Open25 at the Venetian, and demand manufactured out of nothing

Trip 12 to 14 August 2025 · Written up 14 August 2025 · Last expanded 29 September 2026

The last leg of my summer trip was Las Vegas, in August 2025, for Open25, eBay’s thirtieth. I went for the birthday itself, to have a look at the local tech scene, and to do some customer discovery. The Venetian is nice, if a bit gaudy (that is the norm in this town, is my understanding), and there is a very nice view of the strip.

Chappell Roan, the Backstreet Boys, and capture by cohort

eBay was rolling out an influencer driven sales platform, and the roster mixed contemporary stars like Chappell Roan with more vintage ones like the Backstreet Boys, who were then in residency here in Vegas. The intent is plainly to capture across multiple demographics in one go, and what I kept turning over was how potent that really is, cohort by cohort.

Will an older cohort buy an item just because it is liked and talked about on a quasi-amateur sales platform? On first blush that seems unlikely with a more jaded demographic, Gen X or the older Millennials, but if you look at politics you find plenty of personality driven audience capture among Baby Boomers and older, just not by celebrities as we would ordinarily know them. The definition of celebrity in our era is far more nebulous than a list of names suggests.

Based on the audience reaction in the expo, it was clear that most of the eBay staff and the sellers present were Millennials, which tells you which cohort is already in the room and very little about the ones who are not.

Manufacturing demand out of nothing

I do not get why the Sphere is amazing. The hotels here will tell you that a room facing it is an “upgrade” (their word, in quote marks, not mine). It just goes to show that you can absolutely manufacture demand out of nothing for a great many people, if you sell it with enough conviction.

I do not think that is only a Vegas problem, either, since it is roughly the mechanism the influencer platform is betting on, pointed at a different object. Sphere or Backstreet Boy, the question is whether conviction transfers across cohorts or only circulates inside the one already doing the selling.

A leak in the WC, and the best hospitality of the year

Partway through the trip I heard thumping in my room and found out it was a leak in the WC. The hotel unexpectedly and generously moved me up to an executive suite. Since returning to being a road warrior on this AI journey I have stayed in a lot of well run properties, and I can say without fail that this was the greatest hospitality I have had from any of them.

The suite was big enough that I pointed out there was more than enough room to set up some compute towers for interesting agent experiments. So I put out an open call to anyone in town for AI or tech, and floated a meetup on AI strategy for 2026 for the enterprise, or on trends in reasoning patterns and architectures.

I also took my first ride in a driverless vehicle while I was in town, a Zoox robotaxi, and that one got a detailed writeup of its own. It was an invitation-only demonstration, weeks before Zoox opened the Las Vegas service to the public, which is the only reason it happened in August at all. This stop on the map used to be filed under the robotaxi, so for the record: the Zoox ride was the side experience, and Open25 was the trip.

The question I put out from that suite is still the one I am carrying around, which is when, or if, agents will dislodge the multi-sided platform. eBay at thirty is one of the great multi-sided platforms, and its answer for the next stretch is to put human personalities on the front of it, while the other thing I rode in Vegas had no human in it at all. I am not sure which of those two reads the coming decade correctly, and I would be curious which way you would bet.

Photographs

Links

The separate writeup of the Zoox ride, and eBay’s announcement of the influencer selling platform. To be added.

Open entry
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