IRL is back, and the founders we talk to keep asking whether they should host their own events. 

A meetup is the easy answer. A conference asks for far more. It needs months of runway, a team that can step away from other work to go all-in, and a budget that covers costs most founders never think to price. And the results won’t always be immediately felt as leads slowly drip through the sales pipeline. 

Still, a conference creates magic that meetups can’t match when your logo’s up in lights, and the founder takes the keynote stage. For the employees and customers who bet on you early, it’s often the day the company finally looks as big as they always believed it was.

Erika Bricky just went through all of it. Back in September, she ran Navigate, the first flagship conference from Browserbase, which builds infrastructure for agents to reliably use the web. More than 500 people filled the Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF to hear a lineup very few Series B startups (or even more mature ones) could book. Stripe cofounder John Collison, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl, and Thariq Shihipar (former core maintainer of Claude Code for Anthropic) all took the stage, along with engineers from Cognition, Ramp, and Lovable.

The company behind it all was less than three years old, with fewer than 80 employees.

We sat down with Erika, who originally joined Browserbase as the company’s first B2B marketer and is now their Field Marketing Lead, to ask her the questions founders bring us: whether a conference is worth it, how to know when you’re ready, and how a startup can punch above its weight. 

Erika and Browserbase founder Paul Klein IV shared a conviction that shaped everything that followed: In a market flooded with automated outreach, in-person is the one channel buyers can’t tune out. (We previously highlighted how when Paul was first starting the company, he spent his nights at “virtually every AI meetup in SF.”)

So it’s no surprise that Erika dreamed up the idea for a conference in her first month at Browserbase (she even had a name for it). Then she sat on the pitch for more than a year. “I just don’t think I felt like I was ready,” she says. “I don’t think I felt like we were ready.”

The market had to catch up to the company’s thesis. Paul has argued since 2023, long before most people had used an agent, that AI agents would need a web browser. For years, that argument reached a small (but passionate) audience. 

“When we started Browserbase, it felt more like a niche developer problem,” Erika says. But the idea of agents needing to navigate the internet was spreading much wider. 

Some of the timing was luck. When planning kicked off in March, no one could have known that personal agent apps like Muse, Instinct, and Town would take off, putting agents that work across the web in the hands of ordinary people. 

The company (and any other startup thinking about conferences) also needed enough salespeople to close the loop. A conference that generates hundreds of leads is wasted without them.

Finally, she needed the founder’s trust. Erika spent a year delivering before she walked into a meeting with Paul carrying a pitch deck: vision, budget estimate, dates, and vendors she’d already met. He approved it before the meeting ended.

The first surprise for anyone pricing out a conference is where the money goes. “The primary bulk of the costs are food and labor,” Erika says. “It’s not equipment. It’s not cameras. It is food.” San Francisco catering is expensive, and trade show labor in the city is union. There’s no real way to cut costs here without leaving folks hungry.

Erika saved where attendees wouldn’t notice. She sourced merch directly from overseas suppliers over WhatsApp and skipped the event livestream, instead posting talks to YouTube. She spent where attendees would notice. Given a choice between a beautiful museum and a stuffy conference venue, the team picked the museum. The brand design was impeccable, from the floor-to-ceiling screens down to customizable merch (she credits Browserbase’s nimble design team here).

Time is the other cost a scrappy version can’t skip. After getting the thumbs up from Paul in March, Navigate took six months to pull together, with most of the work packed between May and September. That’s not to say you can’t make it work on a much tighter timeline, but she wouldn’t choose that pace. "I liked having a lot of time because we were able to really develop the story of the day,” she says. “We had a lot of time to do design revisions, make sure the attendee journey was locked in, and we had a lot of time to get speakers.”

But the stacked speaker lineup that drew in attendees was completely free. Erika and Paul built the speaker lineup almost entirely from people they knew. “Between me and Paul, I think we called everyone,” she says. This is not the time to be skittish about calling in a favor, and a company that can’t fill a stage through its own network probably isn’t ready to host one.

So what will she change going forward for Navigate 2027? For one thing, next year's event will probably be ticketed. “Our first Navigate was free, which was the right call to help build awareness. But free versus ticketed is like booking a workout class in advance; you never want to cancel and eat that cost. There’s a level of perceived value that comes with someone paying.”

Plenty of companies shouldn’t host a conference yet. “If I had unlimited money and unlimited resources, every event would be a premium experience, but that’s just not realistic,” Erika says. “And startups don’t always need that.”

Every event, at any size, needs a hook. “If you want people to show up, you need to deliver something that they couldn’t get elsewhere,” she says. That can be a unique experience, a room of people attendees can’t meet anywhere else, or information they need. Erika once co-hosted a developer marketing night built around a game: guests guessed which of two LinkedIn ads performed better until one winner was left standing. “Instead of a demo, make it a game,” she says. “Instead of doing it at the office, do it at a coffee shop.”

The same rule carried into Navigate. Erika deliberately doesn’t use the term “user conference.” “I didn’t want it to feel like it was all about Browserbase all day,” she says. "I wanted it to feel like we gathered the brightest minds possible all in one room, talking about the cutting edge of AI infrastructure."

Before Anthropic officially filed its S-1, Notable Managing Partner Glenn Solomon and Principal Dan Cahana penned a thesis on why developers have been the technology industry’s most reliable bellwether for two decades.

Read the article on the Notable Capital blog.