What i learned about Innovation by Leaving Silicon Valley to Make Art

The innovation keynote speaker industry is enormous, and if you've sat through enough conferences, you know exactly what it looks like. Someone walks out in a blazer, tells you that Blockbuster didn't see Netflix coming, puts up a slide that says "DISRUPTION," and then lists five steps to think outside the box. The audience nods. Everyone goes to lunch. By Thursday no one can remember what the talk was about.

I spent about a decade at Stanford and Google watching this happen—and watching it not work. Not because the speakers weren't smart. They were brilliant, many of them. But there's a fundamental problem with most innovation talks, and I only understood it fully when I left Silicon Valley and started making really strange art.

Why the innovation keynote became the most requested—and most forgettable—talk on the circuit

Innovation became the number one requested speaker topic because every organization on earth is terrified of the same thing: being Blockbustered. Being the company that was excellent right up until the moment it wasn't. McKinsey found that roughly 96% of executives list innovation as a top priority. Only 6% are actually satisfied with their organization's innovation performance. That gap—between the aspiration and the reality—is what sends event planners hunting for keynote speakers every year.

The problem is that most innovation content is built to inform, not to change behavior. It explains why you should innovate (as if anyone needed convincing), and it gives you a framework to think about how to innovate. But it doesn't change what you actually do on Monday morning. There's a massive, underappreciated difference between a new idea sitting in your head and a new behavior sitting in your hands.

I didn't fully understand this until I stopped talking about innovation and started doing it.

What making strange art taught me that Silicon Valley couldn't

When I was at Google, I was writing poems in my spare time. Not the kind I was sharing at company all-hands. The kind I was performing at open mics and slam poetry nights, the kind where no one cared about your job title and the only thing that mattered was whether your words landed.

At some point, these two worlds started colliding in my head. Silicon Valley was obsessed with systematic innovation: design sprints, OKRs, lean methodologies, rapid prototyping. Poetry had none of that infrastructure and yet poets had been doing something radical with language for millennia—constantly reinventing what a poem could be, pushing against their own best work, embracing constraints as fuel rather than limitation.

I started asking a question that felt almost embarrassing to ask out loud at the time: what if I treated my poems the way a product manager treats a product? What if I applied the same rigor to art that Google applied to search?

The experiments that followed were some of the most instructive things I've ever done. I created a poem disguised as a series of computer journal entries—a mystery readers had to actively investigate rather than passively consume. I wrote a poem you had to destroy to read. I flew a complete stranger to the Philippines with an hour's notice to encounter a poem in person. Not because I was trying to be eccentric. Because I was genuinely trying to find out what a poem was for—and what it could do that it wasn't doing yet.

What those experiments taught me wasn't about poetry. It was about innovation. Real creative risk isn't thinking outside the box. It's doing something you've never done and watching what happens—and being willing to look ridiculous in the process. The framework is irrelevant until you take the first actual step that costs you something.

The difference between motivation and behavior change

Here's the thing I believe most deeply about why innovation talks fail: they're aimed at the wrong target. They're trying to change how you think. But sustained innovation requires changing what you do.

Motivation is a feeling. It fades. You leave a great keynote feeling fired up and ready to challenge assumptions, and then you get back to three hundred unread emails and a quarterly review and the feeling evaporates. That's not a character flaw—that's just how human beings work. The research on behavior change is fairly unambiguous about this: insight alone doesn't produce new habits. New habits come from new actions, repeated in new contexts, with some form of friction or accountability built in.

This is why my work is structured around the idea of doing different things differently—not just thinking about them differently. The principles I draw on (Write By Erasing, Think Inside the Box, Aim for the Trash Can) aren't philosophical concepts. They're behavioral prompts. They're asking: what is the specific, concrete thing you can do today that you didn't do yesterday? What action can you take that changes your actual behavior, even incrementally?

The goal isn't an audience that leaves feeling inspired. It's an audience that leaves having already done something differently—something they'll carry forward because they experienced it, not just heard about it.

What actually makes a keynote speaker worth hiring

I'm going to give you some honest advice here, even though some of it doesn't particularly flatter the speaking industry.

A great innovation speaker doesn't just explain innovation—they model it. The talk itself should be an example of the thing being taught. If someone is telling you to take creative risks and their format hasn't changed in fifteen years, that's worth noticing. If someone is saying that conventional thinking leads to conventional outcomes but their keynote is entirely conventional, there's a gap worth examining.

The best version of this work is when form and content align. When the experience of the talk is itself an act of doing something differently. When the audience walks away having felt something, not just having heard something.

I also think the best speakers are willing to tell you when they're not the right fit. I'm not right for every event. If you're looking for someone to validate the path you're already on, I'm probably not your person. I work best with audiences that are ready to be genuinely challenged—teams that want to move, not just be told they should.

"The most meaningful hour I've spent at a conference in 30 years." — Mark Brezinski

That quote means a lot to me—not because it's a nice testimonial, but because it points to what I'm actually trying to do. Not be the best speaker someone's seen this year. Be something they're still thinking about years from now.

Questions I get asked a lot about innovation keynote speakers

What makes a great innovation keynote speaker? The best ones don't just talk about innovation—they practice it. Look for someone whose format, storytelling, and methodology all reflect genuine creative risk-taking. The talk should be evidence of the thing they're teaching, not a lecture about it. Ask to see a reel and notice whether you feel genuinely surprised by anything you're watching.

How much does an innovation speaker cost? Speaker fees generally run from about $5,000 on the lower end (earlier-career speakers or virtual engagements) to $50,000 or more for established names with significant track records. Most experienced conference speakers fall somewhere in the $15,000–$35,000 range for in-person keynotes. Customization, travel, and pre-event calls may affect the total investment.

How far in advance should I book? For marquee events—major conferences, annual leadership summits—I'd suggest booking three to six months out at minimum. The best speakers get calendars that fill up quickly, and the best engagements involve meaningful pre-event discovery and customization that takes time to do well. Last-minute bookings are possible but usually produce a less tailored result.

What's the difference between a motivational speaker and an innovation speaker? A motivational speaker's primary job is to shift emotional state—to send people out of the room feeling energized, hopeful, and ready to engage. An innovation speaker's primary job is to shift mental models and behavior—to give people new frameworks and new practices. The best innovation speakers are motivating, and the best motivational speakers can catalyze new thinking, but the emphasis is meaningfully different.

Can a speaker also facilitate a workshop? Some can, and I'd argue the combination is underutilized. When the same person opens a day with a keynote and then leads the afternoon's working session, there's a through-line that audiences can actually follow. The keynote concepts become the vocabulary for the workshop. I build this kind of full-day experience for teams that want both the inspiration and the application. It's more demanding to do well than either element alone, but the outcomes tend to be more durable.

What I'd tell my earlier self

If I could give one piece of advice to the version of myself that was still inside Silicon Valley trying to figure out how innovation actually worked—it would be this: stop optimizing what you're already doing and start doing something you've never done. The insight doesn't come before the action. It comes during it.

That's what flying a stranger to the Philippines taught me. That's what building a poem you had to destroy to read taught me. You don't know what you'll learn until you're in it, looking a little ridiculous, genuinely uncertain how it will end.

That's the only kind of innovation that actually changes things.

If that sounds like the energy your next event needs, I'd love to hear about it.