Are cheap flights to Des Moines available? You'd probably want to hold it someplace with a reasonably low-cost venues but still accessible via low-cost carriers from many cities.

Looking at https://www.southwest.com/flight/routemap_dyn.html and my memory of cities convention venues, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Nashville seem like good options

Startup person (at a "Zebra") in St. Louis here. We've got a neat little scene downtown, and a convention center right in the middle of it all. Definitely have some programs that would love to get this kind of thing into town (Arch Grants, etc.).

Probably not gonna happen, but it sure is tone deaf as shit to have this convention in SF.