Technology Industry Events San Francisco 2019

With 171,000 registered attendees, Salesforce Dreamforce dwarfs the population of most American cities. According to SF Travel, the annual four-day conference drives more than $166 million of direct business sales impact to the Bay Area and directly supports more than 35,000 jobs. “We’re proud that Dreamforce is an amazing experience for attendees, but that it also benefits San Francisco and the entire Bay Area,” says Brigitte Donner, vice president and Dreamforce chair at Salesforce. For professionals who rely on Salesforce, the world's largest cloud ecosystem, the 2,700-plus breakout sessions, training and certification opportunities, and demos are enough to justify the conference. For those motivated by star power, Dreamforce is known for booking famous keynote speakers like Michelle Obama, throwing huge parties, and hosting the blowout Dreamfest concert. Last year, Metallica, Janet Jackson, MC Hammer, and Rob Garza of Thievery Corp performed for attendees. Next: November 19-22, 2019

Oracle OpenWorld, the tech giant’s deep dive into all things cloud, offers more than 2,200 educational sessions, hundreds of demos and hands-on labs, and exhibitions from more than 400 partners. It’s a big deal, taking over San Francisco’s Moscone Center and diverting traffic around the exhibition center for the 60,000-strong crowd. Oracle CodeOne, which it calls “the most inclusive developer conference on the planet,” is also rolled into the four-day affair. And because no cloud conference is complete without a rock concert, Oracle takes over the San Francisco Giants home field (formerly AT&T Park; now called Oracle Park), where Billboard-chart-topping artists perform a private show for conference attendees. Last year’s lineup included Beck, Portugal. The Man, and Bleachers. Next: September 16-19, 2019

It’s one of the golden tickets of the tech industry. Developers sign up each year for the lottery system that determines who gets one of 5,000 spots at the Worldwide Developers Conference. The conference, held in San Jose, is where Apple announces its biggest plans for the coming year, but it’s also home to more than 100 technical and design-focused sessions presented by Apple engineers to help developers build the next generation of apps with newly announced Apple technologies. Attendees can even make appointments to get one-on-one guidance for experts about their apps. Next: June 2020

Google I/O offers all the professional activities the industry demands from a developer conference—panels, breakout sessions, and product announcements galore—with a healthy dose of absurdities to leave all the folks who didn’t score a ticket with a serious case of FOMO. This year, the after-dark activities at Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheatre included a roller disco, a pop-up temporary tattoo parlor, a performance from “super-surreal” group the Fungineers, and a Flaming Lips concert where the band debuted a new song on a Google A.I.-powered bowl of fruit. Next: May 2020

In the 10 years since Facebook debuted F8, the concept has morphed from an eight-hour hackathon into a two-day developer conference. Now the event includes networking opportunities, deep-dive sessions, and product demos for more than 5,000 attendees to showcase the latest in A.I., open source, AR/VR, developer programs, and new tools across Facebook’s family of apps. The event, held at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, is light on entertainment, but rich in information. Next: Spring 2020

Unlike developer conferences, Disrupt doesn’t cater to a specific type of attendee. Engineers, investors, and generally-driven people flock to the event, described as “the original start-up conference” for some of the best networking opportunities in the world. One of the highlights of Disrupt is the Start-Up Battlefield—famously depicted on the HBO series Silicon Valley—where the winning start-up idea walks away with a cool $100,000 in equity-free cash. Next: October 2-4, 2019

Twice a year, Y-Combinator gathers its latest batch of YC-funded founders to present their companies to a room of selected investors and press. Both audience members and founders have to apply for the invitation-only event, and demand has been booming in both camps: More than 200 founders present to a crowd of 600 to 800 investors over the course of two days. Due to the sharp increase in the number of founder applicants, YC reimagined the Demo Days experience for its March event, moving the presentations from a single stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to two stages at Pier 48 in San Francisco. Next: August 19-20, 2019

Games are serious business at the Game Developers Conference, the world's largest professional game industry event. In 2019, 29,000 attendees took over the Moscone Center for five days of education and networking. The conference itself included 780 lectures, panels, tutorials, and roundtable discussions on a selection of game development and VR/AR topics taught by industry experts, while the accompanying expo showcased the latest game development tools and services from 550 technology companies. “The Game Developers Conference evolves with every year, encompassing new trends, new technologies, and bringing up new questions for the whole industry to reckon with,” says Katie Stern, general manager of the Game Developers Conference. “GDC brings people together, and gives developers a space to solve those problems and invent the solutions to help developers make better games that can be enjoyed by more people.” Next: March 16-20, 2020