For almost a decade if you were a hungry young professional living in your industry's hub you were able to eat free and network almost every workday after hours. Boston's biotech conference season was a endless parade of happy hours and free food from pizza at your local hackerspace or python meetup to canapes and late night binge drinking at Ginkgo Bioworks with a guest list of professors any grad student would be blessed to have on their thesis committee.
The leading complaint folk who came of age through this circuit had was that these events sometimes served too much free pizza. I don't know what it is about pizza that makes it so hard to eat more than twice a week but for a lot of folks that's their limit. They'll only eat pizza for dinner two nights a week. That's their limiting factor. The pizza toxicity threshold. The mean young professional can only eat pizza two nights a week without getting completely sick of it.
This usually wasn't a problem and event organizers obviously realized that pizza is the least they could do and would often go beyond this. As long as the gross pizza index didn't go too far past the pizza toxicity threshold of two nights a week that meant you had a thriving industry hub of people constantly brushing elbows, trading information, and working together.
Covid of course paused this. There was a brief resurgence post lock down. It peaked sometime in late 2022 and now our economy is so fucked the pizza index isn't even applicable anymore.
The pizza index for SF tech and biotech is currently 4.5. As in for every ten events nine of them will serve pizza. That tenth? There's a decent chance it won't serve anything at all. A close friend (I know, I know, super reliable source) of mine went to an event where they were actually trying to sell the pizza.
The pizza index is entirely broken. It was created with the assumption that there would almost always be at least free pizza and now that's not even the case. We've gone critically high over the pizza toxicity threshold. No one goes to these things consistently anymore.
It's so over.
What can we do? In age of obvious economic decline and uncertainty sponsors are not investing in what they'd call "human capital" or as you or I would call them, people. They haven't budgeted to sponsor things in the same way and are failing to provide an ecosystem for upcoming talent.
I'm getting tired of writing this and could get into an entire diatribe of how the executive class is using something as nebulous as "AI" to justify their lack of spend when raising the next generation of scientists and engineers but just know this.
For the next stage of my career I'm looking for somewhere where the catering is good.
In the meantime maybe I should start a meetup called, "Anything but Pizza, Beer, and AI". I'm sure I'd see a lot of familiar faces.