"Like Startup School, but more expensive and with people you haven't heard of!"
The conference is being run as close to at cost as possible. This isn't comdex, and we have a huge number of college student discount admissions.
The goal of the event isn't to have a bunch of famous people lecture at you, (although we have some really cool seattle based speakers attending) its to give you the hands on tools you need to build a great startup. At the end of the day you will have a hackers guide to getting your company up and running.
Think of the expenses of the dudes from UK!
They don't have SUS speakers (who does?) and they charge a small fee. So what?
Sounds like a good thing to me.
I'm not going to say anything bad about this group, but I'm not likely to pay for a one-day conference to learn how to incorporate and keep ledgers. Those topics aren't served well by the format.
Anyway, perhaps Bay-area residents never lack for motivation or meetups with liked-minded people, but for me, that aspect was far more important than the content of the talks.