Nick Bilton/The New York Times
Attendees watch celebrity speakers at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.
The chatter in the hallways of conferences are usually a better barometer of the tech scene than the conversations taking place on the stage.
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this week, the banter was not about a bubble, the next Instagram for chipmunks, or if the new iPhone would be square or round. Instead, people were constantly talking about the tech and Hollywood celebrities at the event.
“Can you move, please, I can’t see Zuck,” a man said as he pushed by to get a partial glimpse of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, who took the stage Tuesday for his first public appearance since the company went public.
In the case of celebrity, Mr. Zuckerberg seems to be the Elvis Presley of our era. As he began to speak, nearly all of the 3,600 people in attendance pulled out their smartphones in complete unison — no flip-phones here — to snap a picture and share it on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Eric Eldon, co-editor of TechCrunch, said that the interest in the high-profile attendees and speakers at the event, including Mr. Zuckerberg and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, is a sign that technology is becoming more mainstream, and people want to understand how the most successful start-ups made it.
“There is now a lot more awareness about how hard it is to be an entrepreneur. Just a glimpse into what it’s like to be Zuck, to think about how he solves his problems, is pretty powerful,” Mr. Eldon said.
He said attendees are asking “What should we focus on?” and they are looking at the tech elite to answer that question. “I think people want to understand what these guys have done to get them on stage.”
People took nanoscale opportunities off stage to seek those answer. Each time a speaker wrapped up their interview, or talk, attendees buzzed around them like bees circling a flower for pollen, each person feverishly trying to snap a photo, or hand over a business card.
But there was also a swirling of all types of celebrities at the conference, including Jessica Alba and Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark.
“In many respects, tech celebrities, who now grace the covers of glossy magazines and TV shows, are now as popular as Hollywood celebrities,” explained Eric Kuhn, social media agent at United Talent Agency, based in Beverly Hills, who was attending TechCrunch Disrupt. “You have people like Jessica Alba here, launching start-ups, and the line between Hollywood and Silicon Valley is continuing to blur.”
Although the tech celebrity isn’t new, the divide over the successful ones is widening as millionaires are left behind by billionaires. (After all, the word “famous” is rarely complete without the word “rich” as a preface. As the book, “Celebrity,” written by Chris Rojek, a professor of sociology and culture at Brunel University in England, notes, “money is typically the currency in which honor and notoriety are measured.”)