Two of the most important lessons I learned in grad school:
1) you can register anything you want as a fictitious business name and get an official looking logo and letterhead and credit card
2) if a conference rejects your paper, your business can book the next conference room over at the same hotel and hold your own workshop and present your paper anyway
Feb 25, 2026, 6:31 AM@dan 2nd is devious!
@dan I had this friend who, in their late teens, with another friend wanted to go to this conference and they needed a company name so they came up with a letterhead and everything for Bolux Incorporated.
He very proudly kept the badge he was given when he went to the conference that listed the company name 😂
@dan 2 seems overkill, given how many venues and publishers there are who would be happy to publish whatever you send them for a small fee.
@dan My single-member contracting side company is named Velociraptor Aerospace Dynamics LLC. Its logo is a clipart raptor riding a bomb, Slim Pickens style. It has its own anthem. Its lore backstory is the name was chosen to fool the government into giving me defense contracts. It's an awkward conversation when I need to, say, open a bank account. I regret nothing.
@dan #2 is more respectable than like 90% of IEEE conferences
@regehr also this is basically how NSDI got started. And CIDR. And...
@dan how much does the business registration cost?
@oblomov last I checked, $50ish in my state
@dan oh it's really cheap there