Every year we go through hundreds of adventures when organizing a large scale event like LIFT. Here are a few stories you've never heard about LIFT08:

• Everybody thinks that all LIFTers come with laptops, and the prospect of hosting the conference generates a few sleepless nights for the IT manager of our conference center. Some pictures might easily let one think that there is a one to one relationship between attendees and laptops. But I got the real number, and we only has 240 laptops at the event this year! That's right, a mere 35%... that generated 28'000 connections. It seems some folks tried to finish their downloads, and the mandatory wifi blackout happened. Next year we should have all p2p traffic blocked and I hope that for the first time ever we will have reliable wifi service :)

• The caterer had an extremely hard time serving everybody - and came up with unfortunately deserved mixed reviews - because we had a last minute problem. The person in charge of the kitchens at the conference center resigned four days before LIFT. He had promised we could use the kitchens to cook, but his successor had other plans and didn't allow us in. Our caterer had to cook the meat at a remote location, driving it just in time for lunch. Add that to the fact the bakery didn't find the delivery entrance on Thursday and you have a recipe for disaster.

• We delivered 6 visa letters to participants coming from eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Half of these were accepted, with unfortunately three attendees were unable to attend for administrative reasons.

• For the second year in a row we received a proposition of someone who wanted to pay to speak. For the second year that was an easy decision for us - a loud no! - but we had a sign that being on stage at LIFT creates more and more value for the speakers. At some point we will be forced to think about channeling all this, just like the creation of the venture night allowed us to give all entrepreneurs a tribune to express themselves, which resulted in less pitches and less "aggressive" networking during the conference.

• Last year we had 100 tshirts remaining, among them 80 S-sized women tees. This year all that remains is 150 M-sized women tshirts. Not sure what conclusion we can draw on the population from this, but if are coaching a women soccer team just let us know we are happy to sponsor your jerseys ;)

• We had a small problem with a (fake?) journalist who had forgotten his press card and said he was working for a magazine called "nectars and flavours". More than the absence of a press card, we had a hard time finding any relation between LIFT and hid magazine ;)

• As we had around 80 people showing up unregistered on Thursday (most of them from our partners, some journalists, a few late registrants) we suddenly had 700 people attending the conference, which means we had a potential overbooking at the fondue as the venue could accommodate 600 persons. I quickly called Fabien - who was in charge of the evening's logistics - and he found a way to create 50 more seats. Fortunately - or unfortunately ? - "only" 550 persons showed up, and we had some spare tables which gave the impression the fondue was less crowded than it was.