There are hundreds of millions — even billions — in IRL event businesses

The opportunity in IRL events is not small. Look at companies built entirely around selling events — SaaStr, for example, where Jason Lemkin built an event business around SaaS and shared numbers that are enormous. South by Southwest is another example of massive scale. The key shift happening now, though, is that people generally no longer want huge events. They want smaller, more intimate, more individualized gatherings — and that's exactly where the opportunity lies.