Herbie Hancock. That tells you who’s going to be coming to this meeting. It’s allowed me to go very top-drawer, but also avoid politicians and avoid CEOs.
How did you come to create the TED conference? I was traveling a lot then, and it occurred to me that the only interesting people I was talking to were people in the technology business, the entertainment industry, and the design profession. I was a designer, and it seemed to me that when they were talking about some project that they were doing that was interesting to me, they unbeknown to themselves were involving the other two disciplines. And they didn’t understand at that time — it’s old news now, because everyone understands this, but then they didn’t — they did not understand the convergence of the technology business, the entertainment industry, and the design profession. They really thought of them as three separate entities. It was siloed. So I thought, I’ll call it TED and give away Teddy bears
and get these people together. It was quite a good conference. I couldn’t get people to come, and lost money. And then I waited a while and did it again, because people started asking me to and chatting about how good a conference it was. But
I waited quite a while. And then I did it again and then it was always sold. And I never advertised it and never announced it. I don’t have that luxury now. When you start something
from zero, like WWW, and when you’re an old guy like me, I have to announce what I’m doing. Everyone is saying they want to be there, but I’m not selling tickets. Nobody’s coming except the presenters. It’s not even invitation-only. I never had an invitation event. TED as an invitation event was done by the people who bought it. It was never invitation; first-come who sent their money got in, period. It was never an exclusive event. It just is now.
Did you cap TED’s attendance at a certain point? For four or five years, I kept it at what the auditorium would hold, which was 500. I sold 550 seats, because there was always 10 percent of the people wandering off. And then, downstairs in the same building there was a large exhibition space, so I decided I would try an experiment — out of avarice and greed — to say that if you couldn’t get in, because there was such a demand to come, that you could come and when there were seats empty in the main room you could sit in there, but otherwise there was going to be a simulcast room with
BEST IN SHOW: The first meeting that Wurman chaired was the International Design Conference in As- pen (IDCA), in 1972. “It was supposed to be at that time — and I think it was — the best conference in the world,” he said. “It was that way before me and after me; I didn’t make it the best conference in the world.”