 Hello, my 15 amazing speakers for Derritable 2023. It's me, Chris. Thank you all for being here. I am so excited to be sending you this update. We are less than 30 days, about 29, 28 days out from the event as of today, April 19th, 2023. We are reaching almost 100 people now, speakers and attendees. So we are right at the numbers we wanted to be. I'm super excited. I just sent out an email and a video yesterday. So you should have been on that list to kind of get an update on all the surprises. But I wanted to make a really quick video just to you guys, the speakers, to kind of get your heads around preparing and being ready for the conference. I know that some of you have expressed to me this is your first time speaking or you have spoken before but you're a little bit nervous and there's a lot of reasons to be nervous. I speak all the time, all over the world. I'm really fortunate to do it. But I thought out what I wanted to do was give you some practical tips and tricks on how I have used my experience as a speaker doing this conference for the last three years and working with other speakers to help make you more successful. To get this started, I wanted to go over a few kind of housekeeping things with you and then get right into thinking about your presentations. So the first thing is we are 30 days out or less than 30 days out. So by now you've hopefully made your travel arrangements. You're flying in, driving in. We have people coming in from all over the world to San Francisco. I realize some of you have mentioned the cost of housing. Yes, it is expensive. It's expensive anywhere you go. Just try going on vacation. So do what you can to find the appropriate Airbnb. I know one person found a hostel. I'm staying at Airbnb. I know some people have actually collaborated and gotten places together to make yourself comfortable. San Francisco is super safe. Contrary to what you may read. And we're right on Market Street. So there's a lot of places I know I looked right around there when I was looking for places to stay and travel. I actually will be coming in a week early. So I'll be there, not a full week. I'll be coming in Sunday for our conference that's on Wednesday and Thursday. And I'll be staying until Saturday. So if you come in early and you wanna come see the space, I'm planning up being at air table on Tuesday the 16th. So reach out to me and I will make sure I get you in to see where you are going to be speaking. Next time, more time, it's always about time. Your session, if you're doing a regular session at their table 2023 is one hour and 15 minutes. Now that might seem relentlessly long or not long enough depending on where your mind is in this presentation. But I'm gonna tell you this right now, it won't be enough time. It's gonna go so fast, you won't even realize it. It'll only seem like a long amount of time until you actually get there and then it'll be fine. If you're speaking at a keynote, there's a few of you, I know those people I've spoke to you. Your time is still a bit shorter. It's only 45 minutes. So a few things about the time, how to break it down in a little bit, but just to kind of get your heads around it, you're aiming to be in a room with your class for about one hour and 15 minutes if you're in a session or 45 minutes if you're in a keynote. Now don't worry about filling all that content. Like I said, at the end of this video, I'll give you some tips and tricks to make that space expand or contract depending on how you're feeling about the time. Our space is at Eric Table headquarters and we're on the top floor. So they've got two floors, we're on the top floor. It's a massive space. It's got a main center space where Airtable actually has their hands meetings and then some breakout spaces, which means you could be in one of three different spaces when it's to your time to talk. Two breakout rooms and the main room. Now obviously the main room sits everybody and the breakout rooms cannot fit everybody because they're breakout rooms. So what happens is we will invite people to pick their sessions before the event or they can make up their minds at the event. What's great about this is what we found in the past historically is people will go to an event or a session they really like and we try to put the sessions we think are gonna be the most full in the main area based on a few things. People have signed up already, interest. If it's hands on, it's better to be in a breakout, one of the breakout areas because they have tables. If it's not hands on, a more kind of thinking main room. So don't be overwhelmed. Your space has been already selected. So if you go to the website and look up the event calendar or the agenda or if you're logged into the portal and look at this, you'll see which room it is in at the bottom of your session. Don't be overwhelmed if something has to change. Last year we found a lot of people went to one session and not so many went to another and we had to switch the rooms. Not a big deal, it happens all the time. You never really know where people's minds are so don't overthink. If you've got more people than you wanted or less people than you wanted, everything will be fine. If you wanna film your session for posterity, you're more than welcome to. We had someone last year who brought a GoPro and filmed their whole session and they actually use it as a meteor roll now so feel free to do that. As far as other things, lunch will be in the main area along with all of our sponsors both days. We'll be doing tours for everyone at the lunchtime midway point, two o'clock both days. And as speakers and additionally getting paid, you're all getting special gifts and swag from Airtable. So lots of surprises coming for you speakers. If you've spoken at Airtable in the past, you already know that we tried to treat you guys as good as possible. Finally, arrival. When you come, you can come when the regular conference starts. You don't have to worry about being there extra early or extra late. I'll show you two of your room. Each of the rooms will have a screen that you can plug into with your laptop. We'll have the HDMI cables and other type of cables or AirPlay, whatever we need. Airtable has a great IT staff I've been told that will be on hand for you to go ahead and plug in and get everything you want ready. Should you have any problems? Again, we'll have someone there to help you out. Don't overthink it. Again, I know you're overthinking, it's okay. We'll take care of you, we've got you covered. Now the presentation itself. Woo, this is the big star, right? This is where it gets serious. So when I speak, I like to do presentations that are mapped out in my mind first. And I always think about what am I trying to get across? If you remember when each of you submitted your presentations and I wrote back to you, I said, what are the three or four points that someone will take away? Those are really your guiding principles. You could almost make a bullet list where you have your points and then work up to those. Always try to make the overall theme or goal of your presentation be aligned to the title and subtitle. And the rest will just fill itself out. After I do a mind map, if you haven't done a mind map or a bulleted list, try it out. The next thing you want to do is to remember to always come back to your takeaway. So I like to do a mind map, and then each of those little lines have kind of the takeaways and then build slides backward to that. So think about your building a movie and you know the ending, but you have to fill in the rest of the story now. And that's kind of the best way to think about your presentations. One of the best tips I ever got on speaking is nobody cares what you know. They care how you thought about it. So what does that mean? Well, I could list and I'm gonna show you how to do this air table formula, or I'm gonna show you how to put together this interface and kind of drag this here. Again, that's what I know. People find presentations engaging that tell you how you thought about it. So I'll give you an example. I'm teaching, so the example of what I know. So I know that when I'm building a presentation, interface designer interface, it's best to have a logical flow. So at the top it starts here and then I have a middle ground and then I have an ending and in between I have maybe call outs and bullet points. That's, I know that, you guys know that when you hear it. And so does the audience. And if you tell people something they already know that you know, they kind of get bored. But if you tell them how you think about it, interest, interest, interest. For example, same scenario, interface designer. When I'm building an interface designer, I think about myself, I'm probably gonna be bored halfway filling out this form. I need something. You know, I get bored when I fill out forms. And you know, I like the concept of a really big picture. I sometimes even use animated pictures again because it draws my eyes to it. And people want their eyes to be drawn to things. That's not what I know, it's how I think. Those two scenarios should really help you understand how best to think about your presentations as you're getting ready. Let me give you an example of that. So when I was preparing my slides for last year, these are them, I've got them up on the screen now. I started out with the name of the session. And then I went through with right away in the beginning, the goal. So you can see right here, the goal was to inspire people to think differently about data. So in this presentation, no matter what I did, I knew that I couldn't go wrong because it's pretty easy to think differently about data after explaining how I think about data, right? The other thing is I made sure I used lots and lots of pictures. So people love to be visually stimulated, right? So when they think about things, they want something that's not thought provoking, but also visually stimulating. So when I'm telling them when I think about time data, I could show them a picture of a calendar or I could show them how my mind sees a calendar. Does this make sense the way I'm thinking? So again, in this slide I had, I didn't wanna tell them about thinking about how a calendar works. I wanted to think about how a calendar stores information as far as I'm concerned about how I think about it. So this is a really good example of that. Next thing, you might wanna actually, once you get through your ideas, you might actually wanna talk about Airtable. It's an Airtable conference. So there's a couple of ways you could do that. You could show screenshots of your Airtable base. Again, screenshots are always great. I love screenshots. Or one of the things I did last year to make things easy was instead of screenshots, I intermixed animated GIFs. Now GIFs are really interesting because what they do is they bring a sense of motion to your slide. If you've never used a GIF and you're on Mac, there's a tool I use called CleanShotX that will literally record the screen but make it a GIF. It's super, super simple and easy to use. I always frame my GIFs inside of devices because a lot of times people wanna see those ideas inside the machines that they actually are gonna be running on. And sometimes I'll take still pictures and GIFs. So in this case, I've got three different device types, three different types of images moving and not moving. The idea is to create something inviting that people wanna come to. Got it? Good. Next, don't be afraid to do hands-on. Even if you didn't tell me you're gonna do a hands-on. People like to play around and explore things. So in your session, if there's a place for a hands-on, allow people to do it. If some people didn't bring laptops, that's fine. Invite them to participate while other people are doing hands-on by talking, which brings me to my last point, participation. Don't save all your Q and A for the end. You can, but it's sometimes people are just like, okay, I can't remember my question that long. Break it up. Do one QA at 10 minutes, one QA at 30 minutes, another one at one hour. And just break it up and tell people, you didn't put it right in your slides. We're gonna have a Q and A time right now. Don't be afraid if you say, does anyone have any questions? And there's no questions. Say, does anybody have any answers and allow the audience to add to your presentation, right? The idea is by inviting people to make you successful, everyone is successful. All right. So hopefully that'll give you some great tips on thinking about your slides and getting ready for the event. Always at the end of your slides, add a slide where people can reach out to you. If you wanna add a site that people can download your slides, that's always a great thing. I use QR codes, because people always like to take pictures with their phones. If you need any help, you are not alone. Reach out to me in schedule or time. I can be emailed to, you can call me, my phone number and a way to schedule time with me will be in this announcement that this video came in. Don't be afraid to rehearse. Rehearse with me, rehearse with your friends. Just don't be afraid. Keep yourself COVID safe. Last year, out of our 10 speakers, we have 15 speakers this year, three of them got sick. I'll tell you this. If you're being paid to speak at a conference and the conference attendees are coming to see you, just take a little bit of effort. If you don't wear a mask, wear a mask for two weeks before the conference, just for those two weeks. Keep yourself well. First, it's the best thing for you and your family. We don't know how COVID is actually playing out for everyone. And the second thing is, you just wanna be healthy and excited, right? You don't wanna show up and be just getting over something or have to miss it. And people are like, oh, well, there was a session. Sorry, it's not much we can do. I suggest as often as possible, getting some much possible rest as you can. And like I said, wearing a mask. Finally, remember that your future collaborators, peers, friends, and people who want to believe in you and get to know you will be at this event. So whether you're at a career that you absolutely love right now or at a career that you think, I'm probably not gonna be here in six months, I can guarantee someone you will work with is at that event. I can think of two people. One was a speaker who actually have jobs right now from attendees who came to that event. Something to think about. If you need anything out, like I said, schedule time with me, call me, email me. Do not worry, you're not bothering me. My job is to make you look amazing for this event. That's it, that's my only job. I don't even have to worry about the audience. All I have to worry about is the speakers. With that, I hope this wasn't too long. If you made it this far watching the video, good on you. If you didn't make it this far, well, then you don't know that I'm even saying this. So yeah, okay, everyone. I will talk to you soon hopefully and take care of yourselves and each other.