3 Conferences I highly recommend 10/10

Conference season is in full swing Reader! October and November are extremely busy, but the conferences hosted are great opportunities for networking and learning. I made it out to two major conferences, one for real estate and the other for startups. I had to miss one of my favorite financial conferences, FinCon, and I just returned from Afrotech!

I’m trying to buy me a building! If you’ve been following ​my new real estate investment firm​, you know I’ve recently started shopping around for multifamily commercial properties. I’m ready to challenge myself and dive into the world of raising capital, managing larger commercial assets, and more. I believe you should never stop learning. Furthermore, in life, you have two choices. You can learn from mentors or mistakes.

So, I attended this year’s Multifamily Mastery, a multifamily conference down in Orlando, FL. For some reason, real estate conferences are almost always (2 out of 3 for me this year) in Florida 🤷🏾‍♂️. My goals at this event were to learn more about multifamily investments and networks.

My new life in commercial real estate has taught me something … it’s a sh*t ton of work to find good deals right now. And to make it worse, I’m an anal-retentive know-it-all who is obsessed with making money, not losing it. I might not be the most popular guy at a conference, but wait until you see my investment returns. But I love meeting new people, learning, checking out new properties and markets, and diving deep into my numbers every night (aka falling asleep on the laptop).

DC Startup Week: DC, Tech, Innovation … Like Silicon Valley, but with gov’t and black folks

While I love the collision of tech and real estate, the conferences for these two industries are night and day. In tech, the conferences have a much more casual vibe. Ideas are always flowing, and you see innovation and efforts to change how we do the norm everywhere. This year’s DC Startup Week was no exception.

This event brings together startups, investors, founders, and entrepreneurs in the DMV (for those who aren’t local, that's DC, Maryland, and Virginia). This is an action-packed week, where the speakers are more diverse in age, ethnicity, and profession than those at the real estate conference. DC Startup Week caters to everyone from the early-stage founder, the do-good startup, or the series C venture-backed rocket ship. They also had a track for female founders, mental health advocates, and service-based companies.

Attending DC Startup Week just got me more excited about Afrotech. I hadn’t been in five years, and this annual event is known for connecting thousands of Black professionals with tech companies and innovators who are dedicated to shaping Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at some of America’s most impactful corporations. It took place in Austin from Nov 1st to 5th. Did you attend? It’s possible we sat next to each other at a session or stood near each other during happy hour before the electric slide broke out…IYKYK!

This year, Afrotech was amazing! Shout out to Morgan DeBaun and her team. You'll see me at every Afrotech with one major change. Next year, I’ll create a game plan and better utilize my time to take advantage of EVERYTHING Afrotech has to offer.

FinCon23: How I missed my favorite money nerd conference

One of my favorite conferences I didn’t get to this year was FinCon. This is a conference where money nerds meet. It’s the best conference for digital influencers who teach or talk about money and are building online platforms. So many people come together and share notes on how they built successful brands, YouTube channels, courses, and more. Plus, potential sponsors attend and look for ways to collaborate with entrepreneurs with large and small audiences. The Black FinCon community is tight. We call ourselves “cousins” and support each other throughout the year, and we use FinCon as the place to have a “family reunion.” We connect, create content, and plan out upcoming collaborations. I was sorry to miss it since it was in NOLA this year, but I hope to make it to ATL next year. I just got back from AfroTech… but I’ve already talked enough. I’ll save why this conference beat all of these hands down another time, but visit my ​LinkedIn post for a quick recap​.

-Damien “The Year of Conferences” Peters

P.S. We just paid out our firm's first distributions (aka money we get from rent) 🙌🏾. It’s one thing to say, “This is gonna work,” but it hits differently when returns hit the group’s shared bank account.