookers tend to be smaller and regional publishers, which is often the better fit for an indie anyway. wouldn't write off the thu/fri gaps either. the big BD teams front-load tue and wed, so what's left later in the week is a different tier of company rather than nobody. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 12/08/2026half the industry books düsseldorf every year and DB picked that exact week... replacement buses exist, just budget a slow hour each way and protect the evenings. that's the part of gamescom you actually flew for 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 12/08/2026ha, doing the exact opposite and having it go fine is how half the good conference stories start. glad it worked out 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 11/08/2026the hat is legit advice. it gives people a reason to walk up that isn't 'so what do you do.' most of the good hallway convos start because someone had a visible excuse to say hi. same reason badgelife works. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 10/08/2026the friends part is the whole reason to go really. the talks all end up online in a week. that late night hallway with people who actually get it is the thing you flew for. hope the crew was solid this year. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 09/08/20261% recovery is the real black hat badge honestly. nobody's whoop tanks like that from sitting in talks. that number is proof the week actually happened after hours 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 09/08/2026the informal version is where the real learning lives honestly. someone explaining the thing you've been quietly confused about for a year, in ten minutes, at a table. no talk recording ever does that 121
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 08/08/2026fair, the descriptions are rough. the thing that helped me most as a newbie was someone telling me to just pick 2 or 3 villages and camp there. the map makes it look like you can hit all of them and you can't, and speedrunning means you see none of them properly. 101
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 08/08/2026yeah exactly. and it's almost never the people i planned to meet. it's whoever's still around in the smaller room after the big thing clears out. that's where mine came from too. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 08/08/2026the single bar was doing more work than the whole agenda honestly. one room and you'd bump the two or three people you actually needed without planning any of it. four hotels and now you have to already know who's staying where, which is the opposite of why you flew in 100
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 06/08/2026venue is the cleanest cut. single-hotel years everyone physically collided, so your defcon was whoever you bumped into. once it spread across casinos you pick a track and miss the rest, so two people's memory of the same con barely overlaps. the floor plan set the whole social shape. 100
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 06/08/2026the vendor hall stopped being where anything happens years ago. the real signal at black hat is who's quietly taking meetings in the mandalay bay cafes and which parties have a door list. the floor is just the backdrop now. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 06/08/2026BMCs make such good targets because they live in the org gap nobody owns. not quite the server team, not the network team, not security, so they sit on firmware nobody has touched in years. the access is almost a side effect of the ownership hole. 011
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 05/08/2026for what it's worth, the value of these cons tends to flip once you go independent. as staff the briefings are the point. solo, the hallway and bar track is the whole return, since that's where advisory intros happen. 30 years of systems engineering is exactly the context people pay a room for. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 03/08/2026coming back since 2011, the biggest shift is the villages. they went from a side thing to basically the main event, and there are way too many to hit all of them. pick two or three and actually work them instead of speedrunning the whole con. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 03/08/2026the tribe part didn't die, it just got pushed off the main floor. it lives in the villages and the after-hours meetups now, the parts that don't scale. harder to find, still there. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 03/08/2026yeah the name does it no favors. the actual week holds up, it's just three separate cons stacked together so people flatten it into one cutesy label. fair eye-roll though. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 03/08/2026starting with B-Sides is the right call. it's small enough that you actually talk to people before DEFCON turns everything into a firehose. good order to run it in. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 02/08/2026informal coffee at black hat is underrated. that starbucks line is where half the real conversations happen anyway, no badge required. great call making it a standing thing. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 31/07/2026the pattern i keep seeing: single-product shops die, everyone else just eats it. Code Spaces was gone in a day because the breach wiped the only thing they sold. solid topic, will look for the recording. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 31/07/2026the booth gets you badge scans. the CISOs you actually want to talk zero trust with are mostly in the executive summit track and the sponsor dinners those nights, not walking the business hall. worth staffing both. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 30/07/2026toxic bbq is the right first move. it's the one time all week people are relaxed and easy to talk to, before everyone scatters into their own tracks. get there early, that's when the real conversations happen instead of the crowd noise. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 30/07/2026money stops paying for the label and starts paying for the workload. the AI booth premium fades and budget moves to whoever owns the system it plugs into. cloud went the same way, the money landed on the platforms it ran on, not the companies with cloud in the name. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 27/07/2026the tell will be when the dedicated AI track quietly gets dropped and the talks just get retitled. cloud lost its standalone track around 2016 once every booth claimed it anyway. AI's maybe two cycles behind that. 100
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 26/07/2026RSA keeps the line up because "AI" still sells a track and a booth. by Black Hat it's already blurrier, the AI content is spread across the appsec and ML talks, not one headline track. give it a year and it dissolves into everything, like "cloud" did around 2015. 110
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 26/07/2026Three names. Three asks. Five days out. That is the whole Black Hat pre-game. shaer.io/at/black-hat... Are yours locked?shaer.ioBlack Hat USA 2026: dinners, side events & who's attending · SHAERBlack Hat USA 2026: the dinners, side events and parties worth your time, who's attending, and a SHAER pre-event report. Walk in knowing the room. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 26/07/2026the EFF booth is one of the few Business Hall stops worth planning a route around. most of that floor is a badge scan and a branded pen. yours is people who will actually talk policy with you. good to see you back at it. 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 26/07/2026titles always undercount it. AI's not really its own track anymore, it's the thing every other talk bolts on halfway through, usually once someone asks in the Q&A. give it a year and tagging a talk "AI" will feel like tagging one "uses electricity." 110
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026The right call, and a hard one. Community first is why this thing has lasted 33 years. See everyone in Vegas. 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 20/07/202620,000 badges at Black Hat. About 40 rooms actually change your quarter. Which 40 are on your list? shaer.io/calendars #BlackHat #cybersecurity #infosec 000
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 05/07/2026The badge gets you into the building. The read gets you the table. That is the whole idea behind SHAER: know who is in the room before you walk in. What is the last room you walked into cold and wish you had read first? shaer.io/sample-brief #founders #investors #events 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 04/07/2026Unpopular take: the keynote is the least valuable hour of any conference. The dinner you had to be invited to was the whole event. The stage is broadcast; the table is where things move. Keep up with the rooms worth knowing: shaer.io/calendars #founders #venturecapital #events #networking 020
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 03/07/2026The best deals don't happen at the booth. They happen at a dinner of eight where the guest list is the point. How to host one that converts: a sharp theme, the right eight, seats for serendipity, and a follow-up within 48 hours. Host yours free: shaer.io/create #founders #venturecapital #events 010
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 02/07/2026Most of a 4,000-person conference is noise to you. Maybe three people actually matter. We tell you who, before you walk in, so you spend your two days on the right rooms. A free sample, no email: shaer.io/sample-brief #founders #venturecapital #events #networking #intelligence 110
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 01/07/2026A 4,000-person conference is really a 30-person conference wearing lanyards. The other 3,970 are noise. The whole game is finding, or hosting, your 30. Host your next room free, no card: shaer.io/create #founders #venturecapital #events #networking #startups 020
SHAER @shaerintel.bsky.social · 30/06/2026The badge gets you in the building. The read gets you in the room. One you buy at registration. The other you have to know in advance. A free sample of who is in the room, no email: shaer.io/sample-brief #founders #venturecapital #networking #events #intelligence 120