Pretty Sure That Was Best DSE Mixer Yet

November 17, 2022 by Dave Haynes

One of the staffers at the Hard Rock Cafe hangs out at the welcome area offering assistance and usse a little handheld clicker-counter thingie to log how many people come in for the mixer, and while I didn’t the final-final count, it was north of 300.

By all reports, to me and others, it was a great event and thank you to all my industry friends, old and new, who turned out. Thanks as well to the sponsors who made it possible. And to those who could not make it but sent notes about sick kids back home, changed meetings and delayed planes, asking me to release tickets to others for what was otherwise sold out.

We ticketed about 400 but there’s always a percentage who can’t make it because of commitments, delays or clients/prospects open to doing dinner, but early. This was, I think, the 12th Sixteen:Nine Mixer, and the best in how it set up and worked. We’ve come a long way from 50 of us hanging out in 2009 around the flaming fire pools, brass rails and velvet seating of the Peppermill Lounge (like that place but it can’t hold many people).

We did a pre-event panel just ahead of the formal start, using the stage, lighting and big LED screen to run a panel session on Mergers and Acquisitions. I am told that went off really well and know we had at least 100 people who came early for that.

I did an intro but had to turn things over to a moderator so I could get back up front and make sure everything was coming together for the mixer proper. Christian Armstrong of Spectrio did the moderating, speaking with his boss, Tamara Bebb of Spectrio, Kevin Carbone of Scala and Rick Mills of Creative Realities. Thanks to all of them for opening up the time to do it!

I need to come up with a better name than pre-event panel.

We had a photo team running around taking lots of pix, and video, and if things worked out technically I should have an audio and video file of the M&A panel to post at some point soon. Spectrio also organized a photo studio set-up that allowed people to update their Linkedin profile photos – which was busy all night.

Speaking of photos, I was too occupied all night to stop and take even a single snapshot of the proceedings. I’ll get the pro ones later, but I have nothing to work with this morning. So the image at the top is a placeholder.

This is DSE tweet that shows the event in action, but at hyperspeed:

My plans/hopes to do check-in kiosks to streamline picking up badges ran into technical issues yesterday afternoon, so we shelved that rather than doing something sub-optimal. One day …

If you are here in LV for DSE, see you there. Heading to Starbucks and hoping they have a Benna size for lattes. Benna is Bucket in Italian. I need.

One last thank you to sponsors:

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