On The Conference Trail: Cryptolina, USAID Blockchain4ID, and Techtonic Summit
By: Luis Buenaventura, Bloomx
Tags: International Development, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Travel, Startup

There’s this joke that people who think traveling for work is fun, probably don’t travel for work enough. Getting to visit new places on the company’s expense account sounds great in theory, but tight schedules and constant jetlag tend to reduce the fun factor substantially.

I was recently reminded of how challenging business travel can actually be when you’re doing so on a budget. Over a period of 12 days this June, I traveled to 5 destinations, attended over a dozen meetings, and spoke at 3 conferences. I did this with a single 20" Samsonite Evoa spinner and a Nomatic backpack. (For travel nerds, that’s a total of 60 liters of carry and around 16kg of weight, and it included a hundred metal BX8 souvenir coins, a hundred postcards, and our official BloomX tablecloth for conference tables.)

First rule of efficient business travel: carry-on is the only way to go

Day 1: Manila to San Francisco (Travel time: 13 hours)

I landed in SFO at 9:30pm with no accommodations. I had been wanting to try HotelTonight for some time and had decided that I was going to finally give it a shot this trip.

HotelTonight collects all of the hotels that still have spare rooms on a given evening and puts them together for easy perusal. True to their name, there were about a dozen hotels to choose from when I landed, all of them discounted by at least 30%. I picked the cheapest one in the Union Square area, and was checked in about an hour later.

After a very pleasant bespoke Old Fashioned at nearby Biig, I took a nap that unfortunately lasted all of four hours. I listened to the early morning mewling of the Tenderloin as I waited for the sun to come up.

This was the easy part of the trip, I only had two meetings in the city — one of them with our friends at the Stellar Foundation — before I needed to head back to the airport.

Day 2: San Francisco to Los Angeles (Travel time: 1 hour)

I landed in LAX by 10pm and checked in to the Sheraton closest to the airport. I’m not in Los Angeles very often, but whenever I am, I’m reminded of how huge it is. At 1,300 square kilometers, you could fit two Metro Manilas inside its land mass. (Bangkok has it beat though, at 1,500 sq. km.)

All of my appointments the following day were in Santa Monica so I thankfully didn’t have to make my way into the downtown area. I got to meet and hang out with some great folks from Strong Ventures, Wavemaker, Veritoken, and Science Inc.

By this time, the crypto bear market was in full swing, but with perfect LA weather it was hard to be depressed about it.

24 and sunny at the Santa Monica Pier

(Speaking of depression: I was back in LAX by that same evening, waiting for a 10pm red-eye to Raleigh, North Carolina. It was an otherwise great day to be connecting with crypto folks though.)

Day 3: Los Angeles to Raleigh (Travel time: 5.5 hours)

The Raleigh/Durham airport is small relative to the city’s aspirations. It’s one of the final candidates to host the second campuses of both Apple and Amazon, and its Research Triangle area already has major facilities from brands like IBM, Google, and Cisco.

Raleigh is also the site of one of the industry’s longest running conferences, Cryptolina, and Bloom was one of the exhibitors and speakers.

BloomX’s conference table at Cryptolina. I had a few dozen conversations while sitting comfortably behind these chairs, probably my most relaxed conference experience this year.

I got to meet some fine folks over the two conference days, including Jameson Lopp and Tatiana Moroz, the latter of which even interviewed me for her crypto show. I didn’t get to socialize much in the evenings, but I did get to eat a lot of pulled pork and check out a couple of local pubs.

I’m guessing this wasn’t the quintessential North Carolina pub

I was scheduled to speak on the second day of Cryptolina, and I don’t think I’ve ever spent more time and energy mentally preparing myself. Not because of the talk itself, mind you, but because of what was going to happen after.

I spoke about the continuing growth of crypto in the ASEAN region and how we were building the BloomX network to usher in a new generation of crypto fans

My presentation that day was scheduled to end at 3:30pm, and I had a flight out of Raleigh at 7. On its own, that wasn’t a big deal. All I had to do was finish my talk, pack up all our remaining conference merch, say goodbye to some folks, grab my suitcase from my hotel, and head to the airport.

But once I set foot on that plane was when the most ridiculous part of my whole trip was about to begin: now I was heading to Thailand.

Day 6: Raleigh to New York to Hong Kong (Travel time: 24 hours)

When I was planning all this a few weeks ago, it seemed like a funny challenge that only a crazy person would have accepted: I had booked two speaking engagements within 36 hours of each other, in cities that were separated by over 15,000 kilometers. (The first was the two-day Cryptolina conference in Raleigh that I had just finished, and the second one was a three-day private USAID blockchain workshop in Bangkok.)

I suppose I could have just declined one of the invitations, but that solution just seemed so much less interesting than mustering the Herculean (Sisyphean?) energy necessary to do both. And so I packed myself into three consecutive economy-class flights, and spent half the time wondering why I was doing this to myself, and the other half genuinely curious whether I would even survive the whole affair.

Digression №1: Some thoughts on pay lounges

I had a long layover at JFK, prior to transforming myself into a flying sardine for 15 hours, and got to try LoungeBuddy for the first time. As implied by its name, it’s an app for finding and booking pay-lounges in hundreds of terminals around the world, and is a great solution if you’re not lucky enough to have a spot at any of the more exclusive areas. It’s not cheap at $40–50 a pop, but you’ve got food and drinks for four hours, and is theoretically less annoying than having to sit and wait at your gate.

Unfortunately, I found the pay lounges in JFK to be overrun with people, such that it was impossible to find a quiet corner. Perhaps LoungeBuddy has done its job too well, but when I showed up at my chosen lounge, they had stopped accepting walk-ins and were very close to maximum capacity. Not exactly the most relaxing way to wait for your long-haul.

Day 7: Hong Kong to Bangkok (Travel time: 2.5 hours)

I finally landed in Bangkok at 10:30am on Monday morning. I checked in to my hotel, showered and changed, ran to the USAID offices near Sukhumvit, and was giving a presentation on Bloom by 2pm.

I spoke about our experiences running a crypto remittance platform for the past few years, and answered a lot of familiar questions about how it all worked. How do you mitigate volatility risk? Why is this better than using banks and the SWIFT network? How do you reduce costs if you’re converting to and from fiat on both ends of the transfer?

I gave away copies of my book Reinventing Remittances with Bitcoin to the folks who wanted to do a deep dive, although I unfortunately only had half a dozen left. For the rest of the attendees (and really, for anyone else reading this), I gave out links to the fully-illustrated PDF at bloom.solutions/book, or the Amazon Kindle edition.

I remember being light-headed when I first arrived at the conference venue, but adrenaline and a genuine fear of embarrassment helped me power through the rest of the day. The other resource speakers included folks from ConsenSys and Civic Ledger.

I ended up facilitating a couple of remittance-focused breakout sessions and ideating on various blockchain solutions that USAID and its partner organizations could potentially deploy or support in target regions.

USAID, UNESCAP, UNCDF, ILO, and a handful of blockchain specialists

Digression №2: Some thoughts on jetlag

There are tons of techniques to fight jetlag while traveling. Ironically the one that I’ve found that works best for me is not to fight it all, and instead control your itinerary as much as you can.

For me, that means limiting non-Asian destinations to a maximum of 1 week. (Of course when I say “non-Asian,” I really just mean locations that are greater than 4 hours off from your home timezone.) Don’t bother acclimating to US timezones and just accept that you’ll be sleeping terribly, so that when you return to Asia your body doesn’t feel like it’s even left.

In practice, this means avoiding late evening US meetings, because there’s a high likelihood that you’ll be asleep by 8 or 9pm each night.

Day 11: Manila (Total flight time: 3.5 hours)

I arrived in Manila on the heels of a pretty bad typhoon, and was sad to see that the complaints about Grab’s steadily worsening service were true. It took 30 minutes to find a Grab car from the airport at 11pm, and the total cost ended up more expensive than the official airport taxis.

The next morning I was heading to the annual Techtonic Summit in SMX Convention Center. I was scheduled to participate in a mock debate, that funnily enough involved me attacking cryptocurrency and blockchain proponents. The goal of the whole debate format was to create an opportunity for the audience to hear both sides of the cryptocurrency discussion, instead of just hearing the unbridled enthusiasm.

Basically it was the polar opposite of the last two speaking engagements I’d just been on, which was a weird change of pace.

The Blockchain debate at Techntonic Summit (photo: @bitpinas)

Of course, four years worth of defending crypto meant that I was basically an encyclopedia for every criticism ever levied against our community, and it was an interesting experience to temporarily embody the opposition.

After the debate, I went straight home and entered into a 12-hour coma.

Digression №3: Some Numbers

As a quick recap: my total displacement over 12 days was 35,000 kilometers via 7 separate flights. I spent a little over 43 hours in the air, and carried 60 liters of luggage.

It’s hard to recommend airlines or hotels because half of my flights and accommodations were free, either through my mileage program or paid for by the conference, so I wouldn’t be giving a very accurate analysis of price vs. performance. I can however wholeheartedly recommend HotelTonight, and will try it again in every city that it covers. I can give only a middling recommendation for LoungeBuddy though. It really needs a more real-time view of how many people are currently in a given lounge.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever attempt a trip that’s quite as hectic as this again, but it was certainly a memorable two weeks. I’m already packing for the next one!

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