Dan Chuparkoff: Ins and Outs of Being a Professional Keynote Speaker! 🔈
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by kirupa | Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm

Dan Chuparkoff (https://danchuparkoff.com/) turns a career story into a practical guide for anyone curious about speaking on stage for a living. He talks through the moment that pulled him into tech, the accidental opening that led to keynote work, and the less glamorous parts of the craft, from shaping a repeatable talk to rehearsing until the delivery feels natural.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0
A conversation with Dan Chuparkoff | 1h 09m

ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION

One of the best parts of this conversation is how far back Dan goes to explain his work. The turning point was not a polished career plan. It was an internship at an architecture firm, a lot of repetitive drafting, and then the sudden realization that software could change the pace and scale of an entire profession. That copy-and-paste moment pushed him toward computer science and toward a career built around helping people work differently.

That background matters because Dan does not treat keynote speaking as some disconnected performance art. He links it to product work, consulting, and change management. Speaking, in his telling, is another way of helping organizations absorb big ideas and act on them. The unexpected Gartner opportunity that got him on stage full time feels important for exactly that reason: he was ready because the substance already existed.

The middle section is especially useful if you have ever wondered how professional speaking actually works as a business. Dan talks about building a core talk sturdy enough to travel, then customizing the right portion for a specific audience. He also gets into visibility, books, video, and the modern discovery loop. People do not just hire a speaker from a blurb anymore. They want to see how the person thinks and sounds.

His creative process is pleasantly concrete. Slides come early. Rehearsal happens out loud, often to camera. The real editing happens after watching the playback, not after polishing a script in isolation. Even his take on nerves is practical. The fear never fully disappears, but it becomes manageable once the attention shifts away from self-consciousness and back to the audience in the room.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT

- A small moment with a better tool can redirect an entire career.
- Great keynote speaking sits closer to product thinking than to pure performance.
- A strong talk usually combines a reusable spine with audience-specific tailoring.
- Modern speakers build trust through video, writing, and consistent public presence.
- Rehearsing out loud is part of the writing, not just the polish phase.

JUMP TO A TOPIC

- 0:00 - Why speaking for a living is fascinating: Kirupa frames the conversation by asking what life looks like when public speaking becomes the main job. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=0s)
- 8:30 - An architecture internship changes everything: Dan tells the story of discovering how software could transform a slow, manual workflow. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=510s)
- 17:30 - Building a career around change: The discussion moves into software, product work, and helping people operate more effectively. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1050s)
- 26:00 - Consulting and organizational impact: Dan talks about change management, consulting, and the challenge of measuring what actually lands. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1560s)
- 34:30 - The Gartner opening: A surprise speaking opportunity becomes the bridge from tech leadership into keynote work. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2070s)
- 39:00 - Turning talks into a business: This chapter breaks down how speaking becomes a paid profession instead of an occasional side activity. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2340s)
- 43:00 - How speakers get discovered now: Books, YouTube, and online presence show up as major ways audiences and clients evaluate speakers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2580s)
- 51:30 - Creating a keynote: Dan walks through a slide-first, rehearsal-heavy process for finding the shape of a talk. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3090s)
- 58:30 - Stage nerves and reading the room: The focus shifts to delivery, confidence, and what speakers learn by watching an audience react in real time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3510s)
- 1:05:00 - Where presentations may go next: The final stretch looks at future formats and how the medium itself may continue to evolve. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3900s)

TO LEARN MORE

- Dan's Website: https://danchuparkoff.com/
- Dan's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DanChuparkoff
- Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuparkoff/
- Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danchuparkoff/

TRANSCRIPT

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

0:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=0s)

Hi everybody. For many of us, public speaking is terrifying. It's not something we look forward to. But there are also people who love it so much that they make a full-time career out of it. To talk more about the life of a public speaker, I spoke with Dan Chuparkoff, a professional keynote speaker at events around the world. We worked together in the past, and he's an excellent product manager and product leader. In this really fun chat, we talk about what it's like to be a professional public speaker, how you come up with topics, what the logistics look like, and a whole lot more. So stick around.

Dan, it's great to meet you. For those of you listening or watching, I've met Dan in person multiple times. He used to work at Google on the same team I was on, so it was great to know him then. I've also been following Dan online for several years, and there's a lot of interesting stuff we'll talk about there too. Dan, thanks for taking the time to chat. Awesome.

1:00 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=60s)

Thank you, Kirupa. Thanks for having me. It's been an exciting time. The last couple of years have been really crazy and great at the same time. I'm looking forward to cracking some of that open and talking about how change is changing teams all over the world. So yeah, I'm excited.

1:18 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=78s)

We'll definitely touch on what happened over the last couple of years. But I want to do what I always like to do with my guests, which is go back to the beginning. What made you interested in tech, the whole tech field, and all the stuff that went around it?

1:34 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=94s)

Yeah, for sure. There's a pretty definitive pivot point for me. A long time ago, when I was still in high school, I took a couple of drafting classes, and they were really fun for me. I heard a little bit about architects and what they do, and the idea of designing buildings that you could drive past and say, "See that building? I made that," was really enticing. That sense of permanence, the artifact of the work, always appealed to me. So in my senior year of high school, I got an internship at an architecture firm. This was 1986, and architecture was still very much a drawing-on-paper kind of job.

Sometimes you'd draw on what they called mylar, which was almost like a plastic film, and you'd draw in ink so it wouldn't get erased. We had those drafting boards you can picture, the slanted desks with a ruler attached. I started there in January of my senior year, worked through that semester, and then stayed for the summer before I went off to college. My plan was to become an architect. As an intern, I wandered around, met some of the architects, and got a few jobs to work on.

But as a 17-year-old kid in an architecture office, the main thing they'll let you do is draw the lines in a parking lot on a site plan. They'd draw some building with this huge triangle-shaped parking lot and say, "Dan, tell me how many spaces we can fit in this lot." I'd figure out where the medians should go, whether it had one entrance or two, and then I'd draw the parking lines over and over again. I spent months doing that. One day I was putting plans away in one of those big flat-file cabinets, and I met this guy I'd never seen before. I introduced myself, and he introduced himself back.

His name was Mr. Pak, P-A-K. I said, "How come I've never met you? I've been here three months." He said, "Oh, because my office is down here. My plotter makes too much noise." And I said, "What's a plotter?" He said, "Come here. Let me show you." I walked in and saw that he had a drafting board like everyone else, but he also had a computer and this huge printer thing that's hard to even describe now. He showed me how it worked, and I realized I could copy and paste parking spaces on a computer. We say "copy and paste" all the time now, but in 1986 that felt like magic.

To draw something once and then go plop, plop, plop, plop, plop? That would've saved me weeks of work. I just knew computers were going to completely change architecture, so I changed my major immediately and started focusing on computer science. Now I just try to help change every industry with little copy-and-paste kinds of ideas so people can work faster and more productively.

4:55 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=295s)

Did you go into computer science thinking you'd keep doing architecture work in digital form, or did you end up wanting to do something different once you got into it?

5:02 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=302s)

No, pretty much instantly. First of all, as a naive kid, I thought, okay, architecture has already been fixed now, so I should figure out how to use computers to fix other industries. I went into computer science thinking our job was to go from industry to industry and help people work more productively. So I didn't care as much about architecture design itself, because AutoCAD already existed and I figured Autodesk would keep improving it. I've always thought it would've been cool to go work at Autodesk, since they make architecture software, for anyone who doesn't know. That convergence of fields would've been fun.

But I pretty much abandoned architecture as soon as I saw how massively computer science could change the way people work.

6:02 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=362s)

That's pretty funny. I have a similar story in some ways. In high school, we had elective options beyond the core classes, and the only thing that seemed remotely interesting to me was drafting, which felt like one of the precursors to a lot of this work. Drafting One was literally on the board using the slide rule, the horizontal and vertical rulers, drawing lines on paper, learning angles, measurements, and how to go from small sizes to big sizes and back again through scale. Then the next class, I think it was Drafting Two, was on AutoCAD.

That's where you took all the work you'd done by hand and suddenly did it on this white virtual grid full of tiny dots. I remember the snapping feature being a huge life changer. I didn't understand at first that the dots had their own interval, so I was working in centimeters or feet or whatever unit I was using, but the grid was snapping to something else. I kept trying to line things up in between. Once I realized I could customize the snapping so it actually matched my units, that was a game changer.

So when you talked about drawing lines manually and then suddenly doing it on a computer, that really resonated with me. It felt like taking something from real life, shrinking it down, and then using plotting and scaling to turn it into something portable and workable. And I think the city I was in had a ton of legacy plans that needed to be digitized. Who better than kids learning this stuff to help out? It solved multiple problems.

I remember looking at plans for what I think was an intersection, with sewer lines, gas lines, and all this underground infrastructure drawn on little sheets of paper, and being asked, "Can you turn this into digital form?" That was probably my first real foray into what you're describing. I could absolutely see the connection between the physical world and the computer world. The computer version made everything more accurate, more reproducible, more shareable, and easier to archive. You no longer had to worry about paper getting burned, water damaged, or just disintegrating over time. So yeah, when you told that drafting story, it reminded me a lot of my own experience.

I didn't keep going with drafting after that, and there was no drafting career for me. I went to college and did other things. But it's fun that there's a connection there. That is amazing.

8:24 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=504s)

Yeah, drafting was one of those things where, in high school, you had required classes and electives. Drafting was one of the only electives that could also become a job when you finished, and that was super enticing to me. People chose to do it. They weren't forced. When you walked past the rooms where drafting was taught, they looked very different from traditional classrooms. It wasn't just a normal room repurposed by changing things on the whiteboard. The arrangement itself was different. You had larger desks, different chairs, and a different layout. You'd look in and think, I want to try this because who knows what's going to be in there?

Anyway, that's where I got started. Little by little, I moved into computers. Then I started working in the 90s. My first corporate job was in 94, and the company had just gotten PCs for the first time. They were transitioning from old mainframe computers and dumb terminals, where the actual computer was in the basement and we only had keyboards. For me, it was the same kind of opportunity: hey, we're getting PCs here, and I'm going to help you figure out how to use them to do your work. Then we got the internet. Then we got mobile phones, cloud, data science, and remote teams. Now we have AI.

For me, this is just the seventh transformation in a long series of transformations that is never going to stop.

9:56 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=596s)

So you started out studying architecture. Was there any fear that you'd sunk a lot of cost into that path, only to move into a career that didn't really use it in a direct sense?

10:11 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=611s)

So first, I changed my major in school. When I tell the story, it sounds like this binary switch, and it was in my head, but I didn't immediately follow it with my body. I had already spent a couple of years working toward an architecture degree. I was taking drafting classes, building models, and doing all that stuff. I was doing okay at it, maybe a C or B-minus student. But then I'd have a CAD class and absolutely plow through it. It was great. And once I started taking more computer classes, I gradually realized those were way more intuitive for me than the architecture side was.

So my architecture triangle got smaller and smaller, while my computer science triangle got bigger and bigger. I never thought of it as sunk cost. Learning how the old thing was done made me better at finding the product value in the new things I wanted to build. I saw it as learning what mattered, so I could preserve the important parts and automate the boring, slow ones.

11:32 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=692s)

Makes a lot of sense. So from there, how did you choose your first real job after finishing your computer science education?

11:43 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=703s)

Yeah, that was kind of serendipity. I was still in school. Because I changed my major halfway through, I was basically on the seven-year plan for a bachelor's degree. One day I saw a job in the newspaper. This was before Monster. Back then we looked for jobs in the Sunday paper, and there in the want ads was a listing for a computer operator. It basically said, "Computer operator. Will train. Works nights." I thought, I can still go to school, it says computers, I like those, and they're going to train me, so they need nothing from me.

I applied, got the job, and that was really the only actual job I'd applied to at that point. I wasn't doing career fairs or anything like that yet because I was still just a junior in college. So I started doing that, stayed there while I finished school, and kept doing more and more computer-related work as the company went through its PC transformation. I spent 10 years there. Then they bought a software startup, I went over to help run it, and that's what really got me onto the software side of things.

13:08 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=788s)

As an aside, you just mentioned Monster. I had no idea whether they're still around. I remember that being the place people applied for jobs back in the day. When I was in college, that was the place you went to.

13:20 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=800s)

Yeah, they're still around. There is kind of an interesting story there, and it overlaps with my resume too. Before Monster. Com, there was a company called Telephone Marketing Programs. They managed and sold advertising in the Yellow Pages phone book. Before the internet, people would thumb through the Yellow Pages to find plumbers, and you could also use it to look for jobs. That company, TMP, started making job boards in the Yellow Pages. They were local to a zip code or area code, and they had a lot of the same qualities modern job boards have now. The job board business became so successful that TMP spun it off and called it Monster.

Com. Then 2000 happened and Monster. Com exploded. They made so much money that they bought TMP, their former parent company, so Monster became the parent of the original TMP. Then, maybe 15 years after that, they split apart again, and I ended up working at TMP, the original company. They were still doing recruiting and job-board sites for people. You can still look them up, although I think they've changed their name now. It'll probably be in the speaker notes later because I can't remember the new name. But yeah, it's a long, meandering career path, and it did overlap with Monster. That's amazing. I always knew Monster. Com, and I vaguely remember TMP.

For whatever reason, I just love reading about companies for the fun of it. I remember seeing that name a long time ago. I didn't realize you had a direct connection to it.

15:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=919s)

Anyway, one thing that stood out to me in your career is what you mentioned earlier about identifying problems that need to be solved and using computers to solve them. I imagine that shaped a lot of the path you took. You've been in product management, consulting, and all these different areas. So walk me through that. When did you move from solving problems on a smaller scale to trying to have a much larger impact? You've had several roles where you were defining a big part of the strategy for a company.

15:54 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=954s)

Yeah. I think, intuitively, I was always a product manager. When I was doing homework in junior high, I was looking for ways to do it more efficiently. When I was working at McDonald's before that architecture internship, I was looking for ways for us to do our stuff more efficiently there too. I was always just a problem solver. For me, it's a fun puzzle. Then I majored in computer science and started programming as a developer at that first company I worked for. My first developer project was as a solo developer assigned to a sales team. They basically said, "Go work with this sales team and make stuff that will help them."

So I started building a CRM system for them. At the time, they were all managing their day in one of these. I have a visual aid. Yeah, absolutely, bring it on. It was a Franklin Planner, for anyone under 50. They wrote all their customer notes in this book, kept track of their calendars, their to-dos, all of it. Then a salesperson would quit or get fired and they'd take the book with them. You'd lose your whole sales history with that client, and the next salesperson would have to start over. So I built a CRM system that digitized that book. This was before Salesforce. Com or anything like that.

I had four users, and that was it, my four salespeople. They'd put their stuff into the system, and then we could transfer accounts and keep the history. They didn't call me a product manager back then, but on day one I walked up to a salesperson and said, "What's your biggest problem?" He said, "I'm about to go visit this customer and I have no idea what the last person said to them." So I built something to solve that. Little by little, I realized that was the fun part of my job, not programming and fixing my own bugs all day.

So I just kept asking more people what problems they had and trying to imagine software solutions for them. I've really been doing that my whole life, long before we used the words product manager.

18:35 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1115s)

So essentially, solving the customer's problem was the destination for you. Everything else, like programming, was just the way you got there. Speaking of programming, what language did you write your CRM in?

18:50 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1130s)

Way back then it was Visual C++. I learned C first and then C++ in college, but a lot of that was mainframe development without window interfaces. Back when Visual C++ first came out, it was essentially the C programming language with Windows you could draw, manipulate, and automate. That's what I built the CRM in. I still have it on a floppy disk somewhere.

19:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1168s)

Was the UI framework Windows Forms?

19:30 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1170s)

You know, I can't remember. It might have been. It was definitely something from Microsoft. You could literally buy Visual C++, and Microsoft probably got that package from somewhere. I don't actually remember that.

19:46 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1186s)

The reason I ask is that Visual Basic was one of my first real programming languages. Flash was my first one, of course, but nobody considered it a real language. Visual Basic was the first one people took seriously. It had a form designer that was a little like AutoCAD. You had a window or layout surface where you could place things, move them around, and control the spacing. At the time, I think that technology was called Windows Forms. Then it evolved into WPF and all the various versions beyond that. I've always been curious about this because some people didn't like using the UI designer at all, so they wrote everything in code.

Just as you could in Java, they defined the entire UI with mathematical numbers and coordinates, and those values translated into visuals. I was curious where you fell on that spectrum and whether you were happy to use the designer.

20:35 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1235s)

Yeah, I was happy to use the design tool because I've always been a visual person. The architecture background helped. If I could picture the thing in my head, drawing it out was way easier for me.

20:49 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1249s)

Yeah, if you'd said, "No, I wrote every line, defined every button by its rectangle coordinates, and manually recreated everything," I would've had to cut this interview short. But that makes a lot of sense. From there, at some point you went from writing programs to solve customer problems to becoming a formal product manager. Was that transition natural, or did it take more careful planning on your part?

21:23 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1283s)

It was pretty organic. Mostly what happened was that I had worked on that CRM system for about four years. During that time, we were shifting from Visual C++ over to Java because we now needed web applications for the internet and all that. So there I was, trying to understand classes, the Java framework, and all these calls and concepts that felt brand new to me. I was struggling as an early Java developer and felt like I was starting over. At the same time, though, I was eight years into my seniority on the IT team at that company.

I knew how our teams worked, I knew the people involved, and I knew what mattered to the business. Other engineers started relying on me for documentation, problem solving, and analysis. At first I called myself a business analyst. Somebody would say, "We don't have a business analyst on this project. Dan, can you help us for a bit?" And I'd say, "Yeah, sure. I've worked with that team for years." So I gradually stopped focusing on getting better at Java and started focusing more on helping people with the documentation side of the work. Then I started figuring out roadmaps.

I went to a company called Construx, which probably won't mean anything to most people, but one of the leaders there had been part of the group in Colorado that produced the Agile Manifesto. So, like four years before the Agile Manifesto, I took training from that company. I forget the guy's name, but I was really interested in how software was evolving and how people were going to use it. I got good at listening for customer problems and then translating between the business, which didn't understand Java, and the development team, which did. I became that translator.

23:59 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1439s)

That's really fun. At some point after that you went to Autodesk, McKinsey, and other places. What usually made you change companies? You've tended to stay at places for long stretches, like 10 years here or several years there. What was usually the forcing function that made you say, okay, I've done what I wanted to do here, and now I need something new and interesting?

24:23 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1463s)

Yeah, super easy answer. As a product manager, if you have enough skill, speed, and customer access, you can pretty easily create a five-year roadmap. Then you're basically waiting for engineers to build it, or you're having the more frustrating conversation: "We can only build 20% of this roadmap. Which 20% should we build?" That's not the fun part for me. So for most of the last 32 years, I'd build five years of roadmap and then say, "Hey guys, I'm out. Good luck." Then I'd go build five years of roadmap for somebody else who needed it.

The part where the roadmap slowly comes to life, and you do all the horse trading with new stakeholders and different opinions, just feels more political and bureaucratic. That part isn't as fun for me. So when you look at my history and see four or five years here, four or five years there, then a startup for a bit, then a bigger company after that, that's basically why. I've always been a three- to four-year-on-a-project kind of guy, because that's where I get my motivation and inspiration.

25:47 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1547s)

Most helpful. Speaking of four- or five-year roadmaps, do you think that time frame is still valid today?

25:55 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1555s)

I do, although I've just begun a research project to dig into that more because I know what you're going to say. It seems like things might be speeding up. I think you're right, but there's still a real driver behind how change happens in large organizations, and maybe medium ones too. Once leaders reach a certain level of seniority, they can get close enough to retirement that they don't need to make dramatic, sweeping, revolutionary changes. Some leaders at companies like Google, where we worked together, make those changes anyway, even though they could coast for five years, ride it out, and let the next person decide whether AI will be a big deal.

At many companies, though, such as an insurance company in Iowa or a transportation logistics company in North Carolina, if you're 61, you don't care about AI, NFTs, big data, or whatever the new thing is. You're trying to ride it out without breaking anything. There's a generational throttling effect on major organizational change. One set of leaders has to age out of the market, and a new set with completely different experiences has to come in before real change happens. That part isn't going to speed up. The new leaders might be trying to make 28 changes at once instead of one big change. They aren't just switching from mainframes to PCs anymore.

They're simultaneously figuring out remote work, what quantum computing will mean, and how to serve the African continent as a new market because those people are coming online. They're doing all of those things at once, but I think the changes will still arrive in packages with a 4 to 5 year transition span. Does that make sense? That's how I see it.

28:21 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1701s)

It does make sense, because if you look at the technology life cycle, there are a few major shifts we can point to. Moving from mainframes to PCs was one. That was a decentralization and democratization of computing, where everyone could eventually have a computer in the home instead of needing to go to a library, a university, or some lab to access one. Then the internet was a huge shift, because what lived on your local machine could suddenly be available to the entire world, not just the people physically in the office, building, or warehouse with you. Cloud computing was another big one. You no longer needed expensive machines everywhere.

You just needed lightweight ones, and someone else could handle the complicated, costly infrastructure. And of course AI is the big shift right now. A lot of the things we assumed were just naturally part of doing work are now being abstracted away and handled by AI. These are the moments where, if you don't react, you can end up without a business to come back to. If you're still selling mainframes, for example, at some point that market just isn't there. We've seen companies navigate these transitions well and others navigate them badly.

Growing up, especially in college labs, I remember all those purple-themed Sun Microsystems machines, and the SGI boxes that felt like the really high-end systems you wanted access to. I went back a few years ago and not a single one was there. They'd all been replaced by thin clients. The real software was running somewhere else, and you just had a Citrix VM basically pushing pixels. Because it was local to the network, it was fast enough that you barely noticed the latency. There are so many examples where, if you were the executive nearing retirement, you might say, "I don't see this as a threat. We've always done things this way.

We've been successful. We've been on magazine covers. We've won all these awards for being the most innovative company in the mid-'80s and '90s." Why would you ever change? Even today, if you follow Intel and some of its challenges, there are a lot of reasons it wouldn't feel natural for them to change how they've always operated. They got successful by doing something really well, and that same thing might also be part of what's making them less successful now. That makes me wonder about something you touched on earlier. On one hand, you can have CEOs trying to do many things at once, which makes focus harder.

On the other hand, you have someone like Jeff Bezos whose mission is something like, "How can I create the most customer-centric company?" That mission statement isn't tied to the internet, or mainframes, or AI. It's broader. Do you think having that kind of broad vision protects you by helping you naturally accept that change is coming, instead of being so locked into one idea that you miss the huge thing arriving in the side mirror and making all your work irrelevant?

31:36 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=1896s)

Yeah, I think what I like about Jeff Bezos's vision is that he's trying to create a North Star that isn't as much about the implementation. It's a single thing they can measure for customers that shows whether they're getting better or worse. You've had hundreds of conversations about OKRs, key metrics, North Stars, data mapping, and all that stuff. If you can measure one thing that says, I'm trying to help customers, and customers say I'm helping them, then I'm doing the right things. If they say I'm not helping enough, then I'm not doing the right things. Maybe I'm not helping enough because I need a cloud transformation.

But measuring whether you've completed a cloud transformation doesn't tell you about the customer value you're creating. That's why I like companies that include some kind of customer-value measurement in their North Star. I think some people go much too far down the rabbit hole of OKR mapping and lose track of what they're really trying to do for customers and how they know whether they're doing more of it. Most people can't measure customer value directly, so they use a collection of proxies. Sometimes those proxies are helpful, and sometimes they're distracting. Ideally, that customer measure keeps the entire company grounded in what matters.

33:23 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2003s)

Do you feel like it's easier in some industries than others to create that kind of mapping?

33:28 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2008s)

I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about that question, but it feels like the answer is probably yes. If I'm a doctor and I have a bunch of patients, then having those patients be less sick, be in the hospital less often, or need less medication are all pretty clear improvements. But if I'm helping a company, like I did at McKinsey, build better strategies, how do I measure "better strategy"? That's harder. So yes, I'm sure it's easier in some industries and harder in others. But I still think it's an important thing to try.

34:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2059s)

Yeah. And during all of this, you also made another transition. You're a public speaker now. You go to events, and a lot of people see you talking about different technology topics. How did that come about?

34:35 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2075s)

Yeah, I sort of stumbled into that, like everything else in my life. The in 20 in 2012, I was working at Atlassian, the company that makes Jira for developers in the group. And one of our people on our team had applied to speak at a Gartner summit. So, Las Vegas, Nevada, about 800 like IT VPs and CTO's and stuff like that. Guy on my team, his name was Sven. He had applied, he wrote a talk, he had slides, everything. But then his travel visa got blocked at the last minute and so he couldn't go to Vegas.

And so, with four or five days notice, he asked our team if anyone would be willing to go and deliver his presentation. I knew his content because we worked together really closely. I know the market. I'm fairly comfortable on stage, but I, you know, I hadn't really ever spoken to 800 people before. But I did it. I took his slides. It was fun. It was so fun. I like loved seeing like the audience head nodding back to me when they understood something. That was hard. And people came up to me after and said that was really great.

And they followed me on LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn was still pretty new back then. And all that was just a rush. And so, you know, I came back to work and said, "Hey, can I do that more"? And they said, " I mean, a little bit more, but your job is product management". So, you know, I did it. I did it, three or four times a year, and it was always the most fun thing I ever did. And so I, you know, tried to do it a little bit more and a little bit more, and one day I discovered that people actually get paid to do these speeches.

I never knew that. I thought you were just trying to, like, elevate yourself as a thought leader, maybe sell some of your own services to the audience, sell from the stage, you know, support a product like Firebase at Google, from the stage. Like, all those things are great things to do. I didn't know that people would get money. And one day we were planning an event for our- I was working at a small startup right before Google and we were planning an event and we reached out to an event planner and they gave us a list of speakers and told us what their fees were.

And I was, like: fees, what? I like. We reached out to Daniel Conorman and his fee was like 70 grand for an hour. I was like, my brain exploded. I'm like, the most fun thing that I ever do is a job that people have and it pays really well. That it just blew my mind. So, I, you know, I thought about what would it? What would that look like as my postc corporate career? And I started figuring out, if I had a speech, you know, if I wrote a book, and somebody bought the book 15 years from now, what would I want that book to say?

As a technologist, what am I writing a book about NFTTS? And then somebody reads it in 20, 20 years from now, they're like, "What the heck was an NFT"? And what were they thinking? No offense to the NFT supporters, but, I was just trying to figure out, like, when you're picking technology things to write about, which ones have longevity? And that's a hard question. So I thought about it and I practiced a little more and I did a little bit more speeches and eventually I tried charging people money and they started paying it.

And so almost 18 months ago, September of 2023, I quit my job at Google, just to speak. And now I'll probably do 75 of them this year. And, I'm just helping teams do the stuff that I was always trying to do for our team anyway. Just helping them navigate the world, figure out how to solve problems, use things like AI, or whatever comes next after that, robots and quantum computing, probably.

38:35 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2315s)

Are the topics mainly ones you choose, or do the venues give you hints about what they want?

38:44 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2324s)

Well, mostly, if you want to get paid, you need some consistency. People need to know, "Oh, I saw Dan, and this is his framework for adopting technology in a world of exponential change. It's great. You'll love it." From the customer's perspective, they want it to feel like the same talk I've been writing for seven years, rehearsed hundreds of times, but with a bit of customization for their company or industry. That's how I do it. I have a talk right now that's about an hour long. Roughly 20 minutes of it is specific to the customer or their industry, and the other 40 minutes are basically the same every time.

I help people understand why AI isn't going to take their job, and why the robots won't take it either, no matter what their job is. That's mostly what I'm out there talking about every time.

39:45 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2385s)

It almost sounds like a live musical act. People want to hear the back catalog they came for, but they also want a little bit of new material or venue-specific customization. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

39:57 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2397s)

Exactly. That's a great analogy because it really is a performance, and it takes rehearsal. I have a theater coach who helps me work out where I'm standing on stage and whether I should move my hands when I say “everyone.” There is a right answer to that question. Those details matter. They keep the audience from drifting off, looking at their phones, or tuning out, and they help drive real change. I saw a speaker in 1996 whose words I still remember. His name was Geoffrey Moore, and his book was called Crossing the Chasm. It was the most impactful book I ever read, and it changed my life as a technologist and businessperson.

Maybe 15 years later, I saw Eric Ries speak about The Lean Startup, and that changed how I thought about making things. Creating that kind of lasting impact takes work, thought, practice, and rehearsal. It takes all of that sustained effort.

41:07 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2467s)

You know, when Geoffrey Moore and Eric Ries gave those talks, did they already have their books out, or did the talks come first?

41:14 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2474s)

They did. But to caveat that a little with time, back then, if you didn't write a book, there wasn't really any other way for people to know if you were good. Once YouTube became a place where people could actually watch what you deliver, a 10-minute video of you became more helpful than a book. A book still adds credibility, of course, but it used to be an absolute prerequisite for speaking. Now, if you have video, you can get away without it. I don't have a book out yet. I'm writing one. It's called The Innovation Machine, and hopefully it'll be out this fall.

But even without a book, I'm still getting lots of speaking opportunities.

42:02 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2522s)

Oh, that's interesting. I was about to ask about the role of YouTube and social media too, because my feeds are full of little clips from people speaking about all sorts of topics. To be successful as a speaker in the future, do you need to balance the in-person version of yourself at events with an online version too, where anyone can discover you at the top of the funnel, get a feel for your style, and then decide they want to book you to speak in person?

42:39 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2559s)

Yes, I think that's definitely helpful, as long as it doesn't dilute what you're trying to be known for. Imagine you develop a great keynote, Kirupa. Someone hears about it and wants to book you, so they go to your YouTube channel. But if they get there and find a bunch of videos that aren't you doing that keynote, then all your other awesome content, which might be great, can bury the thing they're actually looking for. They might end up thinking, wait, I thought this guy was the keynote speaker. Maybe I found the wrong Kirupa. So if you do two different kinds of things, I'd probably create two channels or two social profiles.

Make it very clear which version people should go to if they care about the keynote speaker, and which one they should go to if they care about you as an influencer. Those are just different things.

43:49 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2629s)

I think one of the biggest things I've learned from this conversation so far is that brand management really matters, because in this case you are the brand. It's not a product you're representing. It's actually you. So anything you do has a major effect on how people perceive the service you're providing.

44:05 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2645s)

For sure. And as you probably see from following me on LinkedIn, I do put content out there. I try to post every Monday, every Wednesday, and every Friday to stay active in the feed. But most of that isn't clips from my talk. I don't want someone to watch every video in my feed and then feel like I didn't bring them anything new when they see me on stage. It's like going to see a comedian when you already know all the jokes. That's a little disappointing. So I write a lot, and I share a lot of thoughts, especially on LinkedIn and a little on Instagram.

But it's mostly about how I see the world and why I'm making the decisions I'm making, not little one-minute snippets from my keynote.

45:05 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2705s)

Walk me through your process. How do you go from an idea for a talk to actually writing it, iterating on it, and then delivering it?

45:14 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2714s)

For my talks, I approached it kind of like a product manager would. I wrote my first talk quickly, without overthinking it, and delivered it for free. Then I talked to people in the audience at the reception afterward about what they liked and what they didn't like. I'd ask things like, "What did I say that you disagreed with?" or "If you only remembered one thing from the keynote, what would it be?" I basically let the audience tell me what the keynote should become. Then I cut the stuff they didn't find useful, or didn't mention at all, and expanded the parts they really liked. I did that for five years.

The whole time I was at Google, I was giving four or five talks a year and using each one to figure out what people actually responded to and what the core of my thought leadership really was. Because I think a lot of things, and other people think a lot of those same things too. The harder question is, what's the unique thing I think about the world? You're almost like A/B testing in real life. Yeah, for sure. I am. Every time I try a new story, even the architecture and Mr. Pak story I told you earlier, I say it a little differently and see what feels good.

Honestly, in this conversation I think I rambled a bit too long on that one, so I'll probably go back and ask whether I can tighten it up and get to the point faster.

47:08 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2828s)

I think the nice thing about podcasts is that rambling is actually allowed. Sometimes it's even desirable, because you get to see someone in a more natural state. I read a lot about how comedians come up with material, and one of the reasons I'm always curious about the rise of comedy clubs, and what still sustains them even now that so much has moved online, is that they give comedians a place to workshop material. They can see what works. They come in with notepads, take notes, record things, scratch things out. That makes total sense to me, because you can't really get that kind of reaction from much else in the same way.

47:51 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2871s)

Yeah, for sure. But as you do that, you also have to be careful about where you experiment. If you're delivering a talk for free because you filled out a call for speakers at something like the Splunk conference or Salesforce, then you can do whatever you want. They don't really care. But if somebody is paying your rate card for an event, you probably want to dial back the amount of experimentation. My goal is to do one free talk every quarter. So I'm always looking at places like South by Southwest, CES, or something in that category where I can try material with a live audience and see how it lands.

If an audience is way more technical than, say, an insurance company in Des Moines, Iowa, do they still like the content? They already know a lot about technology, so that's a real test. Those are the kinds of experiments I'm still doing. I try to do that once a quarter with a live audience, just to keep testing whether the material is going to resonate.

49:07 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2947s)

On that note, has AI helped you in any of those ways? I ask because I give a lot of presentations at work. Like you, I change how I explain the same thing each time I present it, just to learn what helps the audience understand it better. Recently, I've started experimenting with the voice features in AI assistants. I'll say, “I'm going to present topic A. Tell me what you like and don't like about it. Pretend you're this kind of person.” I've found that it's getting better.

Compared with what I received 6 months ago, the feedback I got as recently as a week ago closely matches what I hear from real people when I present to them. I'm curious whether you've tried any of those approaches yourself.

49:52 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=2992s)

I've definitely been experimenting, partly because one of the things I do is help organizations figure out how to use AI for work like this. I want to approach it as a practitioner too, so I have firsthand experience. There are some things AI is good at giving you, and other things it isn't. I haven't really done the voice version of that yet. I do use voice with ChatGPT and Gemini sometimes, but that's mostly just to transcribe the question. If I'm already at my computer, I just type. What I do use a lot is taking a snippet of a story and putting it into ChatGPT or Claude.

When I'm working on thought leadership, I usually use Claude or Gemini because I like their privacy policies better than ChatGPT's. I'll ask things like, "Can you make this a little tighter? Can you make it crisper? How's the structure? Should I start with a James Bond moment and jump right into the action, then explain things later, or should I do something else?" It's great for that kind of feedback. I haven't used it much to simulate what an audience might think, because at this point I have enough real audiences that I can get real feedback from real people, and they all think different things anyway, so it's hard to generalize.

But it's worth trying more. I should play with it more, because AI is pretty knowledgeable when it comes to writing.

51:38 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3098s)

When you're writing your presentations, do you start with pencil and paper, or do you go straight to something digital?

51:50 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3110s)

Digital, but not as a script. What I actually do is make the slides first, usually in a really low-fidelity way. It'll just be five words on a white slide, then five more words on another white slide. I'll put together maybe 15 slides like that. Then I talk to my camera as if I'm giving the presentation. I record it, listen back, and figure out what went really well, what should become part of the script, and what I should try again. So I write by speaking and transcribing, as opposed to typing a script and then trying to read it. People ask whether it's hard to hear or watch yourself.

For me, it isn't. I'll watch myself over and over again. I don't know what that says about me. Maybe I'm a narcissist. But when I do a practice run for a one-hour speech, I'll record the whole hour, then listen to the whole thing back while taking notes. Sometimes I'll listen to it a second time. Sometimes I'll just play the audio again on a plane. I probably spend 10 hours a week listening to myself. If you were playing sports, and I'm not really a sports guy so I hesitate to use the analogy, you'd watch the tape afterward with a coach and figure out what you could have done better.

If you didn't do that, you'd be a worse athlete.

53:42 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3222s)

Yeah, I'm not a big sports person either, but I do like biographies and reading about that world. One thing I've read about Tom Brady and Bill Belichick is that what set them apart was how many hours they spent reviewing footage of themselves playing, seeing where the team could do better, and also watching other people play. There really is something to having more data, not just on what you do, but on how other people handle similar situations and react to them. It may not be the most fun thing in the world, but it gives you an edge. Totally agree.

So in terms of speaking to audiences, what's the most fun kind of audience for you to talk to?

54:24 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3264s)

Wow. I think the audiences I really enjoy are those middle-range technology audiences that aren't super technical, but also aren't completely non-technical either. Somewhere in the middle. A good example is one of my favorite events this year. It was for salespeople at a cybersecurity software company. When I first signed up for it, I thought, what am I going to tell a cybersecurity company about AI? Surely they've already got it figured out. But what I learned is that I wasn't talking to the engineers or the senior security ops people.

I was talking to the salespeople who had been handed a deck somebody else wrote, and now they had to explain what this highly sophisticated thing did. Those are the people I love speaking to. I can give them a way of explaining something, and they're so grateful because they can immediately use that same explanation with their customers. It's such a binary shift. Something that felt confusing and threatening suddenly clicks. That's the most fun group for me.

56:05 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3365s)

When it comes to speaking, we've talked about a lot of things you're good at. One thing I always noticed when we worked together in real life is that you have a knack for simplifying really complicated things. I wonder if that shows up in your presentations too, because you just mentioned that moment where a sales team suddenly gets it. It may not be that the material is new to them, but the way you simplify abstract concepts turns them into something they can relate to. I wonder whether that's a huge part of it. Yeah, for sure. In fact, that's literally in my stage intro.

It says, "Dan's superpower is making complex things simple and useful." I was just about to ask what you think your superpower is, and you answered it from your own bio.

56:54 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3414s)

Yeah. That's because I started at a very non-tech company. That first company I mentioned was a coupon-printing business. They printed coupons for newspapers. Those people didn't know anything about PCs, the internet, or what Java even was. So out of necessity, I became a translator between non-tech people and tech people. Then I spent 30 years practicing that over and over again, dropping myself into new industries with new software I'd learned three days earlier and trying to explain it to a VP of operations or whoever. That was just a skill I built. Maybe it came from practice. Maybe some of it is in my DNA. I'm not sure.

But it's definitely the thing I'm leaning on now as a speaker.

58:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3480s)

Do you get stage fright?

58:03 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3483s)

Sort of, but not really. About 20 minutes before they call my name, I'm in the back of the room looking at all these people milling around. I hear the company president talking about everything they're trying to do, and my stomach is in knots. I'm definitely nervous. But as soon as I'm inside my content and thinking about material I've rehearsed hundreds and hundreds of times, it isn't that hard. I stop thinking about the room. I'm focused on the content and trying to be myself on stage. I talk the same way I'm talking to you now. I'm not thinking about the fact that I'm in an arena with 4000 people watching.

That can be a little scary sometimes, but most of the time I simply don't think about it.

59:05 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3545s)

And I think product managers get a lot of presentation practice too. It may not be a huge crowd, but you do get practice thinking on your feet, and sometimes having to throw something together in an hour and present it. As a public speaker, you might have more time, but as a PM you're doing versions of this constantly. Surveys always say the thing people fear most is public speaking. That always comes up. For me, it doesn't bother me that much. I still get nervous in a real venue, but not overwhelmingly so.

When I think back to being an intern and giving my first presentation to the larger team about my intern project, I remember dreading it the night before and even the day before. The analogy people always give me is skydiving. I've never been skydiving. It's on my bucket list, but I'm absolutely terrified of it. People say you're terrified getting on the plane, terrified when you look out the door, but once you jump, it's fine. Once you hit terminal velocity, you don't really feel it. And I'm like, that is not comforting to me in any way, shape, or form. But I'll take your word for it.

I think public speaking is like that for a lot of people. Most people never really get a chance to practice it, or to speak in front of anyone larger than a familiar group. So standing up in front of strangers, talking about something when you don't know them and they don't know you, I can absolutely see why that feels terrifying. I can see why the surveys keep mentioning that.

1:00:42 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3642s)

Yeah, for sure. But one thing I've learned is that audiences are usually really nice. If they don't like you, they're just not going to be engaged. They're not going to start yelling. You're not going to get heckled. Nobody is going to grab the microphone at the end and say, "You suck." As a product manager, you're used to pitching things, and maybe half the time the team, the VP, or whoever tells you they don't like it and sends you back to the drawing board. Your keynote audience isn't going to do that. Mostly you'll get three people who come up and say, "That was really great.

Thank you." And everyone else, whether they liked it or not, just fades off into the distance and you never see them again.

1:01:33 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3693s)

Yeah. Do you prefer speaking in venues where you can see the audience, or in venues where the lighting is so focused on the stage that all you see is darkness, with maybe the occasional glow from a phone?

1:01:50 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3710s)

Yeah, I love being able to see the audience. It's hard for me when I can't see people. I can't see the head nods. I can't see when someone takes out a phone to snap a photo of a slide, and that lets me think, okay, this is resonating. A couple of times the light on me has been so bright that all I could see was light and I had no idea who was out there. That probably makes for better video because the spotlight looks great, but I'd much rather see the audience's eyes, their head nods, and their phones taking pictures.

1:02:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3748s)

I have a few more questions in the same vein. Sometimes I've seen speakers stay on stage, and other times, especially at places like Salesforce, I've seen speakers walking between tables and zigzagging around the room like a Roomba. Which style is your preference?

1:02:53 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3773s)

I think I'm generally not a walk-around-the-room kind of speaker. There are contexts where that's really helpful, especially when you're being more interactive, asking the audience a lot of questions, and drawing energy out of them. One of my mentors, Seth Mattison, is a master at that. He'll jump off the podium or stage, walk into the audience, sit down with people, and ask things like, "What do you think?" or "What was your favorite part of today?" He's great at it.

As a conference closer, when you're trying to leave the audience feeling comforted, recapped, and at just the right energy level, getting down into the room and meeting people where they are can be really powerful. I don't do that yet. Maybe someday I will. Right now I ask questions, I poll the audience, I get hand raises, and stuff like that, but I don't physically come down into the room very much.

1:04:12 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3852s)

Yeah. Last question that you know, in that same train. I know some speakers like to have music playing when they are coming up on stage. And it's often the music that they typically get excited by and do all of this, all this work. And I actually asked this question to you know, when I was in college, one of my AI professors name is Patrick Winston. He always would play Rolling Stones before he would get up on. Why do you do this like? Why do you play Rolling Stones music? And these were like large lectures like 400- 500 people there. So it was definitely a large enough thing.

And then he do this like mult three times a week for, however the semester long it is. It's like, yeah, for me, that helps me get into the zone, because I do this day in and day out like talking about AI, teaching about AI and so on, but I can't be in that professorial research mode where I'm like completely disengaged. Putting this music on triggers something, where I'm now suddenly doing something where I'm like, this is not my norm. I need to now put on a performance and do a good job teaching. And I've seen public speakers often do something similar.

So I'm curious to know where you stand on that.

1:05:10 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3910s)

Yeah. Generally, it depends on whether the event team is set up for that. How is the audio in the room? Are you in a 150-person room in the basement of a Marriott, or are you in Vegas with 1200 people? That matters a lot. Often, the event team will ask whether I have a preference for walk-up music. I'm still finding the right song for me. For a long time, I've used a cover of the Beatles song “Revolution,” the one with “Say You Want a Revolution.” That's my usual go-to. There's a cover by the MonaLisa Twins that I think is cool and a little more modern.

I also like Imagine Dragons or OK Go. Those kinds of songs get the audience thumping a little before you walk out and raise the room's energy, which can be super helpful. Finding a great song with both the right beat and the right message is hard. I've struggled with some of the more modern songs, so I'm still working out what that song should be for me. I am still searching for it today.

1:06:31 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3991s)

What is your dream venue to give a speech in?

1:06:34 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=3994s)

Wow. I don't know. My favorite venue last year was really amazing. It was the Cleveland Public Auditorium. It used to be a basketball venue, probably where the Cavs originally played. It's this really old, maybe 100-year-old place, with an ornate stage and two decks. It's just a wonderful room. The stage is cool. The backstage area is epic. That was really fun. Mostly, though, by the time they outfit the room, a lot of venues start to feel the same. They're putting the stage in, setting up the screens, and so on. Wide screens are great. If you get those really cinematic wide screens, they're super fun to work with.

And as the room gets bigger, I think that gets fun too. The kind of room I don't want is the one where people are all around you and you have to keep turning as you speak. That's awkward and hard. But specific venues? I don't know. Somewhere big in Vegas is always fun. They're big.

1:07:55 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=4075s)

What do you think of the Sphere in Vegas?

1:07:58 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=4078s)

I think that's really cool. I think it'd be neat to speak there for sure. But I would spend months figuring out what the graphics should be for that presentation. That would be a massive project, because the whole point would be to do something different and really take advantage of the full 360-degree space instead of treating it like a normal rectangular screen.

1:08:18 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=4098s)

That would be amazing. Now that you've planted that seed, I'm going to start working on that already so that when it does happen, I'll have the slides ready, because that is going to create some work. Dan, is there anything else you'd like to share with the world?

1:08:35 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=4115s)

No. I think I just really enjoy having conversations with people who care about the stuff we're talking about right now. So if you're on LinkedIn or Instagram, find me. I'm pretty easy to find. My name is pretty unique. There are only like 20 of us in the world. So you'll find me. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram. I'd love to follow you back, have conversations in the future, and wish everyone the best of luck. And I want people to let me know how I can be helpful.

1:09:05 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=4145s)

And I'll make sure there are links to all of that in the description and the show notes so people can find you there as well. Dan, thank you so much. It was great catching up with you, and best of luck.

1:09:13 - Dan Chuparkoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uES3M4pLGV0&t=4153s)

Likewise. Thanks, man. I'll talk to you later. Bye.


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