STARTUP HEALTH FESTIVAL Nimble Planning When a "surprise guest" was U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, a planning team had to quickly meet security and logistical needs to ensure a memorable experience. BY MARIA LENHART i For attendees at a special event during the StartUp Health Festival in San Francisco in January, the unexpected appearance of then-u.s. Vice President Joe Biden as a keynote speaker was a delightful surprise. For the event organizers, the Biden appearance and its attendant security requirements was one of several challenges that required nimble planning and last-minute flexibility under tight circumstances. The StartUp Health Festival, a two-day event coinciding with the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, brings together healthcare entrepreneurs and innovators, known as Health Transformers, who are members of StartUp Health, a global organization with a mission to improve health and well being worldwide. Founded in 2011, Up Health is dedicated to accomplishing 10 "Health Moonshots," goals that include curing cancer and other diseases, reducing healthcare costs, making healthcare accessible to all and extending longevity. "We require the companies that join StartUp Health to be all-in in their dedication to transform health," says Callie Fisher, event manager for the organization. "Our members have a passion for their life s work and what they do is very difficult healthcare has so many complexities that it s difficult to make changes. They need to meet with people like themselves."
Toward this end, StartUp Health saw the opportunity to bring members and potential investors together during the J.P. Morgan conference, which typically draws about 40,000 healthcare professionals and investors to San Francisco. While the organization had been arranging networking opportunities coinciding with the conference for several years, in 2016 it went a step further by launching the StartUp Health Festival. "We know that our Health Transformers want to meet others like them, so we decided to centralize this and put it under one roof," Fisher says. "We wanted networking capabilities as well as incredible speakers to create an energetic environment. Something fun and exciting, not a stuffy conference." Seeing a need for a local partner to help orchestrate the new event, the New York-based organization hired Anna Marie Rembold (MPI Northern California Chapter), president of Anna Marie Events in San Francisco. "Instead of holding meetups in hotel lobbies, they told me they wanted a destination event with a festival vibe," Rembold says. "They envisioned a cool, hip vibe that would make it stand out from the status quo." Space Puzzle First among the challenges for the 2,500-attendee festival was finding a venue.
"There s little meeting space available in San Francisco during the J.P. Morgan conference, which brings in thousands of people, most of them not actually attending the conference but going to all the ad hoc events taking place around it," Rembold says. "All the hotel rooms and venues in the city are taken up." For both the first StartUp Health Festival in 2016 and the subsequent event, space was secured at Workshop Cafe in San Francisco s financial district. For the event planners, the biggest challenge with the venue was its limited size and configuration. Although the venue had expanded in time for the second festival to about 6,000 square feet, attendance had expanded even more, Rembold says. The cafe s management team says the best way to handle big groups is to rotate small groups of about 250. "We had a lot of people coming into a very small place and the way the space is designed created a real bottleneck," Rembold says. "We had actually outgrown the space even before we began. We had a puzzle on our hands and had to make it work." With the festival offering a series of invitation-only presentations, the event planning team tracked in advance how many were coming to each of the talks. "In this way, we knew what to expect and were able to manage it on the registration end," Rembold says. "We also created more space by altering the layout to allow for more seating. A critical change was to add a central aisle, which changed the access points and enabled people to get around better." The planners also worked hard on the design of the guest experience at the event, creating a look anchored around the themes of "moonshots" and "transformation," highlighting these key messages with oversized graphics placed throughout the venue. In formulating the design of the branding and the space, Rembold strove to provide a contemporary look in keeping with the innovative nature of the organization and its attendees.
"We wanted people to feel like they were walking into a StartUp Health Cafe," she says. "We made everything lifesize, including the size of the banners, so when you re standing in the cafe, you can really see all of the sponsors. We filled all the walls with messaging and branding, to give a sense of where you are. You need to saturate the guest with the brand experience." The planners also created a VIP lounge and added projection screens so that guests anywhere in the venue could view the speakers and discussions taking place on the main stage. Special sound zones were added to facilitate audio reception and projection. According to Fisher, design of the venue space, which included a main stage as well as casual social areas, worked well. "We didn t want anything overly formal, but to provide a free-flowing atmosphere where people can have meetings and network," she says. "We have speakers all day, with networking going on simultaneously. You can spend as little or as much time as you like." The setup also enabled StartUp Health to conduct live interviews with speakers and attendees that were then posted on the organization s website. "These are quick little snippets where you can capture people s ideas," Fisher says. "We did over 60 interviews in two days." Special Guest A wide range of high-level presenters was a key highlight of the StartUp Health Festival, which featured a roster of top executives and doctors from Cleveland Clinic, Merck, Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, Stanford Children s Health, SAP and many other organizations. For the keynote speaker, event organizers hoped to engage Joe Biden, who has been involved in the organization s mission to fight cancer, a personal concern that began with his son Beau s diagnosis of the cancer that would eventually take his life in 2015. Joe Biden is also the father-in-law of Dr. Howard Krein, StartUp Health s chief medical officer. "We had the vice president in mind when we planned the program, but we didn t know for sure if he could make it, given it was during his last few days in office," Fisher says. When Biden agreed to come, the event organizers learned that because of security reasons they couldn t tell the attendees that he would be there. "This posed a challenge as we wanted to let the attendees know to expect something exciting and to also be prepared for tight security," Fisher says. Further challenges followed, including reorganizing the venue space to meet security requirements. "We had to re-engineer the registration setup for cross-checking all IDs and add on a double layer of security," Rembold says. "We had to lose some of the seating to meet security demands. We also had to add tenting outside, shut down the street, including the sidewalk on our side of it. This caused a lot of inconvenience, so we had to play ambassador to the local business community."
Despite the demands, Fisher and Rembold were impressed with how efficiently the White House Secret Service team operated. "The White House team was really amazing some of the most professional people we ve ever worked with," Rembold says. "We functioned as a team."
She was also impressed with the vice president himself. "It was like a fireside chat with about 250 invited guests assembled to listen to his talk," she says. "He spoke about his son and his desire to end cancer within the next 10 years. It was very personal." Positive Feedback The response from those who attended the StartUp Health Festival was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. "People told us how much they enjoyed the environment, the energy in the room and how much was going on all in one space," Fisher says. "They told us how special it was to hear Vice President Biden as well as have a fireside chat with Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. An opportunity for a down-to-earth chat with our CEO Steve Krein was a big hit as well." The decision to partner with Rembold in planning the event was crucial, she adds. "Anna and her team are real pros," Fisher says. "We re out of New York, so it s important to have boots on the ground in San Francisco. Anna worked with us to develop clear visual messaging and implement it into the space. She has great relationships with local vendors and was very prepared once the festival began. As a result, when we had lastminute changes like getting Biden as a speaker we could leap into action." The next StartUp Health Festival will take place Jan. 8-9, 2018, once again in San Francisco during the J.P. Morgan conference but at a much larger venue. "We ve really outgrown the space at Workshop Cafe, so we re moving to a venue with three times the capacity," Fisher says. "We ll be able to have two stages and an expanded program. We ll be able to be more inclusive and feature more of the Health Transformers on stage. Keeping up that energy is really important."