The Road to UNBOUND Office Hours - Crossing an Ocean for the Part Nobody Schedules

Office Hours, twenty days out, two guests and no script.

Matthew Ruxton has a session on the HubSpot Heroes stage on the Friday, and the story of how it happened is better than the session description. He told HubSpot's customer advocacy team the thing he tells them every year, that there are not enough real customer stories that do not feel like a sales pitch, and someone asked whether he wanted to turn that into a session. He said yes assuming the answer would be no, and got thirty minutes on a stage. It is deliberately unstructured, with a Q&A at the end, and if it goes well it may become a standing thing.

Jonas De Mets is coming from Belgium for his second UNBOUND and his first Boston. Last year he hid koala bears around San Francisco with a thousand dollars attached, then spent the event running the campaign instead of attending it. This year he has teamed up with three other independent app partners on a joint scavenger hunt and brought a colleague, so he can actually go to the sessions.

Most of the hour is the part with no calendar entry. Where to stand if you want to meet people. The escalator down into the Boston convention centre, and what George does with the memory of it. Prop bingo, and whether the props still say INBOUND. Why the schedule builder refuses to let you book two sessions back to back, and why the answer is to bring a friend.

It ends somewhere nobody planned: Pokemon, Lego, and the small specific slightly odd things that turn out to be how people actually recognise each other.

Office Hours is the informal one. No script, no segments, people drop in and drop out. Thursdays at 7:00 Central through UNBOUND, open mic for the Insiders.