We went to Future of Web Design this week.  It was my first FOWx experience, and it won’t be my last.  It was good, but not great — sentiments Jackson shared on the Four Labs blog.

Ryan Carson / Carsonified runs the FOWx events.  He also runs Drop Send.  And Amigo.  And Vitamin.  He blogs openly about his experiences, and has a nice following of people paying attention.  He’s also a super nice guy who I’ve enjoyed hanging out with and getting to know recently.

Ryan strives for good things: authenticity, credibility, and quality come to mind.  He does the FOWx conferences because he’s a web guy.  He loves the content and digs the speakers.  As an entrepreneur who runs web companies, he feels qualified to put on FOWx in ways non-web guys can’t.

That may have been right when he started, but now, I think he’s wrong.

On my way out of the MediaTemple party on Wednesday night, I told Ryan I thought he should dump his web companies and do nothing but conferences.  Vitamin should stick around as a platform for knowledge sharing and a central place for the community to connect and collaborate (with only an occasional essay from Ryan — not any management oversight), but his full-time (4 days, anyway) should be putting on the best events in the world.

My guess is Ryan won’t do this because he likes to run web companies, and that’s fine.  Greatness requires focus, though, and speaking strictly as a conference attendee, I wish he’d just do conferences.  He “gets” the space and now has the contacts and attention of the community needed to put together great speaker line-ups and draw quality audiences, and that’s all I care about — not whether he runs a web company himself or not.

Speaking as his financial advisor (which I am not) I’d suggest focus as well.  If he can put on the best web conferences in the world, he could make a killing doing so.

Speaking as his friend, I’d say screw it, do whatever you feel like.  As long as you’re having fun and you’re proud of the output, let the focus come naturally, whatever it may be.