The highest ROI activity in AI right now isn't on your screen

Everything in AI is accelerating. Every day there's a new model, a new agent framework, a new post telling you that if you don't ship this exact tool in the next five minutes your company is already dead.

It's exhausting. And most of it is noise wearing a costume of urgency.

Last week I went to SIM Conference in Porto. Two days, no screen glued to my face, just people. I came back with the one thing the timeline never hands me: clarity.

What I actually did at SIM

I didn't show up and wing it. I ran four plays, and the value compounded across all of them.

I scheduled meetings ahead of time with the people I genuinely wanted real, uninterrupted time with. I organized Ship or Die, an AI meetup for founders, with Pedro Oliveira and Martinho Matos in the room. I had a booth. And I bumped into a lot of old friends, plus a few new ones who became friends fast.

Here's what surprised me. The biggest value didn't come from strangers or cold opportunities. It came from conversations with people I already knew.

Friends I trust, talking honestly about what they're building, where they're stuck, what's actually working and what isn't. Almost every one of those conversations did two things at once. It validated that what we're building at LayerX matters, and it surfaced concrete opportunities I could go explore with them. Not the vague "we should collaborate sometime" energy you get online. Actual problems, with actual scope, that we can actually solve.

You don't get that from a DM. You get it from someone relaxed, coffee in hand, no audience watching, telling you the real version instead of the polished one.

That's the part nobody schedules and everybody underrates.

Is a booth worth it? Honest answer: it depends who you are.

I get asked this a lot, so here's the unfiltered version.

If you're new to the ecosystem and nobody knows your name yet, a booth earns its cost. It gives you a reason to exist in the room. It's a magnet and a credibility signal at the same time. People walk over, you get to explain who you are without it being weird. Worth it.

If you've been around and people already know what you do, the booth is close to the least valuable thing you can invest in. It anchors you to one spot. And the real value at an event is the opposite of staying in one spot. It's moving around, falling into unplanned conversations, being physically present where serendipity happens.

Look at where the best things at SIM actually happened for me. Not at the booth. In hallways. At the meetup. Over a drink after the talks ended.

So the booth isn't the play. The booth is training wheels. Useful when you're starting. Once people know you, take them off and go talk to people.

The lesson I keep having to relearn

The AI space rewards speed, and honestly that's mostly a good thing. I move fast at LayerX and I'm not going to apologize for that.

But speed without input is just running in a circle faster. You feel productive. You're not necessarily going anywhere.

IRL events force a completely different kind of input. You absorb knowledge that wasn't optimized for engagement. You hear what people actually think when there's no algorithm rewarding the take. You get signal instead of the post that happened to perform well that day.

And there's a quieter benefit too. When you're in a room with people building real things, the panic evaporates. The "implement this in five minutes or die" framing stops feeling like a threat and starts looking like what it is: content. The people doing serious work aren't panicking. They're shipping, comparing notes, and being honest with each other about what's hard.

Slowing down to be in that room is not a break from the work. It is the work. The timeline tells you what's loud. A room full of people you trust tells you what's true. Those are very different signals, and only one of them helps you decide what to build next.

What I'm taking from this

I'll keep shipping fast. That doesn't change.

But I'm going to keep showing up in person, deliberately, because every time I do, the opportunities that actually move things forward come out of those conversations. Not the feed. The room.

If you're building in AI right now and you're feeling the firehose, here's my honest suggestion: block the time, go to the thing, leave the laptop in the bag, and talk to people you trust. The ROI is absurd and almost nobody measures it because it doesn't show up in a dashboard.

See you at the next one. The good stuff happens off the timeline.