great screens. And people liked the simulcast room. So then it immediately went to a thousand people. A thousand was too many; that was just me being greedy. I don’t think a meeting should be bigger than 700, because
you can’t see and meet and remember the people you see within a space of three or four days if it’s over 700. TED now is three or four thousand. Davos is five or six thousand. They’re all things that have become rather anonymous events. I understand why they do that, and I understand why I made mine twice as big. [Laughs.] But I can look back on it and see things I’ve done.
What made you sell TED? Each year it was getting a little harder to get it together and do one more and outdo myself from the year before. Because I was doing everything, and I was just trying to make it better every year. And I realized two things. One, what I just said; and two, that fundamentally I don’t think a creative person should try to keep on doing a better version of what they’ve just done. Just a better version wasn’t enough. I wanted to start from scratch. Then I sold it, and I really missed not doing it. [Laughs.]
After I’d gotten rid of it, I realized I probably shouldn’t have sold it. When my non-compete was over, I started a new conference called e.g. That was from scratch, and that was really hard. I worked by myself on it, and it was really difficult and it turned out to be the best conference I had ever done.
Did you create e.g. to compete directly with TED? I guess it was partly petulance, and partly to try to do something better. Could I start something with a funny name that nobody understood again — exempli gratia — and write it in lowercase; do it in a city [Los Angeles] that I swore I would never do a conference in; start from zero; and could I pull it off? Well, I did. It was a self-test. It was showing off, probably. I learned a lot. I did one [e.g. conference], and then I helped on the second one, and then I gave it away. Now I’ve decided, I’m still doing conferences just the
way I did them, just better versions; I’m going to break the mold. The [TED] presentations, where they were 18-minute presentations, have become kind of rehearsed presentations. I wanted spontaneity. When I did TED, I was on stage, and if somebody wasn’t interesting I’d pull them off or I’d interrupt them and ask them a question. It was more of my dinner party. So I decided, what could I do to really challenge everything
I had done? So [for the WWW.WWW Conference,] I decided not to have any schedule, not to have any presentations, to have
“EVERYTHING FOR ME IS PATTERNS. A GATHERING IS A PATTERN — HOW YOU SET IT UP AND HOW IT’S PACED, AND WHEN THERE’S DOWNTIME AND UPTIME, AND WHEN PEOPLE TALK TO EACH OTHER. HOW LONG THINGS TAKE. HOW THINGS REINFORCE EACH OTHER, AND HOW SUBJECTS CHANGE AND ARE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED. TO ME IT’S ALL THEATER, BUT THE THEATER OF UNDERSTANDING.”
BY DESIGN: IDCA was “this open book where I could do anything I wanted to do for a week,” Wurman said. “I really reinvented the conference. I used the whole town of Aspen for my conference, and did a lot of things that show up in my later work.”