The very first conference I ever spent my own money to go to was Webstock. I was a lawyer at the time, and couldn’t think of a way to justify attending an event that was so outside my professional wheelhouse that I took annual leave and flew to Wellington on my own dime. I did it because the lineup that year was staggeringly good: Obama’s design director Scott Thomas, the poet Rives, Digg’s founder Kevin Rose, and startup legend Eric Ries. Attending that conference rewired something in my brain, because every last detail – from the swag to the lanyards to the food to the people – was thought through with such care.