The Content-Community Flywheel

At this point I’ve surveyed thousands of people across hundreds of events of all kinds. One of the more interesting trends I’ve noticed is that the highest-rated part of an event is almost never the content.

It's usually the peer breakouts and networking.

In the vast majority of cases, the thing people say they found most valuable and enjoyable is the people they met and the conversations they had. The key person they finally got introduced to. The customer they ran into over coffee. The investor they ended up grabbing drinks with afterward. The peer who was dealing with the exact same challenge they were.

But there's a strange paradox hiding inside that observation.

If you removed all the content and simply told people they were coming to a networking event, most of them wouldn't show up. Try inviting a bunch of tier 1 executives to a basic happy hour that has no programming…you’ll see what I mean.

The content is what gets people in the room. The networking is what keeps them coming back.

That doesn't mean the content is unimportant. In fact, it's the opposite. Great content creates the conditions for great networking. It gives people shared context. It gives them something to react to. It surfaces ideas, challenges, and opportunities that continue into the conversations afterward.

The content might not be the most important thing, but it’s often the critical catalyst for everything else.

The biggest mistake I see event organizers make is designing content for the wrong customer.

The audience is the customer. Always.

That sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to lose sight of. Content decisions often get driven by sponsor requests, speaker requests, internal politics, executive preferences, or a desire to stack impressive logos on the agenda.

Those things all matter to varying degrees, but they are secondary. The audience must come first.

Whenever I'm reviewing content, I usually ask a very simple question: Why is someone attending this event?

Most of the time, the answer falls into one of two buckets:

1) They’re there to become more successful (i.e. get promoted, meet customers, raise capital, etc.)

2) They're there to have fun.

You can appeal to one or both of these buckets, and have a successful event.

The “fun” route means people are coming because you’re (for example) taking them to a VIP box at the US Open, to F1, or to wine country.

The "more successful" route might mean people are coming to learn something useful, meet customers, find a job, find a key hire, understand a new market, or get better at their role so that they can get promoted. They’re coming because they expect a material outcome that will improve their life in some way.

Your content must help people accomplish one or both of those two goals.

If you’re going the “fun” route, the answer might be no content, minimal content, or tangential content, meaning an inspirational talk from an Olympian, a performance by a top mentalist, or a fireside with an amazing author.

If you’re going the “more successful” route, the content needs to be much more strategic and tactical, driving directly toward the outcome people are there to achieve.

One of the mistakes organizers make is assuming every session should be educational. Education is certainly one category of valuable content, but it's far from the only one.

The strongest content I've seen over the years tends to fall into a handful of buckets:

Tactical Content 

This is content that gives someone something they can immediately use. A new hiring framework. A better interview question. A sales process. A management technique. An AI workflow. A review process. Something that someone can take back to work and implement.

The key isn't that it's educational. The key is that it's actionable.

Inspirational Content 

This is the content that gets people excited to go do the work. It's the founder story that makes people want to build. It's the turnaround story that reminds people why they got into the industry. It's the talk that leaves people energized instead of just informed.

Aspirational Content

Aspirational content answers a different question. Instead of teaching people how to improve, it shows them what great looks like.

How does a world-class marketing organization operate? How does a top pre-IPO company think about finance strategy? How does an elite revenue organization structure itself? How does a company achieve results that seem impossible from the outside?

People love getting a glimpse behind the curtain. Sometimes they don't need a step-by-step playbook. They simply want to understand how the best operators in the world think.

Entertaining Content

This category is often overlooked, but sometimes a talk is valuable because it's funny, surprising, weird, fascinating, or simply enjoyable to sit through. Not every session needs to be a masterclass.

In fact, if you’re running a half- or full-day event with lots of content, you should have at least one session that is there purely for entertainment value to give people a bit of a break/release.

Value and memorability are related, but they aren't the same thing.

I've seen incredibly useful talks that nobody remembers a month later. I've also seen talks that people talk about for years despite having very few practical takeaways.

One talk that sticks in my mind to this day was from the founder of a multibillion-dollar company. He put their live stock chart up on the screen from IPO to present day, highlighted every peak and every valley, explained exactly what happened before and after each one, and what he learned.

Do I remember specifically what he said? No. Do I remember thinking it was absolutely fantastic and enjoying it? Absolutely.

The best sessions manage to be both valuable and memorable.

In my experience, memorable content usually contains something people haven't heard before. It contains a surprising story, an unexpected lesson, a behind-the-scenes detail, or a perspective that feels fresh or unique.

Specificity matters a lot here.

People rarely remember generic advice. They remember stories. They remember examples. They remember odd details. They remember things that feel real.

Delivery also matters more than most people realize.

Two speakers can present the exact same information and get completely different reactions from the audience. One person will have the room hanging on every word. The other will lose people halfway through.

Energy matters. Storytelling matters. Humor matters. Pacing matters. Posture matters.

The best speakers understand that people aren't just evaluating the information. They're evaluating the experience of receiving it.

Most event content falls into one of five formats: Panels, firesides, lightning talks, demos, and paid keynotes. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Panels 

I hate panels. Panels are probably the most common format. They're attractive because they allow organizers to put multiple impressive names and logos on stage at once. In practice, that often means nobody gets enough airtime, nobody prepares particularly deeply, and everyone says a slightly different version of the same thing.

Panels can absolutely work, but they require extensive research and prep, strong moderation, a clear reason for those people to be on stage together, and actual disagreement or tension.

Firesides

Firesides are probably the most common format for senior executives. The reason is simple: they're easier for the speaker. A busy executive is much more likely to agree to a fireside than a prepared presentation because the prep burden is lower.

The tradeoff is that the burden shifts to the moderator. A great fireside requires research, preparation, structure, and active moderation. Done well, they're fantastic. Done poorly, they become rambling conversations that never quite get anywhere.

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are probably the most underrated format in events.

The constraint is what makes them work. When someone only has ten or fifteen minutes, they're forced to decide what matters. They prepare more. They edit more aggressively. They get to the point faster. As a result, audiences often learn more in a fifteen-minute lightning talk than they do in a forty-five-minute presentation.

Demos

Demos are another favorite of mine because they feel authentic. There's something powerful about watching someone actually plug in their own machine, and use a product, workflow, or process in real time rather than simply talking about it. The best demos are live. They feel honest, practical, and grounded in reality.

Paid Keynotes

These are often authors, researchers, athletes, journalists, scientists, entertainers, or professional speakers. Unlike operators, speaking is their craft. The best keynote speakers have spent years refining a talk. They understand pacing, storytelling, audience engagement, and stage presence at a very high level.

They're also one of the few formats where I think thirty to forty-five minutes can work extremely well. Two of my recent favorite keynote speakers have been Ben Mezrich and Charles Duhigg.

One of the biggest mistakes organizers make when selecting speakers is optimizing entirely for logos.

Logos matter. People are more likely to RSVP when they recognize the companies represented on stage.

But logo quality and speaker quality are not the same thing.

Sometimes you'll have an incredible company and a mediocre speaker. Sometimes you'll have an incredible speaker from a company nobody has heard of.

The best events balance both.

The logos may help get people in the room, but the quality of the experience is what gets them to come back.

This is also true when thinking about sponsors.

As a rule, I don't sell guaranteed speaking slots. Not because sponsors can't be great speakers. Some of the best speakers I've ever had were sponsors.

The issue is that once speaking rights are guaranteed, you've lost the ability to curate the content around the audience.

My general rule is simple: if the company wasn't sponsoring, would I still want this person on stage?

If the answer is yes, great. That's an easy decision.

If the answer is no, I'd rather find another solution. Sometimes that's a different speaker from the sponsor's organization. Sometimes it's giving the sponsor 2 minutes of stage time to do a quick intro and welcome. Sometimes it's something else entirely.

The audience is still the customer.

Almost every great session I've seen had one thing in common: preparation.

Prep calls, slide reviews, moderator research, speaker coaching, content reviews, fireside question reviews — the strongest content rarely happens by accident.

Lightning talks improve dramatically when decks are reviewed in advance. Firesides improve when moderators do deep research. Demos improve when expectations are aligned ahead of time.

If you’re plan is to invite people to speak and then let them do whatever they want…

From a speaker's perspective, the signals are usually obvious.

Are people paying attention? Are they looking at you or their phones? Are they asking questions? Are they approaching you afterward?

From an organizer's perspective, it's a little more complicated.

The question isn't really whether a talk worked (though you should be gathering individual scores for each talk in the feedback survey), it's whether the event content worked overall.

Did people stay for the whole thing? Did they complete the feedback survey at all? Did they write to you after about their experience? Did you hear good things anecdotally in real time?

Survey data helps, but so does observation. People vote with their feet. They vote with their calendars. They vote by deciding whether they want to come back.

A few rules of thumb on surveys: announce live that attendees should expect it, send it as soon as the event ends, keep it short, make most questions multiple choice, and send one follow-up 24 hours later. If 25% or more of attendees complete it, that’s excellent.

I also read non-response as a critical signal. A strong score is obviously good. A weak score is bad, but at least they cared enough to tell you. No response at all is often worse. It usually means the event either missed badly or was so forgettable that they did not bother engaging afterward.

The longer I've been doing this, the more I've come to think of content and community as a flywheel:

Some of the best content ideas I've ever found came out of networking conversations at previous events. You hear the same challenge come up repeatedly. You notice everyone struggling with the same thing. You see certain topics generating energy and others falling flat…that's useful information.

The goal of event content is not to fill a stage. It's not to maximize logos. It's not to cram as many speakers as possible into a schedule.

The goal is to create an experience your best attendee is genuinely glad they attended. Everything else will flow from that.

Your success is downstream from your attendees’ success.