Program
No pay-to-play slots, no sponsor keynotes, no fame-by-default invitations. A look inside the four questions every Converge talk must survive.
Every year we receive roughly nine hundred talk proposals for about thirty slots. The math is brutal, and so is our filter — deliberately. Here are the four questions every proposal must survive.
First: has the speaker actually done the thing? We weight operators over commentators. A talk about tiny teams lands differently from someone who bootstrapped with five people than from someone who read about it.
Second: is there a number, an artifact, or a scar? Vague inspiration is free on the internet. We ask for the specific — the metric that moved, the decision log, the postmortem.
Third: would this talk survive without slides? If the substance collapses when the deck is removed, it was never a talk; it was a presentation.
Fourth: does the speaker disagree with at least one popular belief? Converge exists to move thinking, not to confirm it. If a proposal reads like consensus, it goes to the bottom of the pile.
The result is a program we are proud to defend line by line — and a rejection email we send with genuine regret, eight hundred and seventy times.