TechCrunch Disrupt Is Still Running BOGO Deals, and I Have Thoughts

Look, I'll be honest. When I saw TechCrunch pushing buy-one-get-one-half-off deals for Disrupt 2026, my first reaction was that this is exactly what's wrong with tech conferences right now. Then I thought about it more and, well, it's complicated.

The deal itself is straightforward enough. Buy a pass, get a second one at 50% off, bring your co-founder or colleague. They're claiming you can save up to $410, which tells you something about what these tickets cost in the first place. The window closed May 8th, so if you're reading this after the fact, you missed it. Not sure that's a tragedy.

When I was at Kuka, we'd send teams to these things religiously. Hannover Messe, Automate, IMTS. The robotics-specific shows where you'd actually see hardware, talk to engineers who'd built the things, maybe catch a demo that wasn't just a polished video. I remember running into Frank from Fanuc at a trade show in Chicago back in, must have been 2015, and we ended up sketching out a gripper modification on a napkin that actually made it into a production system six months later. That doesn't happen at a general tech conference.

Disrupt is a different animal. It's startup pitches, VC networking, the Battlefield competition. Good for software founders, probably. For industrial robotics people? I'm less convinced. The robotics content tends to be surface level (flashy demos, not technical depth) and you're competing for attention with every crypto project and AI wrapper that bought a booth.

Now here's where I complicate my own argument. A colleague of mine, younger guy who left ABB to start a warehouse automation company, swears by these events. Says he closed his seed round because of a conversation at Disrupt 2024. So maybe I'm just old and cranky. The industry has changed. A lot of robotics companies now are software-first, selling autonomy stacks or perception systems rather than hardware. For them, the general tech crowd might be exactly the right audience.

I called my old colleague at Siemens last week, asked him if they're sending anyone to Disrupt this year. He laughed. Said they'd rather put that budget into Automate or the A3 events where the actual customers show up. But he also admitted their startup partnerships team goes to everything, including Disrupt. Different goals, different events.

The BOGO promotion itself is interesting from a business perspective. It suggests they're either trying to boost attendance numbers or, more charitably, genuinely trying to make it easier for small teams to attend together. When you're a two-person startup, sending both founders to a conference is a real cost. Half off the second ticket actually matters.

What I don't know is whether Disrupt's robotics track (if they even have a dedicated one this year, I couldn't find details) will have anything worth seeing. The promotional materials I found were all generic stuff about networking and deal-making. Nothing about specific speakers or technical content. That's a red flag for me, but maybe they just haven't announced the full agenda yet.