Confessions of a Tech Panelist
They do serve a purpose. Sometimes. Can I have a glass of water?
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A few years ago Box invited me to their developer conference to moderate a panel of tech executives. At one point I asked one of the bosses a question related to the timeline for designing and shipping product. The answer was, in my mind, unsatisfying. So I went with a follow-up, pressing whether he would have given that same answer were he in charge of marketing and not product.
A silence passed through the room.
“I don’t know,” he said and then gestured around him as if to explain:
“It’s a panel.”
It was a peevish response. But tech panels do occupy a space that teeters between education and handwaving. In some ways, all of the communication from the tech ecosystem balances on this razor: what is useful and true, and what is marketing? There’s a lot of noise in the techochamber.
Enter “tech panel” into Twitter’s search bar, and filter for images. You’ll see a conference hall, microphones resting on a white tablecloth, experts offering views. Or the atrium of a low-slung office building, experts perched on stools near the window, holding microphones (one invariably with audio problems), offering views. In fact, expertise can happen anywhere, and at any time. A hotel lobby. A coffee shop. A conference room. The back of a bar. Even livestreamed. Just check Meetup.
I’ve attended enough of them that while writing this I found myself saying “Wait, that conference in the Kabuki hotel—was that the time Brewster Kahle was speaking about bitcoin or music technology?” Panelists start to show up in more than one type of—
I’m going to cut you off here—can you talk about why tech panels happen?
Great question. A Venn diagram of motivations.
For the audience, free food, coffee or booze doesn’t hurt. But a panel creates a reason to network. I once attended a daylong series of panels about launching a startup and after each you could almost hear the entrepreneurs launch from their chairs and start scanning the room like the Terminator for name tags that said Angel, VC or Press. The roster of panelists functions as the litmus test for one’s ability to Make Contacts, Set Up Meetings and Follow Up on that new idea. Good panelists mean you wake up the next morning with some extra know-how and a Powerful collection of business cards.
Of course panels are an opportunity to listen to and maybe chat with heavy-hitting or hard-to-access luminaries in a field. Lots of questions start with an explanation of why the questioner really respects the panelist—or an awkward public invitation to Chat Offline after the panel.
What about organizers?
So, in a city filled with lots of ideas, it’s important to try to be the crucible for those ideas, whether you are a non-profit, a media company or another tech company. Marketing departments love the idea of someone leaning against the water cooler the next morning and saying, “You know, I heard the most amazing talk last night at [Brand].” Autodesk has monthly soirees to hear about the future of modeling software and robots in their snazzy downtown offices.
And panelists?
I was getting there. Let me speak from personal experience, having sat on a couple panels: it’s a big smack on the lips for your ego. People want to hear what you have to say! But for businesspeople or researchers commenting on their industries in front of peers or potential customers, there’s the opportunity for free press—or at least a free soapbox to get out some Messaging.
Okay but I’d never watch a movie where every character was in agreement. Why would I watch a tech panel?
Let me be clear: There are plenty of Great Tech Panels. These are unfiltered discussions, when the panelists tackle hard questions and there is legitimate augmentation and disagreement on points. That aforementioned series of panels on launching a startup did cover finer points of incorporation law and at one point a longtime Silicon Valley VC told the room of entrepreneurs, betraying absolutely zero humor, that he wasn’t interested in them “learning on the job” with his money.
I once attended a panel on privacy regulations for app developers at Runway, a San Francisco incubator. Hackers/Founders founder Jonathan Nelson both had trouble hiding his disdain for government officials who he believed didn’t understand the tech they were regulating, while also making important points about how these regulations were hurting businesses. To his credit, the assistant to California attorney general Kamala Harris who joined Nelson on the panel did a pretty good job handling the accusations. There were a couple awkward moments—Nelson spent a bit too much time with his arms folded and not looking at anyone while talking—but you walked away feeling like you’d witnessed something real.
Of course you don’t want a panel too unfiltered—recently I attended a discussion where original iPod engineer Andy Grignon referenced the size of his penis a couple times. Organizers want a balance where panelists add, as The Churchill Club’s CEO Karen Tucker puts it, “something you can’t Google.” She points to a recent panel on civilian use of drones that featured back and forths with CEOs of different drone-related companies, including my former uber-editor at Wired Chris Anderson.
So you need a Honey Badger?
Good one. Yes. In my experience having a lively panel requires at least one participant to not care—to get all crazy and nastyass. Or at least something close. If someone goes Honey Badger, others panelists often rise to meet them (or demur and say very little). At “The Future of Money,” Internet Hall of Famer Brewster Kahle moderated a panel with the confidence of someone with little else to prove. Some of the panelists were reading from marketing playbooks but Kahle was able to loosen them up with his honest insights.
A panel is rarely better than its moderator. I will admit to being underprepared to moderate a panel and holding back the quality. With the Average Tech Panel the audience endures a plastic question and answer — basically concurrent interviews, no semblance of human interaction. Many execs field questions like the PR department has a pistol in the small of their back so you need an established personality like Kahle or a good journalist to crack the ice. Organizers attempt to catalyze conversation by introducing everyone beforehand, sometimes even taking them out to a nice dinner the night before. But this doesn’t always work.
What are some other issues that arise?
Well, I don’t need to tell you that panels in the tech community are usually very male and not very black or hispanic. And yet somehow organizers will still fail to understand the interplay between demographics, an audience and who’s holding the microphone. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing seemed to think that the mostly female attendees would — rather than find it obnoxious and condescending — enjoy a session where four white men sat on stage and offered up career advice. How these sorts of bizarre myopic blunders still happen in 2014, I don’t know.
You mentioned “free press” for panelists a minute ago, can you talk a little more about that?
Sure. A panelist talking about their company can be dicey. Organizers usually ask panelists to confine pitches to the introductions. No one likes when a panelist becomes a salesman. But of course in an industry where everyone’s pitching everyone, people break the rules to get ahead. One organizer asked me to keep the panel name secret in exchange for telling me about a time the audience booed a Salesman Panelist right as he was talking (pitching). They’d signed up to hear interesting information, not an elevator spiel. Some people even started calling him out on Twitter before he’d even left the stage. Hard to blame them.
But that seems to assume everyone’s trying to get the same thing out of a tech panel.
Fair. Some people do attend panels to hear specially about other businesses. But usually the point is to learn the effects of those businesses and the headings of their particular markets. Complicated topics get bottled into tiny terminology — privacy, the cloud, big data, artificial intelligence, privacy, and so forth — so panels function to parse the information. This can be especially useful for those on the periphery of digital businesses. The San Francisco-celebrating Bold Italic (for which I’ve written) organizes panels on subjects like the future of the car. That may seem trite to those in tech but most people aren’t glued to Hacker News and Twitter. Organizer Ellen Black says the idea is to give San Franciscans a better sense of the issues affected—or perhaps, generated—by the companies around them.
But panels can fill a narrow niches too. I sat on a panel for PR people that focused on how to pitch stories to journalists. Rhonda Walker organizes panels for Jasper, a company that builds software for the internet of things. “There’s an enormous amount of hype,” she says of the catchall idea that soon every machine will have a way to chat digitally with the next. A recent panel for Jasper’s clients discussed such implications for farms and tractors.
Perhaps not for everyone. But folks that operate John Deere tractors have questions about the future too.
We’re over time. This was supposed to be a 5-minute read. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Yes, one thing. People toss Disrupt and Innovate around like beanbags and it’s easy to be forgotten in a sea of pointless apps and companies with names that sound like a child’s first attempt at language. The Bay Area is full of smart people trying to do crazy things — where the definition of crazy ranges from “another goddamn laundry app” to “electric cars” but either way you’re considered a techie. You work in a ruthless job market. You work in an industry that doesn’t sleep. You work in an economy that could detonate at any moment. You work in a city that acts like you’re ruining it. People assume you’re rich. People assume you’re aloof. People assume you’re apathetic. People even attack the buses that take you to work. This is no sob story for tech and I don’t want to psychoanalyze an industry but the flipside of a panel pumping noise into the techochamber is, simply, a friendly professional environment outside of work.
And again, free coffee or beer doesn’t hurt.
