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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I do a lot of public speaking[1], and occasionally earn a speakers fee for doing so. I'd be interested in doing more paid speaking gigs (in particular the in-house type) but it's not at all obvious how to get them.

There are plenty of speaking agencies for celebrities / motivational speakers, but nothing for technical speakers. I've been thinking for a while that there's an interesting business opportunity here - a speaking agency that specialises in technical topics ("the guy who created Solr" / "one of the Linux kernel comitters" / etc) and goes out and sells them to companies that want to know more about specific technologies.

[1] http://simonwillison.net/talks/

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I enjoyed your Django and OpenID talks at Webstock in 2008 - they fit the conference and audience perfectly. However Webstock is a 400 person conference hosted in a remote part of the world. I'm not convinced that the niche of conferences that want speakers for such technical topics is large enough to support an agency you described.

I'm not so interested in an agency for conferences, since most of the conferences I speak at can't afford to pay their speakers (or if they can, don't pay them enough to make it worth having an agency involved). I'm interested in an agency that gets bookings for private talks at companies - really sort of one day consulting gigs.

In my case, I'd give a talk at a conference like Webstock and note at the end (probably just in text on a slide, no need to say anything out loud) that I'm available for internal talks at private companies. If anyone in the audience asked me about this afterwards I'd put them in touch with the agency. The agency negotiates pricing / travel / etc, and also actively sells my talks in other media (taking out adverts in "CTO Monthly" promoting the 20 or so speakers and topics in their stable).

I'm pretty confident that the niche of companies that want to engage technical experts for a combination of tech talk + a day consulting in the office is big enough to support something like this. I just have no interest in doing it personally - the reason I want it to exist is so I don't have to negotiate / market / coordinate the above points myself.

I think it'd be difficult to guarantee that someone great at talking in-depth on a technical topic (most technical speakers) could do so for a range of audiences, which could make selling the speakers difficult. Yet, I do see the potential in this kind of matchmaking, especially if you get some big names on board early.

I've only recently started doing 'proper' public speaking myself, after a varied history in acting, improvisation, coding and a failed attempt at student politics. It's a lot of fun, and my sort-of-plan is to get the rest of the year's gigs under my belt and then see if I feel confident/ready to charge, as I'm not being paid (just expenses covered) so far. To be honest, though, if I get a conference ticket and expenses out of it, that's fine for me right now..

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