“I’ll be 51 at the last ShmooCon, not 50. It will be the twentieth ShmooCon because [they didn’t host ShmooCon for one year during the COVID-19 pandemic]. I may or may not have grandchildren by then, but we knew we wanted to just end when it was good. We wanted to go out on a high note,” Potter says.
“I think that we accomplished what we set out to do with the event, to really get people engaged, help bring more people into the industry, the community, give them the opportunity to learn and set an example that others can learn from and follow and build upon,” Bruce Potter tells CSO. “I think we’ve done a lot of good work, and we keep hearing stories now that we’ve announced this of the impact we’ve had on people’s lives and their personal lives and their careers. And so, when you had that kind of impact, I think we could be comfortable saying, okay, it’s time to let go, time to let everybody move on into the next things that they’re going to do. That’s a great feeling.”
As anyone who has attended ShmooCon knows, the conference is a family affair, with the Potters’ children pitching in to help run things. “Honestly, it is so much work for us and our family,” Bruce Potter says. “We run it out of our house. And so, the weeks before the holidays every year for decades now, it’s been like the house builds up with boxes, and the kids are all working, and we are making badges and banners and all this kind of stuff. I think even on a personal level, it’ll be nice to have a holiday to relax and not have all this over our head.”
The conference has a dedicated staff of about 90 volunteers, many of whom show up year after year. “You’ve got to build your team first because without a team, without a good team, nothing else happens. You spend so much time fighting those fires, and those aren’t the fires we want to fight. When I show up here, the amount of support that they give me just makes this fun.
ShmooCon “the most amazing journey to be on”
The Potters have no plans to sell the event. “I would say from the very beginning, we always knew we wouldn’t sell the event,” Heidi Potter says. “We wouldn’t hand it over. We always knew it would come to an end at a time of our choosing. This has been just, I think, the most amazing journey to be on.”
However, an end to ShmooCon is a beginning to a new career for the Potters, who will work together at a new venture they’ve founded, Turngate.io, which plans to release a visual interface that makes understanding logs easy. “We still got a few years of work out of us,” Bruce Potter says. “Well, even if we stop working, we’ll get bored and do it again.”
