Source: Hyper
Meta, OpenAI, and other Valley heavyweights have weaponized developer conferences as brand-building theater, where announcements about APIs and infrastructure get secondary billing to the sheer production value and founder charisma on display. This shifts how technical adoption gets driven—less through documentation and case studies, more through FOMO and influencer validation. Early access and mindshare now flow to founders who command a stage and PR teams who seed stories in the right Slack channels and Discord servers first, not necessarily to companies with the best products.