Podcast: Launch Stories—Creating an Event for an Industry

Jessica Blake, Senior Director-Global Events, Confluent

Creating an event for the industry, as opposed to only your customers, is a power move that requires a nuanced approach. But, with the right timing and the right strategy, the result of an event like this is a healthier, better connected, and legitimized community that can only boost business for all in addition as well as the reputation of the company that created it.

Enter: Confluent, a platform that enables teams and systems to act on real-time data instantly, and its big bet on Current, a two-day summit that brings together data professionals to learn, share and network and talk all things fast-moving data streaming. It includes real-time technology leaders and developers from across the landscape (read: potential competitors); peers talking to peers; local moments in the host city of; efforts to do-good; and a keen focus on content that is helping Current grow and evolve.

In this episode, we sit down with Jessica Blake, senior director-global strategic events at Confluent, to talk about year-two planning for the event, which takes place Sept. 26-27 in San Jose, CA; about the challenges of hosting an event for an industry as opposed to your users; strategies they’re leveraging to manage the last-minute nature of conference planning today; listening to the community; as well as what inspires her work the most.

“The idea is that it’s a place for anyone who works with or in the data streaming industry. They need to come to this event and see it as the data streaming event, where they can learn from anyone who’s in this community,” Blake says. “Especially an open-source community, they have the power, they want to learn from their peers, what are the wins, what are the losses, how can they learn from each other, and so we want to put on this event where it’s not a biased event and it’s just about Confluent, right, we want to bring in our competitors—everyone in the space—so that everyone in the community can learn from each other.”

Listen here:

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