It must be exciting when you find out your startup is in the only industry that's in VCs sightlines, and it must be fucking exhausting crafting a pitch for them.
The VERA story of pet euthanasia reinforces my bias that there is nothing good to be gained at an industry conference, so I'm tempted to believe it's true. Either it's truly insane marketing copy crafted to suck up sociopathic VCs attention because these people live in hell, or it's actually real and they're happy that they've created ~~Uber~~ a killbot for dogs because these people live in hell.
Even when you luck out and somehow get a chance to win at capitalism by a coincidence of destiny, it still eats your soul.