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Comment by mattwdelong | Hacker News Reader

I would pay money to attend such a thing. Is this open to the public, or invite only? Not a whole lot of details listed here.

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It sounds like it's only open to YC founders (and invited guests) based on the following: The speakers were completely open, because they knew they didn't have to worry about someone cherry picking quotes in a blog post to make them look bad.

Yeah, there were a lot of anecdotes ("one time, when I was working for company X..."). It was very useful to see concrete examples of how different companies have handled (or mishandled!) a wide range of SEO problems, but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record.

Those specific anecdotes were also really useful because they let the audience go home and do more research on their own. If someone says "a company did this thing and it worked/didn't" that's useful. But if they give you actual companies who do a great/terrible job on different things, then you can dig up a lot more information after the fact and keep learning.

I agree with everyone who said it was a great event. Thanks to Paul, Jessica and everyone at YC for putting it together.

Would you mind elaborating on

> but of course also very obvious why this stuff could only be talked about off the record.

Please? It isn't obvious to me :-/

Well there's a ton of good reasons why company X wouldn't want you talking publicly about this stuff. What if you suggested an SEO strategy and they implemented it really poorly, or even not at all? Or what if they had a really successful SEO strategy and still consider it part of their "secret sauce"?

Even when you don't have an NDA stopping you from talking about company X, you still probably want to maintain good will between you and them.

Ok cool, that is what I figured after thinking about it for a bit. Thanks!

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