Trista Myers (Head of Events, Salesforce Ventures) shares a behind the scenes look at Dreamforce, how Salesforce Ventures creates executive experiences, tips for working with multiple event partners, baking recipes, and why you should never sell yourself short when interviewing for your next role.

Trista leads all global events for Salesforce Ventures. In 2018 she was selected for Event Marketer's list of 35 National Experiential Event Professionals under 35 for her work at AOL and on Dreamforce.

Monique Ruff-Bell (Events Director at Money20/20) discusses Cannes Lions, growing your career with mentors and sponsors, how to make big events feel small, supporting women in leadership, and singing karaoke around the globe.

Monique is the Event Director at Money 20/20 USA and VP of Events at its parent company Ascential plc. Monique’s responsibilities include setting the show vision and strategy with the Global President, plan execution, P&L management, and sales and marketing support and performance.

Andréa Long (Global Diversity Events Manager at Twilio) discusses Twilio's After Hours Events program, how employee resource groups can be a powerful catalyst for change, diversity and inclusion best practices, and weighted blankets.

Prior to Twilio, Andréa managed branding, marketing, and events on the recruiting team at Lyft, co-led Lyft's black employee resource group, and launched the company's first series of events celebrating Black History Month. She also co-founded Our Collective, a community resource group for professionals across Silicon Valley.

Helen Stoddard (Head of Global Events at Twitter) discusses what it takes to create buzzworthy events, why B2B and B2C events aren't really that different after all, and how events help drive Twitter's revenue strategy.

Helen owns Twitter's presence at large events like South by Southwest, Cannes, and CES. Prior to Twitter, Helen led events at Toys "R" Us and Nickelodeon, founded and managed her own event production company, and spent several years working on David Letterman's Tonight Show. #PinkSweats

Karen Merritt (Head of Owned and Operated Events, LinkedIn) shares a behind-the-scenes look at Talent Connect, how she and her team take a customer-centric approach to events, tips for creating networking opportunities, thoughts on segmenting audience data, and what marketers can learn from Disney Land.

At LinkedIn, Karen oversees the strategy and execution of roughly 200 proprietary events across the globe. Prior to LinkedIn, Karen had the opportunity to lead events at companies like Cisco and Splunk.

David Adler (CEO of BizBash) shares the most unconventional fundraising story that you’ll ever hear, how to develop an event from an online brand, tips on securing sponsors and partners, event trends, and restaurant recs.

David founded Bizbash back in 2000 with the idea of creating the first marketplace for events and meeting professionals. Since then, BizBash has become a leading voice in the industry—boasting digital and print offerings, and producing the city-spanning BizBash Live event series.

Nicola Kastner (Global Head of Event Marketing Strategy at SAP) shares how she and the team transformed SAPPHIRE NOW—SAP’s annual flagship conference. Along the way we discussed ABM strategy, creating data-driven content journeys, what IKEA, Disney World and grocery shopping have to do with professional events, and why it pays to be an Excel nerd.

Working alongside the Head of Global events, Nicola is in charge of overseeing SAP’s event strategy. Before Nicola formally joined the team in 2016, she was assisting SAP in a consultative capacity for several years. All said and done, Nicola has accumulated over 20 years of events experience, working on both the agency and in-house side.

Devin Cleary (VP Experiential Marketing, PTC) shares lessons learned across his eclectic career, how to use data and personas to grow an event, how to retain and hire top talent, and why events need to try harder when it comes to diversity and inclusion.

By the time Devin joined PTC in 2016, he had already spearheaded the growth of HubSpot’s INBOUND event, overhauled the event program at the American Red Cross, and spent nearly 6 years orchestrating conferences and trade shows at his own events company.

Janna Erickson (Director of Events at Drift) discusses why you should consider hijacking events, the art of event marketing hand-to-hand combat, managing an events team from “startup” to “scale-up”, and parleying event expertise in discussions with key stakeholders.

Janna joined Drift in 2017 to help take the team’s event strategy to the next level. Prior to Drift, Janna accumulated over 8 years of event experience from working at brands like HubSpot, Kayak.com, and TomTom.

Vasil Azarov (Founder, Growth Marketing Conference) shares how to launch an event from scratch, how to collaborate with partners and sponsors, the best channels for driving growth, the emergence of the “event marketing” category, and wine.

Since founding GMC, Vasil has scaled it to over 106K members. He is also the CEO of Startup Socials—which is dedicated to providing resources for founders—and has worked with large brands like IBM and Delta Airlines and high growth startups like Autopilot and Zendesk.