The SMS meetup at The Barbershop Cuts & Cocktails was exactly what it sounds like: a room full of people who'd figured out how to monetize text messages gathering in a place that served overpriced whiskey while pretending to give haircuts.
I walked in already calculating percentages.
Payment processing. The eternal thorn in the side of anyone operating in what the banks politely call "high-risk" industries. Which is code for: anything interesting, anything profitable, anything that involves actual human desire instead of selling organic dog food to kindergarten teachers.
One provider was offering 2.8% on payment orchestration. Not a merchant account, orchestration. Which meant they'd route transactions through multiple processors, playing shell games with the money until it landed somewhere the credit card companies wouldn't immediately freeze. It was elegant, in the way that tax evasion is elegant when done properly.
"So that's all is needed?" I asked the rep, a guy who looked like he'd stepped out of a fintech startup's diversity brochure, young, confident, probably owned cryptocurrency he wouldn't shut up about if given half a chance.
"That's the beauty of orchestration," he said. "We handle the complexity. You just integrate the API."
2.8% was competitive. And I had businesses that needed it for processing. Lots of them.
The real conversation, though, the one that mattered, happened later, somewhere between the official conference schedule and the unofficial networking that makes these events worthwhile.
Between meetings, I found myself at the Cosmopolitan, which had become the unofficial headquarters for everyone who mattered and several dozen people who didn't but were convinced they soon would.
The lobby bar was a parade of faces from twenty years of industry history. People I'd worked with in the 90s when we were all young and stupid and convinced the internet was going to make us rich, which it did.
"Jesus Dialer," someone said, and we were off. Down the memory hole into the wild west days when adult traffic was easy money and compliance meant not getting caught rather than navigating a legal framework that didn't exist yet.
We'd all survived. Some of us had thrived. Most of us had scar tissue and stories we couldn't tell in polite company, which was fine because we were never in polite company anyway.
The nostalgia felt good for about fifteen minutes, then it started feeling like quicksand. You can't build a future by living in the past, even when the past involves more money and fewer regulations and the kind of wild operational freedom that would give a modern compliance officer a stroke.