Photo caption: Salim Ismail, Exo World host, with Lily Safrani, CEO of ExS, and their son Milan, with guest host Peter Diamandis and sons, and Brazilian actor, commentator and friend, Luigi Baricelli.

“Every event on earth should be like this one! Rich content! Challenging paradigms! Funnels of knowledge and inspiration! Motivation fire! ExO World has changed my world and the Impossible has become Possible in New Zealand and around the world.”
– Cindy Mullins

“This event amplified my mind to no end – I feel like a 5-year-old on Christmas morning.”
– Alistair Hofert

We at ExO Speakers are still basking in the tremendous success of last week’s ExO World Virtual Summit, a three day, online summit that quickly evolved into a virtual festival by the time the program wrapped up last Thursday night. Conceived six weeks ago during a conversation in response to what would soon become a global shutdown and a big wrench in the plans to launch this new Speakers Bureau, ExO World quickly became the main focus for our team and an early challenge to help make this groundbreaking event happen along with OpenExO.

Looking back now, it’s amazing to see the community response to last week’s three-day virtual event. The event featured expert keynotes on the main stage, breakout sessions, expo booths, and a networking area where every three minutes attendees could connect with someone new. There was even live music. Brian Bacon, the Chairman and Founder of Oxford Leadership Group and one of the Summit speakers, summed up the event by saying, “This is basically TED meets SingularityU meets Burning Man, meets global Hackathon.”

Our team at ExO Speakers was responsible for coordinating the many thought leaders that participated in this event. When all was said and done, the total number of speakers ended up at 127!!  We also had four musical artists join us to perform. You can see a full list of speakers here.

Our Managing Director, Joi Gemigniani, who led the speaker management process for ExS, worked closely with Salim Ismail and Jaroslav Dokoupil, the Chief Learning Officer at Open ExO to create the agenda for ExO World. In asking Joi about the event, here’s what she said:

ExS: What was most challenging about putting on this event?

Joi: The timeline of this event from inception to execution was the most challenging. We had about four weeks to plan and coordinate all the pieces, and it came together beautifully.

ExS: And most exciting?

Joi: We had no idea how this would go. We started with a target of 12 speakers, and very quickly that number ramped up to over 100. Everyone was so excited to make this happen. The team worked very diligently to get the flow of the event right and to include all the incredible speakers and artists we had the good fortune to work with.

ExS: What was it like working with the speakers? Recruiting them and telling them about this event?

Joi: Explaining how different this event would be from other virtual events was a little tough at first. I told the speakers “Think of this as Live Aid for building the future.” None of us had worked on the platform before or with an agenda like this. There were a lot of firsts. The feedback from speakers has been great.

This global collaborative online summit, hosted by Salim Ismail with guest appearances by Peter Diamandis, covered the massive challenges of today and understanding the exponential opportunities for all of us to jump right in and help. Whether it was an expert on stage, in a breakout session or one of our hosts, families joined in for this global call to action. This was a great way of inspiring a global community around a massive transformative purpose. “We have Corporate Transformations and Personal Transformations going on, but the crucial one is the Geographical Transformation,” said Salim Ismail.

After experiencing this event first hand, broadcast from a series of homes, Lily Safrani was able to sense the new paradigm coming towards the way companies engage with speakers. In response, ExS looks forward to rolling out an innovative set of engagement options in the coming weeks.

“We are not stuck at home. We’re all creating the new being, being human – Together” – Mark Fishburn