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by eatonphil·2y ago·view on hn ↗
I get what you, and other commenters here, are going for. But getting speakers is still hard in the first place. And as I mentioned in the post, I see high quality talks as 100% marketing. They're just marketing for your engineering team, rather than for your product. I think we'd have trouble attracting the high quality speakers we do today if we set restrictions some commenters have suggested such as attending the meetup multiple times, not mentioning the company, etc.

We're pretty picky with speakers we invite but also quite flexible once we've invited someone we think will be good. I think it's worked out pretty well for the audience and speakers. At least, that is what they all tell me.

1 comments
I like your approach and think it sounds very balanced. Creating and preparing for a high quality talk is quite a lot of work, so it’s maybe a bit unfair to expect people with jobs or startups to do them for purely altruistic reasons.

A talk that is mostly substance but contains a quick plug here and there has always been reasonable to me. It’s also a lot more effective for marketing than just giving a blatant product pitch, so it should be a win-win.