So You Want to Be a Speaker?

Joe's Nerdy Rants #54 - My thoughts on speaking and conferences, plus weekend reads and other stuff

Yours truly, speaking in Sydney, Australia, a few weeks ago at DataEngBytes 2024

I recently posted about declining a speaking opportunity at a major data conference. Surprisingly, that post got a lot of views, reactions, and comments. Given the interest in that post and the questions I get on public speaking, I want to unpack my experiences with speaking and some things you might want to be aware of if you’re invited to speak.

Remember that I’m focusing on discussing tech and data topics. While there might be parallels to other genres, I cannot confirm. I can only write about what I know.

Types of Events

Before discussing how I prepare and give talks and the logistics of speaking gigs, I’ll briefly describe the events you might speak at. I’ll include in-person and virtual events, including hybrid events that mix in-person and virtual experiences because they’re common.

Community Events

On a small scale, you’ve got community events like meetups. There might be a meetup focused on a field, like data science, MLOps, or data engineering, or tools and languages like Python, dbt, SQL, etc. Meetups are a great place to speak if you’re new to public speaking or want to talk to a hyper-targeted audience. 

Here, you’ll speak to a group of 10 to 100 ish people who are likely deep in the topic. Because these events don’t charge for attendance, I don’t ask for payment (unless travel is involved, then I request that to be covered). These are mostly community events run by volunteers who do this because they believe in the mission of the community. 

I’ve co-founded two major meetups in my area - SLC Python and the Utah Data Engineering Meetup, so meetups have a soft spot for me. Even this week, I spoke at the local data engineering meetup with Zach Wilson because I just wanted to connect with the local data community I haven’t seen in ages. I’m never in Salt Lake City anymore and constantly on the road. Meetups are still where you’ll get the best conversations with practitioners. If possible, I try to attend meetups because they’re where the real, hands-on work is discussed.

There are other types of community events like local conferences. These are also great places to speak, especially if you’re getting started or don’t speak often. They happen less frequently than meetups, which is why I lean hard on meetups for community events. Still, local conferences are wonderful for dipping your toes into speaking in front of crowds of up to the low hundreds of people.

Finally, there are some large community events. These might be academic or open-source conferences. I distinguish these from non-community events (discussed next) by whether their aim is community or profit. If the aim is supporting the community, I look at whether the organization supporting the event is a non-profit. I'm skeptical of its motivations if it’s a company saying it’s “community-first” but also trying to rake in the money to make a profit. Community-first means putting the community first, not one’s pocketbook. This leads me to non-community events.

Non-Community Events

Non-community events are commercially oriented events that aim to turn a profit. They might be vendor or vendor-agnostic events, but their goal is profit first and community second. I often speak at non-community events worldwide, some of which are small independent events.

On the other hand, you have huge commercial events. These might be organized by a vendor, a large conference organization, a combination, or a combination of the two. Sometimes, these events only charge vendors, and tickets for attendance are free. Other times, the conference makes money by charging both attendees and vendors. While community events also do this, I always consider whether the conference is doing so from a community-first angle and whether they’re a non-profit. Again, community-washing is rampant, so look out for this.

Vendor vs Vendor-agnostic 

Vendors organize some events, and some are vendor-agnostic. The vendor organizes vendor-oriented events, and the talks relate to the vendor's offerings. At vendor events, you can expect announcements from the vendor about new product launches, features, and more. The supporting talks are oriented around the vendor. In some cases, the vendor controls the content of the talks. So, vendor events not surprisingly focus on the vendor. 

Vendor-agnostic events are not organized or led by a particular vendor. Instead, they are organized by a third party. It might be an individual, a handful of people, or a big conference or organization. 

These events feature talks from two main types of people. The first type is from independent or non-affiliated speakers. What I mean by not affiliated is that the speaker is not affiliated with a particular vendor or organization. I fall into this category. I’m an independent speaker who doesn’t work for a vendor. I speak solely on my behalf.

The other type of speaker is affiliated with a vendor or organization. These speakers might get the speaking opportunity on their own or company's behalf. This is where it gets interesting. Many conferences make money by charging vendors to sponsor their events. You’ll notice a vendor hall with many booths while walking around a conference. These vendors may be allowed to speak at this event as part of their booth package or as an additional payment. So, you’ll notice many vendor-oriented talks alongside independent talks. This can get a bit murky for many reasons, because it's not always clear who the speaker is affiliated with. But know that for vendor-agnostic events, it’s often a mix of people who are there independently and those who have paid to speak at the event from their sponsorship.

If an event is trying to get you to speak, or if you’re considering sponsoring one, it’s worth digging into the speakers and who they are affiliated with. A lot of events proudly show off their speaker roster. You need to ask yourself if those speakers are there because they are sponsoring the event and getting a speaking slot. Did that speaker pay to play? Or are they there because they’re offering a unique talk not affiliated with a particular vendor? I noticed these lines are often blurred, and you’ll see speakers with big names who are only there because their company sponsored the event, not because they have a fascinating thing to say on their own. Do your homework on the speakers. The roster is not always as it appears.

Speaking is a LOT of Work

Speaking can be broken into two main categories - presentations and panels/fireside chats. Here, I’ll go into how I create presentations, 

Creating the talk can take weeks or months of preparation. I tend to spend a few weeks working on a major talk I’ll give during a season. My strategy is to create a talk. I’ll give her around six months. Then, I’ll retire that particular talk after six months. Other friends I know will spend months working on their talk. Other friends I know have a giant slide deck from which they take slides and give a talk. How you prepare your talk depends on what you’re comfortable doing. There’s no right or wrong way to organize your talk. The important thing is delivering an excellent talk.

Giving a talk is also a lot of work. I’ve often seen statistics that say most people would rather die than speak in public. I think this is true. Some people are naturally gifted at giving talks, but most require a lot of coaxing and practice in public speaking. Even more people will not speak because they are scared or freeze up on stage. I’ve seen it happen.

As a side note on panels and fireside chats, I don’t want to know the questions or topics beforehand. Pre-rehearsing a conversation doesn’t work with my flow. The conversation feels artificial and forced. The worst example was a “fireside chat” where the host and guest read from cue cards. This was at a major tech event early this year. It was terrible, and the audience universally cringed. 

Also, I’ve been doing several podcasts a week for several years, so spontaneous conversation is second nature to me. That’s me, and I know many people want to be prepared for their panel or fireside chat. Prepare if you wish to, or wing it like me.

Traveling is where things get different. I can only speak from my experience, and I would say that I’m pretty rare here. Most speakers don’t travel internationally or domestically at the frequency I do, so take what I say with that caveat. This Fall, I’m gone every week for an event, often ping-ponging back and forth internationally every week and a half or so. I get to see some incredible places and meet many great people. This makes it worth it. What’s the downside?

An immediate killer is jet lag. The other challenge with travel is just being apart from my family. I can’t say that it never gets easier, especially when you see your kids grow up on FaceTime. My kids have gotten more used to my travel, but I can’t say that it makes it any easier for anybody. It’s one reason for reevaluating the cadence of my speaking schedule next year and beyond. Being away from my family is emotionally draining, and there have been times I’ve spontaneously broken down in tears while walking in a foreign city. Travel seems sexy, but it can make you an emotional mess.

Also, consider the opportunity cost of travel. It will take you time to get to your destination and acclimate. Then, you must do your thing while there, return home, and let the jet lag wear off. During this time, you must be disciplined about getting your work done while on your trip and allowing yourself to adjust to reality once you’re back home. I cannot stress enough that there’s an art and science to international travel, which could take an enormous toll on you.

A Mutual Exchange of Value

I used to DJ professionally. When I first started, I played at clubs for free drinks or a minimal $50 fee. This was back in the late 90s early 2000s. I hear this is still the amount new DJs are paid. However, notice that DJs are compensated one way or another for these gigs, even the smallest ones. Well, some clubs asked DJs to pay for open deck night because of “exposure,” though most DJs thought this was a stupid idea and didn’t participate. As I progressed as a DJ, I would be on flyers and posters, and my rates went up accordingly. DJing supported me while I was in college, which isn’t a bad gig, considering that most college students' wages at the time were around $5 to $7 per hour. I DJ’d around the United States. It was a lot of fun. But I also realized that to continue as a DJ, I’d have to pivot full-time into DJing. I wasn’t ready to do that, so I took a job in data. Sometimes, I think that was a mistake, and I wish I’d continued DJing. Oh well.

Here’s what DJing taught me about b2b sales, err, speaking. It turns out there are a lot of parallels. You’ll probably speak at meetups or some other small-scale event when you start. Suppose you get compensated at all, congratulations. But don’t expect payment. These gigs aim to hone your speaking skills, find your voice, and provide meaningful and engaging talks to your audience. Incidentally, I grew up public speaking ( I was a debater), so speaking came naturally to me. But for quite a few people, this isn’t the case. You must put in these sets and reps to speak publicly. There’s no shortcut to becoming a good speaker. You must do it often, overcome the cobwebs and anxiety, find your voice, and get comfortable speaking to a crowd.

You might start speaking at conferences as a speaker as you move up the ranks. These can be either community or non-community events. This is when you need to start questioning whether you will get paid for speaking. At this point, your name might be used to sell tickets. You can still look at this as an avenue for exposure, and you also need to start asking questions about getting compensated. At a minimum, you should expect your travel and accommodations to be covered. If they’re using your name to sell tickets, I think it’s entirely fair that you ask for a speaking fee. At this stage, it’s about a mutually beneficial exchange of value between you and the event organizers. You need to get a cut if they’re getting a cut. Some events will gaslight you and say they don’t pay speakers for some reason. Dig into this reason to understand if they’re telling the truth or if they’re full of shit. It’s usually the latter. Some event organizers remind me of shady club promoters. Stay away from these people at all costs.

So, Do You Still Want to be a Speaker?

These are my opinions on speaking in public. These observations I note here are meant to guide you in thinking about how to pursue your speaking career, assuming this is something you want to do after reading this. I don’t suggest copying my path, as I don’t have a playbook for replicating what I do. I don’t think I could do it myself if I tried.

Again, public speaking takes a LOT of work. I don’t think most people should do it because the ROI isn’t there. Speaking is a lot of work, as you’ve read. You must prepare your talk, get the speaking gig, show up, and give your talk. Hopefully, people will also want you to speak at their events if all goes well. But all these things take time, so I suggest a long-term approach. But at the same time, taking a long-term approach means valuing your brand so that you won’t dilute it for the short term. Often, I see people make very short-term decisions to the detriment of their long-term viability as a brand. I think that’s a huge mistake; if you can avoid it, you should do so. And understand where speaking fits into your broader goals. What are you trying to accomplish by giving talks? Are you trying to gain a variety? Or are you trying to market something? Only you have the answers to these questions. Best of luck in your speaking endeavors!

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If you haven’t checked it out, the Data Engineering Professional Certificate is available on Coursera! Learn practical data engineering with lots of challenging hands-on examples. Shoutout to the fantastic people at Deeplearning.ai and AWS, who helped make this a reality over the last year. Enroll here.

On another note, the popular Data Therapy Session calendar is posted here. It’s an incredible group where you can share your experiences with data - good and bad - in a judgment-free place with other data professionals. If you’re interested in regularly attending, add it to your calendar.

Finally, I’m traveling and speaking a lot. My schedule is at the end of this newsletter. I hope to see you somewhere in the world!

Hope you have a fun weekend!

Thanks,

Joe

P.S. If you haven’t done so, please sign up for Practical Data Modeling. There are lots of great discussions on data modeling, and I’ll also be releasing early drafts of chapters for my new data modeling book here. Thanks!

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Cool Weekend Reads

The Subprime AI Crisis (Where's Your Ed At)

Tables are furniture (Stephen Bailey)

Why Data Teams Keep Reinventing the Wheel: The Struggle for Code Reuse in the Data Transformation Layer (Max B at Preset)

Why techies leave Big Tech - (Gergely Orosz)

pg_parquet: An Extension to Connect Postgres and Parquet (Crunchy Data Blog)

The Family That Went Against the Grain—and Built a Billion-Dollar Company (WSJ)

The quiet art of attention (Bill Wear)

America’s New Millionaire Class: Plumbers and HVAC Entrepreneurs (WSJ)

Local Community, Human Connection (Aaron Wilkerson)

New Show & Upcoming Events

The Joe Reis Show

5 Minute Friday - Speaking at Conferences (Spotify)

Vijay Yadav - GenAI-Ready Data (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Playing Not to Lose (Spotify)

Navnit Shukla - Data Wrangling and Architecting Solutions on AWS, Writing Books, and More (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - Notes from the Field, Early Fall 2024 Edition (Spotify)

Ilya Reznik - How to Lead New and Existing ML Teams and More (Spotify)

Jordan Morrow - How to Write Amazing Books (Spotify)

Venkat Subramaniam - Moving Beyond Agile as a Buzzword, Learning to do Less, and more (Spotify)

Paco Nathan - Hacker Culture, Cyberpunk, AI, and More (Spotify)

Bethany Lyons - Disrupting the Recruitment Industry, Startups, and the Future of Work (Spotify)

5 Minute Friday - How Good Do You Need To Be? (Spotify)

Jordan Tigani - Why Small Data is Awesome, DuckDB, and More (Spotify)

Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself (Spotify) - PINNED HERE.

Monday Morning Data Chat

Weimo Liu - (Spotify, YouTube)

Matthew Mullins - (Spotify, YouTube)

Ricky Thomas and Paul Dudley - (Spotify, YouTube)

Andrew Ng - Why Data Engineering is Critical to Data-Centric AI (Spotify, YouTube)

Tevje Olin - What Should Data Engineers Focus On? (Spotify, YouTube)

Rob Harmon - Small Data, Efficiency, and Data Modeling (Spotify, YouTube)

Joe Reis & Matt Housley - The Return of the Show! (Spotify, YouTube)

Nick Schrock & Wes McKinney - Composable Data Stacks and more (Spotify, YouTube)

Zhamak Dehghani + Summer Break Special (Spotify, YouTube)

Chris Tabb - Platform Gravity (YouTube)

Ghalib Suleiman - The Zero-Interest Hangover in Data and AI (Spotify, YouTube)

Events I’m At

This event ^^^ is going to be great. Matthew Scullion (CEO of Matillion), Mark Balkenende (VP of Product Marketing at Matillion), and I are chatting about the post-modern data stack. In a chat earlier this week with these guys, I realized that should’ve just been a podcast! It was that good. This discussion will be excellent, so please register!

Matillion Deep Dish Data (virtual event) - October 23. Register here

Other events…

Helsinki Data Week - Helsinki, Finland. October 28 - November 1. Register here

Austin - MLOps Conference. November 7-8. Register here

NYC - Data Galaxy Event. November 13.

Amsterdam - TBA. November 21.

Forward Data Conference - Paris, France. November 25. Register here

AWS ReInvent - Las Vegas. Early December. Doing the after-conference scene. Let’s meet up.

Seoul, Korea - TBA. Mid-December.

CES - Las Vegas. Early January 2025.

Data Day Texas - Austin, TX. January 25, 2025. Register here

Data Modeling Zone - Arizona. March 4, 2025. Register here

Winter Data Conference - Austria. March 7, 2025. Register here

Netherlands - TBA. April 2025

Much more to be announced soon…

Thanks! If you want to help out…

Thanks for supporting my content. If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider subscribing to this Substack.

Would you like me to speak at your event? Submit a speaking request here.

You can also find me here:

• Monday Morning Data Chat (YouTube / Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). Matt Housely and I interview the top people in the field. Live and unscripted.

• My other show is The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). I interview guests on it, and it’s unscripted and free of shilling.

• Practical Data Modeling. Great discussions about data modeling with data practitioners. This is also where early drafts of my new data modeling book will be published.

• Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Matt Housley and I, available at Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books.

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Thanks!

Joe Reis