I gave a 1000-person conference talk and I didn't die

A wealthy investor read about Fractal and invited my husband and I to speak at The Network State Conference. 

We hesitated. Traveling to Amsterdam for a conference was prohibitively expensive for us, but it seemed weird to ask for financial aid. Like any other mature, healthy adults being courted by a billionaire, we ghosted his invitation. 

Luckily, he followed up a few months later. At that point, we agreed to go if we could get our flights and hotel covered, which he generously agreed to. We still had three weeks to prepare, which felt like plenty of time except that we were the busiest we’d ever been.

A week passed. He sent more details about the conference: “Conference will be packed (1000+ in person and 1M online) so it'll be a good audience!”

Did he say one thousand people? That couldn’t be right. I’d only ever spoken in front of 30 or 40 people before. And one million people online? Andrew assured me that one million was just an exaggeration, one to be expected from a well-meaning but optimistic tech founder. It’s like Elon saying the Cybertruck will ship in 2021.

We learned the talks were also being filmed for a documentary: “We're filming everything for inclusion in the Network State Conference documentary…the tighter the talk, the better it will travel.”

I was starting to feel less confident. Our friend Daniel refers to our general mode of existence as “Rose Chaos.” Rose is our last name, and chaos is, well…an apt description of how we live our lives. We live life like it’s a whirlwind and we’re never on solid ground. Some of our experiments fail and some flourish, but almost everything we try is low stakes, with a lot of room for play. The failures are easily forgotten. But failing in front of 1 million people…that I had never done before.

The date of our travel arrived. We had practiced our talk exactly one (1) time.

We arrived in Amsterdam on a red eye flight. Andrew turned to me: “Good thing we gave ourselves an extra day in Amsterdam before our conference. Today we can rest and start to practice, and tomorrow we can practice all day."

"Lol lmao," I said. "The conference is tomorrow. We didn't give ourselves an extra day to practice…"

That day we wrote a transcript for our talk, since our ad libbed practice session had gone terribly. We decided we would bring our phones onstage so we could refer to our transcript. Without using our transcript, we went on tangents and paused mid-sentence and mixed up our words.

On the morning of the conference we woke up still jet lagged. We were scheduled to give our talk at noon. We practiced delivery again and again, each time improving slightly on the previous round. We revised our transcript, with hours left on the clock.

We Ubered to the conference. We went onstage. We were well-lit, but the audience was dark. Despite a 1000-person audience, I could only make out a few faces in the front row. Andrew was supposed to speak during the first section. That meant I would stand quietly next to him for the first few minutes. I didn't know how to stand!! I had nervous energy that made me fidgety, so I willed myself to be still. 

My section of the presentation came. After my first few slides, I forgot to keep referencing my phone notes. Thus I forgot most of what I planned to say on each slide, and skipped a lot of our planned content. But I hit the most important points.

I think overall I came off as nervous and a little awkward. Luckily my husband started and ended the talk, and he was as charming as usual.¹ Hopefully the audience just forgets that middle stuff 😅

Soon enough, it was over, and we were walking offstage. When we got backstage, some people I didn't recognize told us we had done a good job. I couldn't tell if they were being kind or if they meant it. 

I consoled myself by telling myself that everyone I knew was asleep because of the timezone difference, and probably no one would watch my talk. I was wrong — my friends watched our talk and messaged me to say we had done a great job. I wasn't sure if they were being kind or if they meant it.

My nerves were calming down. No matter how we’d done, the work was over. 

P.S. You can watch our talk here:

Thanks to Thomas Schulz and Andrew Rose for suggestions and reading drafts. Thanks to Madhu for co-writing with me. If you’d like to co-write in New York City on Fridays, DM me.

1. Life Pro Tip: marry someone extremely competent and start projects with them.