ExO World: Future of Speaking is Here

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

Welcome

Welcome to ExO Speakers. Our Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) is to deliver insights for global transformation by connecting you to thought-provoking speakers on Disruption, Innovation, and Transformation for any occasion. We hope you find our blog a resource for some of the latest insights from our speakers and community.

The Journey towards ExO Speakers

ExO Speakers is the culmination of years of living in and around Silicon Valley and being surrounded by provocative thinkers from that community — around the world.

For over six years, I lived in Silicon Valley and spent much time at Singularity University during its formative years helping with many projects from their Graduate Studies Program to their Executive Programs. In that same time, I came to travel extensively to events around the world with speakers including Salim and some of the others from our community, and understood that we were all purveyors of Silicon Valley — it’s thinking, culture and possibility.

I became a key contributor to the launch of the book, Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail and would go on to exclusively manage and curate his speaking career for clients around the world. All the while, this work was laying the foundation for the expansion of the ExO Movement and ExO companies.

Our Speakers

Salim Ismail is the best selling author of Exponential Organizations and one of ExO Speakers’ headline talents. At ExS, we are curating a community of disruptive subject matter experts that have bypassed linear thinking and implemented programs that bring about rapid, positive changes at work, in cities, and in our interpersonal relationships. Our speakers come from fields as diverse as:

  • Accelerating Technologies
  • Digital Culture
  • Education
  • Venture Capital
  • Biotechnology/Digital Biology
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
  • Drones And Autonomous Vehicles
  • Blockchain
  • Neuroscience
  • Space
  • Data Science
  • Internet Of Things (IOT)
  • 3D Printing
  • Robotics

They are not just speakers, they are the practitioners at the cutting edge of their fields and advise global CEOs, corporate boards and governments.

Being Disrupted in Times of COVID-19

As we like to say, “you are either disrupting or being disrupted”. COVID-19 has presented us with the ultimate moment of disruption. This is presenting the need for so many of us to pivot our businesses. We’ve had to ask ourselves, how do we operate now? How do we think about the platforms and ways in which we can still engage with our clients and communities virtually? To say that virtual events are exploding exponentially is an understatement. At ExO Speakers, we’ve thought a lot about the in-person conference experience and how we can transfer that to our current remote reality.

Happening next is the ExO World Digital Summit taking place April 14-16, 2020. We are proud partners of this cutting edge event. Join us there and find out how we can work with you to create something similar.

ExO World Digital Summit

My Massive Transformative Purpose is exponential empathy and emotional wellness for all. May this blog post find you all well with your families and loved ones.

We are truly a global community in this shared moment of reset.

Lily Safrani