The Year My Network Became a Strategy

How I drew Revelry and the Startup of the Year community into the same rooms in 2018–2019 - and turned that overlap into stages for our people and a whole new New Orleans conference.

In 2018 I was Head of Communications and Culture at Revelry, a New Orleans software company. Then some of my closest friends - former colleagues at a consultancy called Established - called with a problem I'd helped them solve before. They run Innovate Celebrate, a conference that does something unusual on purpose: it puts the corporate innovation world (executives from the Consumer Technology Association, the people behind CES) in the same room as the startup world (the founders, funders, and operators in their Startup of the Year community). Two audiences that rarely mix, deliberately mixed. I'd contributed to their programs before, and they needed me again.

The obvious problem: I already had a full-time job. The interesting move was refusing to treat that as a conflict.

Staff augmentation, pointed the other way

One of Revelry's many innovation tools is staff augmentation - embedding its people inside other companies' teams to help them build. So I proposed the same model, aimed back at us: I'd run the mentorship program for Innovate Celebrate under a staff-augmentation arrangement, and in return Revelry would earn brand recognition and relationships inside two communities it very much wanted to be part of. Instead of choosing between my employer and my friends' event, I wired them together so that work for one created value for the other.

It worked. Innovate Celebrate in Boston, October 2018, was a genuine success - and Revelry's name traveled with it, into rooms full of exactly the corporate innovators and founders the company was built to serve.

Thought leadership isn't a company on a stage - it's a person

That success changed how I thought about visibility. A logo on a sponsor banner does very little; a specific person saying something sharp to the right audience does a great deal. So I stopped thinking about "getting Revelry noticed" and started matching individual people on our team to the exact rooms where they'd be taken seriously.

It became a real practice. I helped one of our staff engineers, Emily A, shape and land a talk at JSGeo in Austin - taking a deep, specific skill and making it legible to a general web audience. I worked with our VP of Product, Josh F, to build a workshop with a point of view baked right into the title - "Design Thinking, not Design Doing" - and then hunted down the meetups and conferences where he could keep delivering it. When our CEO went to pitch a Startup Studio venture, Incentivize, at Slush in Helsinki, I built the script and the deck. And when one of our senior engineers, Bryan J, helped launch a whole new conference of his own - The Big Elixir - I was a sounding board through it.

Alongside the stages, I ran the quieter brand work that makes those stages land: editing every post on our blog for years, and placing the company and its founder where it counted - our CEO into the Forbes Technology Council, Revelry onto the Inc. 5000. Thought leadership, it turns out, is less a broadcast than a casting process: the right person, the right room, the right idea, again and again.

Building our own room

Meanwhile, Revelry's Startup Studio wanted a conference of its own - workshops for founders and engineers, an event that furthered the studio's business. We were sketching a modest open-innovation hackathon when the ground shifted. In early 2019, we learned from New Orleans' travel and tourism bureau that Collision - the major international tech conference that had called the city home for several years - was leaving the United States for Canada.

That was a gap, and gaps are opportunities. We scaled the idea up fast, into a full conference meant to fill the void Collision left behind. We called it INNOConf - a name that folded together innovation and In NO, as in New Orleans.

This is where "helped organize" stops being a modest phrase. I launched the framework hiring the conference director and staff, choosing the event platform, building the sponsor decks and communications plans, inviting speakers and structuring the content tracks - the major decisions and the thousand minute ones. I worked alongside our executive director, Sloan M, to shape the full agenda, and I designed and edited the web presence that told the world it was happening. Josh F's "Design Thinking, not Design Doing" workshop - the one I'd helped him build for the road - became part of the program, which is the whole model in miniature: the thought leadership I'd been cultivating for our people turned into content for the conference we were building.

We brought the partnership full circle, too. Established's Startup of the Year showcase - the same community that started this entire thread - joined INNO as a public pitch competition. The conference landed between the two weekends of Jazz Fest, with speakers drawn from Facebook, Uber, Twitch, Timehop, Trulia, and FanDuel. Only-in-New-Orleans, by design.

What I was actually doing

On paper, that stretch looks like a pile of unrelated work: a communications role at a software company, a mentorship gig at someone else's conference, a habit of scouting stages, and a startup studio's event that mutated into a citywide tech conference.

In practice it was one job. I was the connective tissue between two innovation communities that were stronger together than apart - and I kept turning that connection into something concrete: the right stages for Revelry's people, partnerships for Established's community, and eventually a whole conference for a city that had just lost one.

The most valuable thing I did across those two years wasn't picking a side. It was building the bridge - and then walking our people across it.