We Spent Twelve Years Promoting Whoever Paid Us
I want to describe our own business model plainly, because it explains why we built something that competes with our instincts.
In 2014 I started 10times. Over the years it became the place people go to find out where the world's business is meeting — more than 200 million people have used it. The way it makes money is the way almost every directory makes money: event organisers pay for visibility. They buy placement, promotion, campaigns to reach the audience.
There is nothing shameful in that. It is the model behind most of the internet you use. But it has a consequence worth saying out loud: in that arrangement, nobody is working for the person spending the money.
Think about who actually pays for physical presence. A company decides to exhibit at a trade show. That decision commits a booth, a team, flights, hotels, freight, weeks of preparation — often the largest single line in a marketing budget. And the information available to make that decision comes almost entirely from the people selling the space. Attendance figures from the organiser. Audience descriptions from the organiser. Testimonials selected by the organiser.
Now ask what an organiser is incentivised to tell you. Not to lie — most don't. But to describe last year generously. To count footfall in the way that flatters. To not mention that four of your competitors quietly stopped coming, or that the show has been shrinking for three editions, or that the audience you want has drifted to a conference two months earlier in a different city.
For twelve years I watched companies make that decision with nothing but the seller's brochure and their own gut. And for twelve years, our business was on the other side of it.
Why we didn't fix it sooner
The honest answer is that we couldn't.
What accumulated over those twelve years was a record: who exhibited, who spoke, who sponsored, who showed up, where, in what category, year after year. That happened as a by-product of running the platform. It was collection, not intelligence — millions of company names in dozens of languages and spellings, editions that split and merged and renamed, categories that mean different things in different markets. Turning that into something you could actually ask a question of was not a matter of effort. It wasn't possible at this scale, at any price we could pay.
That changed recently, and specifically. The AI capability needed to resolve entities across languages, de-duplicate at scale, and classify millions of records became good enough — and cheap enough — around 2024 and 2025. So in 2025 we formed WHR to do exactly that with the record we had been quietly accumulating.
That is the whole timing story. The record is twelve years old. The engine is new, and could not have been built earlier. A competitor starting today has the same AI we do; what they cannot do is go back and watch the last twelve years happen.
What the reversal actually means
It would be easy to say "we're neutral now" and carry on. So here is what we have actually committed to, structurally:
WHR is a separate entity from the marketing business. No organiser can buy a better score, better placement, or a softer trajectory. The methodology is published. If that ever becomes negotiable, everything else we say is worthless.
We show events as the record shows them. Including declining. If your flagship show has lost exhibitors for three editions, the trajectory will say so — even when the organiser is a customer of ours on the other side of the house. A tool that only flatters is a brochure with charts.
Absence is reported as absence of a record, never as absence. We know precisely how much we don't know, and we say so on every number. Our scores are shares of what we track, on the same basis for everyone.
The system has to be able to tell you not to go. A recommender that never says no isn't believed when it says yes. If the honest answer is that a show isn't worth your money this year, that has to be an answer the product can give.
None of this is charity. It's the only version of this business that's worth building, because the moment intelligence bends toward whoever is paying, it stops being intelligence and becomes advertising with better typography.
I spent twelve years on the selling side of that asymmetry. I'd rather spend the next twelve on the other one.
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