A focused conference schedule — only events where Coral's persona density is highest. No vanity sponsorships. ~$130K travel + sponsorship budget Year 1.
| Quarter | Event | Investment | Format | Persona | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2026 | AI Engineer World's Fair (SF, June) | ~$25K | Talk + booth | AI coding agents | 500 demos, 100 cohort applications |
| Q3 2026 | KubeCon NA (Atlanta, Nov) | ~$30K | Booth + talk submission | SRE / platform eng | 200 booth leads, 1 case study |
| Q3 2026 | All Things Open (Raleigh, Oct) | ~$5K | Talk only | OSS community | OSS credibility |
| Q4 2026 | SREcon Americas (Dec) | ~$5K | Talk | SRE | "MCP and AI SRE" thought leadership |
| Q4 2026 | MCP Summit (if Anthropic hosts) | ~$15K | Sponsor + talk | MCP ecosystem | Anthropic alliance signal |
| Q1 2027 | KubeCon EU (London, Apr) | ~$30K | Booth + talk | EU + compliance | EU AI Act-driven enterprise leads |
| Q1 2027 | Strange Loop / Open Source Summit | ~$5K | Talk | OSS community | Maintainer credibility |
| Q2 2027 | DevRelCon · Render ATL · PlatformCon | ~$15K | Talks | Platform eng + DevRel | Recruit Champions |
Total Year 1 event budget: $130K (sponsorships + travel for 4 FTEs).
Public livestream. 8 cohort companies × 5 minutes each. Manufactures social proof at scale, creates press moments, seeds next cohort pipeline.
Production: Restream multi-platform (YouTube, X, LinkedIn), live audio in Discord, post-recap newsletter.
Themed bounty push. 5-day Discord-native event. Live coding streams, daily standups, top-3 prizes.
Themes year 1: Observability, Customer-Data, Security-Tooling, Finance.
Single-day SF event. ~200 attendees. Year 2 ambition — not in year 1 budget. Modeled on PostHog's annual conference and Cloudflare's birthday week pattern.
Inspired by the Memori program. Optional Year 2 add-on if Coral commits to SF presence. 4–6 cohort companies co-work from a shared SF space for 4 weeks during cohort.
Year 2 budget estimate: ~$80K/cohort × 2 cohorts/year = $160K.
Year 1: Not included — wait until Cohorts #1 and #2 ship to validate demand.