| People seem to be attributing "bad intent" here that may not have occurred. In my experience, situations like this occur quite often for various "good intention" reasons. Usually they are resolved before there's an issue, but sometimes they don't work out. For example, the sponsorship form might not have been signed by someone with signing authority. Usually, it's a lower-level marketing (or even engineering) person that is working on getting everything squared away. The peon who is "negotiating" was told by their management that they want to do it. The peon assures the person who they are working with at the event that it's going to happen (because they've been told that). The time comes to print the materials, and the form still hasn't been signed. The event has two options - Forgo the possibility of the $5k sponsorship by telling Couchbase that they haven't signed the commitment, so they can't print their logo. Or hope that things comes through. Again, 99% of the time, things work out. Printing the materials even though they didn't have the agreement (or money) in hand was the right call for the organization. But sometimes it doesn't work out ... Maybe (pure hypotheticals following, because we don't yet know) the person who was working on the sponsorship at the Couchbase end left the company. Maybe their boss, who had given the "okay" even left the company. Now there's no one at Couchbase who knew where this agreement was in the process - They only know that there's no sponsorship commitment that has been made. And they question why there doing it in the first place. That's just one example. Maybe the person who signed the sponsorship form wasn't a director and didn't have signing authority, but thought they were authorized to sign something as "simple" as a sponsorship form. Oops! The employee is fired for signing a $5k agreement, the agreement isn't technically valid, and ... --- Sometimes things are moving along beautifully and someone in management (rightfully) asks to have legal do a "quick review" of it, and there turns out to be something that the attorney has issue with (often an indemnification clause, inserted by an attorney on the other end). They end up not being able to resolve it and get the sponsorship agreement signed at all. Deadline passed, logos printed already ... uh oh. --- If there was a sponsorship agreement in place, then let's be realistic - It's doubtful that Couchbase would be thinking they could just get away with "pulling out" four days before the conference. Something else is going on here. I've been through this before myself -- Usually we get the agreement finalized in time, for the good of all parties. But is T3chFest really "out" this money? Would they have found another sponsor in time? Or did they go ahead and print the materials because they really had no other choice, and no time to line up another sponsor before the deadline since Couchbase hadn't signed the forms yet? |
T3chFest printed the materials because the event is this weekend, so everything had to be ready. Seems like Couchbase bailed today.