SpeechLab: Founders Public Speaking Gym!
SpeechLab: Founder Edition
You know your product inside out. Can you make someone else understand it?
Founders spend an enormous amount of time explaining what they’re building - to investors, customers, potential hires, journalists, and sometimes people they meet completely by accident.
The difficult part is that those conversations rarely follow a script.
For this special edition of SpeechLab, we’re bringing together a small group of founders for an evening of live communication practice built around situations that actually happen when you’re building a company.
This isn’t a pitch competition, and you don’t need to come with a polished presentation. You’ll spend most of the session actually speaking, experimenting and responding in real time.
What we’ll do
Explain It Like a Human
Explain what you’re building in 60 seconds — then explain it again to a completely different audience.
Could you make it make sense to a customer? A 12-year-old? Someone with zero technical background?
The goal: strip away the jargon and get to the clearest version of your idea.
Mini PowerPoint Karaoke
A little SpeechLab chaos.
You’ll get a few completely random slides and 60–90 seconds to somehow turn them into a coherent story.
You might be asked to pitch them as the future, turn them into a startup idea, or explain why three completely unrelated images belong in the same presentation.
No preparation. Just thinking on your feet.
Pitch Roulette
Your company stays the same. Your audience doesn’t.
Explain the same idea to an investor, a potential customer, a journalist, an enterprise buyer or someone you’d love to hire.
Because the way you talk about your company shouldn’t be identical in every room.
Founder Hot Seat
You know your pitch. But what happens when people start asking questions?
Expect rapid-fire questions about your product, market, assumptions and positioning — and practise answering without having time to rehearse the perfect response.
Curveballs
Real conversations rarely go exactly as planned.
Expect interruptions, misunderstandings, strange questions and the occasional challenge designed to make you adapt on the spot.
Who is this for?
This pilot is designed specifically for technical founders and founders building technically complex products.
You don’t need to be an experienced public speaker. In fact, that’s very much the point.
This is a space to practise explaining complicated things simply, responding under pressure and becoming more comfortable speaking when you don’t have a script in front of you.
And hopefully meet some other interesting people building things along the way.
Small group, lots of speaking
We’re keeping this session to 15 people maximum.
We’ll break into smaller groups for several of the exercises so that you spend the evening actually practising rather than watching 14 other people speak.
Come ready to speak, experiment and get challenged.
🕕 Timing
Doors open: 5:40pm
Session: 6:00–8:00pm
Please aim to arrive between 5:40–5:55pm.
We’ll start at 6:00pm sharp and go straight into the first exercise. Because the session is small and several activities run in groups, it’s difficult to integrate people once we’ve started.
So please treat 6:00pm as the start time rather than the arrival time :)