Last week I took my second trip to Las Vegas this year. Vegas is hardly my favorite city in the world, but at least this conference was better than my April trip that produced exactly zero results. I actually stayed just a couple of blocks down the strip from where we stayed for the first trip this year, but I did not have to walk through as many casinos this time as this event was hosted at a hotel that isn’t directly connected with a casino.

This conference was the Rhodium Summit and this year marked my fourth time attending. It is a conference for people who run digital businesses, making me something of an outlier as the only attorney in the group but I roughly fit in with the others who run agencies. It is a very different atmosphere than other conferences. For one thing, if you try to sell things to the other attendees then you won’t get invited back. And I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen it happen. Attendance was lighter this year as a lot of members have been battered by a combination of tariffs, AI upheaval, and the continuing whims of platform algorithms. That made this year’s summit more intimate than some have been, which brings some positives. This event is a chance for me to spend time with people I’ve worked with, have zoom calls with, or otherwise have known for a while and who have similar work experiences to what I have with a fully remote business. That is the true value of both the conference and the larger group for me, the community feeling that I just don’t get in my day-to-day.

There is also the opportunity for idea cross-pollination in speaking with people who are high level operators. The group also includes plenty of members who are very AI-forward so I can always pick up a few things from them. Some of those lessons are going to fill my work free time over the coming weeks. It does require some translation to take the ideas that are working in one business model and place them into my own context, but that’s part of the fun. A conference room full of attorneys talking about how to operate a law firm sounds like something lifted from Dante, and that coming from someone who is doing just that.