Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) 2026 Cancelled | Hacker News Reader

Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) 2026 Cancelled

anitab.org

77 pointspbui51 comments

I've never worked organizing a conference of this scale, but how do you come to a decision like this only 2 weeks in advance? Surely sponsors etc. need to be lined up months ahead of time and organizers would have significantly more advance notice.

"We're a bit low and might have to cut a few things" and "we're so low we might have to cancel" are very different thresholds and merit very different responses.

People in the middle of things can often be in denial about the situation much longer than they should be.

heck just look at what happened with fyre festival.

The difference is that I assume good faith and a history of competence on the part of the GHC operators and do not make any such assumption about the Fyre operators.

Certainly. The Fyre people were definitely fraudsters and so far i see no reason to think GHC are.

Nonetheless, good faith people succumb to denial all the time. It is a very human failing i think anyone can fall into surprisingly easily.

If your event has historically gotten a lot of last minute (e.g. a month before the event) sign ups, your error bars for how underwhelming turnout is going to be might be really large until then.

Presumably when that happens you don't immediately cancel, but rather try some last ditch efforts with sponsors, vendors, etc and then you wind up 2 weeks out in a shitty situation.

Though looking at their filings, it seems like they did not adapt to reduced revenues starting in 2023, so maybe denial and an inability to cut costs is a bigger explanation: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/770...

They also stopped posting audited financials around then: https://anitab.org/audited-financials

> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?

> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.

That's a pretty bad response. Sounds like they are leaving open the possibility that they may not be able to refund people's tickets

I would submit a request for chargeback.

that might be a nail in the conference's coffin...

You're not wrong for wanting your money back for services not provided, but also recognize this organization is to promote women in tech. A charge back kicks them while they are down.

They have nobody to blame but themselves for that. Charities have a duty to conduct themselves with integrity just as much as anyone else does. This has been a regular event for many years. Normally you would expect there to be contingency plans and as other commentators have posted, for ticket sales to mostly fund next years event not the current one.

The above comment should go in the Poe's Law hall of fame.

Only a fool would think they're getting any money back from an organization that is clearly broke.

Cancelling 2 weeks before a conference seems pretty dire. So sad for all the attendees who are going to be out for non refundable travel costs.

According to the announcement, "individual registrations … came in significantly below prior years", so it seems few attendees will suffer financially.

No, it just means that fewer attendees will suffer financially compared to the number of attendees who would have suffered financially if this had happened in previous years. The number of attendees this year may still have been many, while still being significantly fewer than previous years and while not being enough to cover their costs considering the loss of their sponsors.

Very fair. Someone is disappointed and out of money. Still, there is a non-zero chance that attendees were extremely few; it's certainly happened in other cases. As long as communications like the press release are vague, we can't know.

lol, what really happened at this non-profit? do they share their funding and operating expenses?

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/770...

The “president and ceo” is bringing in over $500K a year.

Total nonsense.

> Total nonsense.

Isn't that the entire point of foundations and non-profits? Massive salaries for their EDs.

Foundations yes. Not most nonprofits. The vast majority of nonprofits are tiny mission driven orgs that pay nearly or actually nothing.

You haven't seen San Francisco non-profits. There's a web of them controlled by the same gang of people who are taking in billions from the state and the city.

That's why I said "most".

Scammy nonprofits exist.

For every one of the ones you describe, there are a hundred other 501c3s you never hear of run by unpaid passionate people and with an annual budget under $20k.

Nothing in that budget makes sense. 2.39m executive compensation? 7.4m wages? -14m net income with 23m total assets?

500k to the CEO of an organization bringing in $25m/yr in revenue isn't that crazy.

In hindsight, it doesn't look like they did a great job running it, but the comp package doesn't seem crazy at that scale.

while not crazy, it can still be in excess, would $250k been insufficient to make ends meet? I'd be curious to know who decided that was the appropriate compensation

Would you say the captain of the ship brought $500K of value to the team? $25M/yr in revenue is very different when it comes from charity and memberships as opposed to building and selling something.

I have no idea if this person brought 500k of incremental value to the org, they could have been actively destructive, but they certainly have enough leverage to easily pay for themselves many times over.

Often in nonprofits, the person in charge is mostly an exceptional fundraiser and so their contributions are easily visible in that realm. The corollary to that is they are often a bad manager of the org.

> Often in nonprofits, the person in charge is mostly an exceptional fundraiser and so their contributions are easily visible in that realm. The corollary to that is they are often a bad manager of the org.

Well in this case, going off of their public message, we can safely assume: (1) not a very good fundraiser (2) not a very good organizer

For comparison, the CEO of the wikimedia foundation (wikipedia) makes 520K in an organization that brings in roughly 190 million per year.

I dont really know what is normal for these types of things.

I suspect that when it comes to CEO pay "normal" might be very far from "reasonable"

I would think "reasonable" is more about pay equity than pay scale. As in a CEO shouldn't be making like three times more than their direct inferiors, for example.

I used to go to GHC to recruit every year on their floor, I enjoyed it greatly and hired a lot of bright people from it. It’s sad to see it so humbled. There was to my knowledge nothing quite like it. I hope it can recover.

Someone never learned the "you don't fund this year's conference using this year's signups and sponsorships, you fund NEXT year's conference using this year's signups and sponsorships" rule that applies once your conference is an established yearly event. How the hell was there no contingency fund?

This is sad! I only attended during COVID when it was remote and haven't had a chance to attend in person. I sure hope it can come back. I wonder if we will see the same thing with other conferences or only ones that fall under the DEI umbrella.

Incredibly sad and disappointing. Especially in lieu of Margaret Hamilton's passing this year. This was not right. Planned attendees deserve to understand a deeper post-mortem of why the event failed to transpire.

The post reads pretty clear to me. They didn't raise enough money

Sure, but why?

It's a conference in the U.S.. People don't want to travel to the U.S. right now.

There are 300+M people already in the US, including a huge portion of the global computer science community…

And companies (who provide direct sponsorship, and send staff) are cowering.

This is not very international. Firstly DEI is apparently nongrata in the US now. On top of it GHC got a terrible reputation in recent years.

> On top of it GHC got a terrible reputation in recent years.

It did? What happened?

> People don't want to travel to the U.S. right now

Not enough to break a conference. “International arrivals to the United States in 2025 decreased 5.5% from 2024” [1]. (HY1 2026 is basically in line with 2025 [2].)

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12589#:~:text=There%2...

[2] https://roadgenius.com/statistics/tourism/usa/#:~:text=In%20...

People who attend conferences like this are probably not a representative sample of general arrivals.

> People who attend conferences like this are probably not a representative sample of general arrivals

Business air travel to America was flat in 2025 from 2024 [1][2]. I'm just not seeing any data which support the hypothesis that conference visitation to the U.S. has cratered in general to the point of threatening conference finances. (NTTO stopped breaking out conference visitation after 2019 [3].)

[1] https://assistant.kagi.com/chat/406c2636-106f-400e-a1f8-7011... '25

[2] https://www.trade.gov/feature-article/survey-international-a... '24

[3] https://www.trade.gov/feature-article/2019-overseas-visitati...

Different conferences are likely to attract different audiences. I don't think you can draw the types of conclusions you are drawing based soley on broad trends.

To be clear, i do agree that i don't think there is any evidence either way (nor is it likely we will be able to get any unless the conference organizers release some). The fact that they cancelled just 2 weeks before suggests to me that there are probably deeper management issues, even if lower intnl. travel contributed.

> don't think you can draw the types of conclusions you are drawing based soley on broad trends

Without evidence of exceptionality I think it’s fair to loosely conclude based on broad trends. This conference would have had to have been attracting a disproportionate number of international attendees to be disproportionately impacted. I’m seeing no evidence of that.

Rough economic landscape. Fear of flying to the US. High gas prices. Softening of american company support for "woke" causes.

Lack of interest, since attendee registration was "significantly" down.

DEI money -> GPU money

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