I have been to lots of conferences – some good, some bad, most mindnumbingly long – but none great. That is until I went to Drift‘s Hypergrowth ’17 conference last week.

Scheduled the day before Hubspot’s huge Inbound conference, Drift’s Hypergrowth17 conference attracted over 1,400 people – a pretty remarkable number given it was the first year of the conference. What made it fantastic was it’s balance. Sure, the conference had a Marketing theme – after all that is what Drift focuses on – however, they alternated “Growth” speakers with marketing speakers. And those “growth” speakers were awesome!

The first “growth” speaker was Ben Von Wong  – an artist (with a great name) who evolved from commercial work to only doing work that had a social impact. His photography is compelling and dramatic (check out his very cool work here – www.vonwong.com), and his story uplifting.

Andy Raskin, a tech leader and storyteller, spoke about the importance of being able to craft and tell a good story. His thesis was the most successful high growth tech companies were enabled in many ways by their founders and employees being compelling storytellers.

My absolute favorite speaker of the conference was the founder of the November Project –
Brogan Graham. He had a tough speaking spot right after lunch but he crushed it.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the November Project, it is a set of tribes that get together early in the morning to work out. Here in Boston, they are known to run the steps of the Harvard Coliseum every Wednesday at 6:30 am. Even former Boston Bruins defenseman, Andrew Ference, participated in the November Project Boston Tribe when he was here.

 

Brogan’s message was simple – what is important is Authentic Leadership and Connection to others. He was dynamic, profane and hilarious, and he definitely got us out of our comfort zones. He had us trade our phones with a stranger for a couple minutes (which turns out is an oddly unsettling thing to do), give three hugs to different people and thank them for being there. It was a great way to come back from lunch!

The marketing sessions and panels were solid, although to be fair, I am not a keen judge of marketing content. Overall, I was very impressed by the conference and the team at Drift for putting on such a remarkable event in their first year. It will be a tough job to exceed it next year, but I am sure the team at Drift will be up for the task!