A lightning strike, a dead livestream, and a food truck fix borrowed from London: the story of the SauceCon that became company legend.
Bill McGee spent nine to ten years at Sauce Labs, joining as an events manager when the company had fewer than 50 employees and going on to build out both the Selenium Conference and SauceCon. He joins host Tim Arthur to talk through Sauce Labs' relationship to the open source Selenium project, the year a lightning strike knocked out power mid-keynote in Austin, and why he still believes in-person events matter more than ever in an AI-driven industry.

What You'll Learn:
Open source ownership: Selenium co-founder Jason Huggins donated the project's trademark and copyright to the Software Freedom Conservancy before Sauce Labs took its first venture capital, to keep it independent and free to use.
Mobile expansion: Appium became the mobile testing counterpart to Selenium, extending Sauce Labs' infrastructure beyond browser testing.
Crisis in real time: a lightning strike hit the Austin Hilton mid-keynote and knocked out the livestream until backup generators caught up.
Improvised production: the same storm's wind and rain pushed the team to move an outdoor reception under a portico and bring in food trucks.
Borrowed ideas travel: the food truck fix came from watching Ministry of Test co-chair Richard Bradshaw run a similar setup at a San Francisco event.
Education over lead-gen: SauceCon was built around teaching customers to actually adopt automated testing rather than pushing new sales, which Bill credits with driving retention.
Production speed as differentiator: same-day video turnaround set Sauce Labs' events apart from the grassroots, months-later posting typical of open source conferences.
Resilience after COVID: despite a two-year pandemic pause, Sauce Labs revived the Chicago-based Selenium Conference once its venue contract came due.

Time-Stamped Highlights
(00:00) Welcome and introduction
(00:40) From banner ads on Netscape to the client side
(01:41) Joining Sauce Labs at under 50 employees
(02:18) How Selenium and Sauce Labs are actually connected
(03:33) Appium: Selenium's mobile counterpart
(04:17) Tracing back where they first met: Portland, Austin, Chicago
(06:13) Picking a favorite event: SauceCon Austin
(07:49) The lightning strike and the dead livestream
(08:33) The animated origin story Easter egg
(09:02) Pivoting to food trucks mid-storm
(09:34) Where the food truck idea actually came from
(10:13) Why SauceCon was never about lead generation
(12:01) Face-to-face events in the age of AI
(13:36) Same-day video turnaround and the conference archive
(16:07) Closing comments

Guest bio: Bill McGee spent nine to ten years at Sauce Labs, joining as an events manager and marketing generalist when the company had fewer than 50 employees and staying on as it scaled around the open source Selenium testing framework. He led production of the Selenium Conference and SauceCon before leaving full-time work two to three years ago. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billmcgee

About the Podcast: A conversation series featuring event producers, marketers, and technologists talking through the real stories, wins, and near-disasters behind the industry's live events.

Host bio: Tim Arthur has spent more than 20 years producing video and live event content around the globe, working across marketing, technology, and production. He approaches each project with an emphasis on extending clients' and partners' reach and value through creative, discerning production.

Three people, one AI agent, and a maritime defense conference with the Navy League. This is how small teams are now launching profitable events from zero.

Brian D'Erario is co-founder of Kerri, a holding company for B2B media and events that partners with niche creators and associations to launch conferences from scratch. The conversation covers his path from The Wall Street Journal to Morning Brew to Archaea Media Group, the launch of the Kinetic hardware engineering conference, the upcoming Ironclad Maritime Summit with the Navy League, and how his team's AI agent, Kerry, handles operations, outreach, and logistics behind a three-person events team.

What You'll Learn

• Room composition: Getting the right people in the room matters more than ticket sales or sponsorship, which both follow downstream of content and network.
• Zero-to-one launches: Small, focused first events, like Kinetic's 325 attendees and 27 sponsors, outperform trying to go big immediately.
• No tech debt as an advantage: Starting without a legacy CRM or existing software stack lets a new company build AI-native operations from day one.
• AI agents in events: An AI agent can run outreach, newsletter inventory, and booth planning, leaving content and direct sales as the two functions that stay human.
• Association partnerships: Groups with strong networks but no events expertise, like the Navy League, are prime partners for teams that know how to launch and profit from a show.
• Sponsor satisfaction is inflated in year one: An 80% satisfaction score from a first-year event should be read cautiously, since sponsors tend to be more forgiving on a debut show.
• Personalization at scale: AI makes it possible to give every attendee a personalized manifest of sessions, speakers, and relevant sponsors, even in a 10,000-person conference.
• External shocks can derail a launch: A Lunar and Mars Summit was hit by a government travel ban and a leadership change days before the event, showing how fragile a first-year launch can be.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (00:00) The Content Engine Your Conference Already Has
• (01:19) From The Wall Street Journal to Morning Brew
• (01:58) Launching B2B Summits Coming Out of COVID
• (02:31) Zero to One at Archaea Media: Space, Defense, and Nuclear
• (03:13) Building Kerri as a Holding Company for Niche Media
• (04:19) Hardware FYI and the 20,000-Engineer Newsletter
• (04:49) Kinetic: 325 People, 15 Booths, 27 Sponsors
• (05:04) "Making the Room Correct" as the First Rule of Launching
• (05:26) Ironclad Maritime Summit With the Navy League
• (07:26) Meet Kerry, the AI Agent Behind the Company
• (07:45) What Stays Human: Content and Sales
• (08:43) Three People, One Show, an 80% Satisfaction Score
• (10:11) The Lunar and Mars Summit That Hit Every Headwind
• (11:55) South by Southwest and Why Decentralized Events Work
• (13:02) Closing Thought: Content, Network, and Making People Feel Seen

Guest bio Brian D'Erario is a co-founder at Kerri, a B2B holding company that builds events and media products with niche creators and associations. He previously worked in media and events at The Wall Street Journal, Morning Brew, and Archaea Media Group, where he helped launch space, defense, and nuclear-focused conferences from scratch. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-d-erario-4b0b23121

About the Podcast Eventapalooza is a conversation series with the people building, running, and reinventing live events, covering the strategy, technology, and production decisions behind them.

Host bio Tim Arthur has over 20 years of experience producing video and live events around the world. He works across marketing, technology, and production, and currently leads content at E3 Webcasting, helping event producers and associations broadcast and record their events

Badge scans tell you if a trade show booth failed. They don't tell you why, and Nick Borelli's building a business on that gap.

Nick Borelli works in vision AI for the event space, applying facial analysis technology (via Zenus) to measure attendee sentiment, dwell rates, and engagement at trade shows, keynotes, and activations. He also teaches an AI certification course for PCMA called "Enhancing Events with AI." The conversation covers what ethical facial analysis actually measures, why badge scans are a poor proxy for event success, and how he thinks about AI as an "engine of perspectives" rather than an answer machine.

What You'll Learn

• Aggregate sentiment analysis: Facial analysis tools can measure crowd-level sentiment and dwell rates without collecting biometric data on individuals.
• Badge scans are a binary trap: Judging a show as good or bad off a single scan target ignores impressions, dwell rate, and sentiment data that tell a fuller story.
• Exhibitor trust builds over time: First-year exhibitors should expect high bounce rates and should be coached to measure awareness, not conversion.
• A/B testing works within a single booth: Multiple sensors in one space can test layout, session format, and messaging changes in real time.
• AI produces average output by design: Asking AI to "do the task" returns competent mediocrity because it's trained on the average case.
• AI works better as a perspective generator: Asking AI what's often overlooked or who gets forgotten in a design produces more value than asking it to execute.
• B2C events outperform B2B on experience: Because B2C shows aren't transactional, they're forced to focus on belonging and experience rather than lead capture.
• Curiosity is the differentiator going forward: The gap between people who ask AI follow-up questions and those who take the first answer will define career relevance.

Time-Stamped Highlights: 

•   (00:00) Welcome and background in event technology
•   (01:00) Life on the road: 60+ trips a year and travel realities
•   (02:59) Podcasting history and the metaverse hype cycle
•   (05:29) Joining Zenus and selling "ethical facial analysis"
•   (07:37) How the technology works: aggregate math, not biometrics
•   (09:35) Badge scans vs. impressions, dwell rates, and sentiment
•   (11:19) A/B testing booth design and session formats
•   (13:10) Who belongs in a trade show booth (and why not salespeople)
•   (14:49) Real-time dashboards and the culture shift needed to use them
•   (20:08) Year one vs. year two: coaching exhibitors on trust and metrics
•   (22:22) Why video testimonials land better than data pitches
•   (25:03) Teaching AI certification for PCMA
•   (27:48) AI as an engine of perspectives, not an execution tool
•   (30:30) Agentic builds and staying "in the loop"
•   (36:21) Favorite events: World of Concrete, CES, and Fanatics Fest
•   (38:22) B2C vs. B2B experience design
•   (40:18) Closing thought: curiosity as the future differentiator

Guest bio Nick Borelli has worked in events since the late 1990s across hospitality, venue sales, marketing, and event technology, including roles at venues like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He now works in the vision AI space at Zenus, applying facial analysis to attendee behavior insights, and has taught PCMA's "Enhancing Events with AI" course for three and a half years. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickborelli/

About the Podcast Eventapalooza features conversations with event industry professionals on production, technology, and the forces reshaping how events are planned and experienced.

Host bio Tim Arthur has over 20 years of experience producing video around the globe. A film and video production professional with a background spanning marketing, technology, and event coordination, he approaches every project with a focus on increasing his clients' reach and value through creative, discerning production.

A vendor and an end-user on the same stage does more for open source adoption than any case study you could write yourself.

Dan Brown is a Marketing and Communications Director at the Linux Foundation, where he has worked for roughly 12 years across event strategy and marketing for projects including LF Energy, Decentralized Trust (formerly Hyperledger), Confidential Computing, and Linux Foundation Europe. The conversation covers how event video gets repurposed into blogs, case studies, and social clips, and what separates a forgettable event from a memorable one.

What You'll Learn

• Speaker recruitment: Guests are more likely to accept a speaking slot when they know the session video will extend their reach well beyond the room.
• AI-assisted repurposing: Session transcripts can now be turned into blog posts and summaries quickly, making sessions more discoverable to search engines and AI tools.
• The vendor-plus-end-user format: Pairing a vendor with the customer using their tool, such as a utility company, produces case study material more convincing than either party could produce alone.
• Social clipping: Long sessions get cut into short clips for social platforms where attention spans are shorter, preserving the value of a 30-minute talk in a fraction of the runtime.
• Event scale tradeoffs: Smaller events, such as a 40-person gathering in Lyon, allow for deeper engagement than 10,000-person conferences.
• Milestone events warrant bigger production: The 25th anniversary of Linux at LinuxCon Toronto prompted a black-tie, casino-themed evening event to match the significance of the occasion.
• Open source runs media infrastructure: Widely used tools like FFmpeg and the Academy Software Foundation's visual effects tools are open source.
• Career breadth builds better event marketing: Dan's path through PR agency work, event production companies (RSA Conference, VMworld), and in-house Linux Foundation roles gives him a multi-sided view of what makes events work.

Time-Stamped Highlights
00:00 - Cold open: the LinuxCon Toronto 25th-anniversary night

00:27 - Intro & Dan's background: PR and marketing in tech
01:32 - From PR agency to running big tech conferences
02:27 - Going in-house at the Linux Foundation
03:33 - Current projects: LF Energy, Decentralized Trust, Confidential Computing, LF Europe
04:53 - Favorite event: the LinuxCon Toronto casino black-tie night
06:55 - Why small events matter too (a 40-person summit in Lyon)
08:00 - Turning event video into marketing content
09:23 - Vendor + end-user case studies (LF Energy example)
11:15 - Open source runs the world (FFmpeg, Academy Software Foundation)
11:52 - Wrap-up

Guest bio
Dan Brown is a Marketing and Communications Director at the Linux Foundation, where he has worked for approximately 12 years across event strategy for projects including LF Energy, Decentralized Trust, Confidential Computing, and Linux Foundation Europe. His background spans two decades in tech-sector PR and marketing, including time at an event production company running conferences such as RSA Conference and VMworld. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbrownusc/

About the Podcast
Eventapalooza is a conversation series exploring how event professionals plan, produce, and extract value from live and hybrid events.

Host bio
Tim Arthur has over 20 years of experience producing video around the globe. He works across marketing, technology, production, and event coordination, and is affiliated with E3 Webcasting, which supports event producers and organizations with professional-grade broadcast and streaming production.

A security veteran explains why the real threats at your event are never the ones metal detectors are built to catch.

John Lafferty is a sports, entertainment, and hospitality security consultant who started as a stagehand and arena snow-removal worker before moving through convention center operations, military police service, and freelance security work for clients including the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native, and Adobe. The conversation with host Tim Arthur covers what years of building operations experience teaches you to spot, how AI is changing both the threat landscape and the tools available to security teams, and why the people on an event team matter more than the venue or budget.

What You'll Learn

• Trained eyes catch what protocols miss: A stagehand background trains you to notice a burlap sack taped unusually to an I-beam, the kind of anomaly that formal security checklists won't flag.
• Weapons detection has blind spots: Rigging gear wrapped inside a banner, as seen at a Minnesota Vikings event, will not register on metal detection.
• AI is shifting protest dynamics: Public anxiety about AI replacing jobs or taking over is becoming a new trigger point for brand-targeted protests at trade shows and conferences.
• AI is replacing static information tools: Beta-tested AI bots that answer attendee questions instantly are starting to replace printed post orders and other paper-based guides.
• Open-source intelligence has gotten easier: AI tools make it faster to research the history of protest groups or organizations that may pose a risk to a brand.
• Suitcasing is the oldest ambush tactic: Unauthorized advertising, branded jackets, or guerrilla pamphleting at trade shows is typically addressed through a show's code of conduct rather than prevention.
• Code of conduct enforcement has limits: Once ambush advertising or guerrilla marketing escalates to a mass scale, there is little a security team can do beyond addressing individual violations.
• Client care extends beyond the contract: A vendor relationship becomes a partnership when a client follows up on a crew member's wellbeing, such as during a medical emergency in Shanghai.

Time-Stamped Highlights:

• (00:00) Introduction and welcome
• (00:30) From stagehand to arena operations
• (03:00) The burlap sack in the steel
• (04:49) A purity-minded assumption corrected
• (05:19) Favorite events and the people behind them
• (07:14) The easel incident in Tel Aviv
• (08:52) Fire marshal days and a room with no aisles
• (09:54) Locked in a conference room in Bangalore
• (11:04) The Shanghai hospital story
• (13:15) Looking out for the crew at 2 a.m.
• (15:26) 30 years in events and loving the chaos
• (16:10) How AI is reshaping security threats
• (18:09) AI replacing post orders and paper guides
• (20:27) Ambush advertising and suitcasing
• (22:11) Closing thoughts

Guest bio John Lafferty is a security and life safety consultant with over 30 years of experience spanning stagehand work, arena and convention center operations, military police service, and freelance security leadership for major clients including the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native, and Adobe. He specializes in guest safety, crowd movement, and life safety planning for large-scale sports, entertainment, and trade show events. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jolafferty

About the Podcast Eventapalooza is a podcast covering events, experiences, and the people who bring them to life, featuring conversations with industry professionals about what makes events succeed.

Host bio Tim Arthur is a film and video production professional with over 20 years of experience producing video around the globe. He brings a background in marketing, technology, production, and event coordination to each project, with a focus on increasing client and partner reach and value.

Two decades of technical events, one airfield in Ireland, and a helicopter rescue that explains more about event design than any conference playbook.

Trishan de Lanerolle is a strategic programs manager at F5, a cybersecurity and network security company, where he focuses on AI initiatives. He spent the earlier part of his career organizing and producing developer-focused open source events at the Linux Foundation and Trinity College. In this conversation, he walks through the events that shaped how he thinks about participant experience, content longevity, hybrid access, and the emerging reality of AI agents as a new category of event "attendee."

What You'll Learn

• Venue as experience: The physical setting of an event (a vineyard in Bordeaux, a closed Irish airfield) shapes community memory in ways a conference center cannot replicate.
• The CFP as community discovery: Publishing a call for proposals surfaces contributors and voices that organizers didn't know existed, before a single session is on the schedule.
• Agent-first browsing: AI agents are now hitting websites and event content in milliseconds, and optimizing for that behavior is the next generation of what SEO used to be for Google spiders.
• Recorded content is systematically underused: Most event recordings get posted to YouTube and left to accumulate dust rather than being repurposed into community content, clips, or follow-on engagement.
• In-person irreplaceability: The hallway conversation, the post-event dinner, and the spontaneous collaboration are the parts of events that virtual participation still cannot reproduce.
• Virtual participation is an access mechanism: Streaming and recording don't replace in-person attendance. They extend events to people who would otherwise be excluded entirely.
• Live demos carry disproportionate risk and reward: An unplanned live release pushed to production on stage at a DPDK conference in San Jose landed. The audience had no idea it wasn't scripted.
• AI is restructuring event content production: Transcript-to-summary pipelines, automated chapter markers, and AI-assisted video editing are already reducing the labor cost of post-event content.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (00:00) Introduction and Guest Background
• (00:31) From Humanitarian Open Source to Technical Events
• (03:16) Chattanooga and the Train Car Hotel
• (04:32) Favorite Event: DPDK in Bordeaux's Wine Country
• (05:27) The Drone Code Airfield Event in Ireland
• (07:09) Helicopter Rescue and Mud-Caked Engineers
• (08:38) The MCP Summit in New York City
• (09:30) Agent-First Web Browsing and What It Means for Event Content
• (11:02) In-Person vs. Virtual: What Actually Gets Lost on Screen
• (12:08) The Recorded Content Problem Nobody Solves
• (13:52) CFPs as Pre-Event Community Building
• (18:54) Live Demo Risks: Pushing a Release on Stage in San Jose
• (24:43) AI Tools in Video Production and Content Workflows
• (25:03) Vibe Coding, AI Agents, and Where Things Are Headed

Guest bio
Trishan de Lanerolle is a strategic programs manager at F5, a cybersecurity and network load balancing company, where he focuses on AI initiatives and agentic systems. He previously worked at the Linux Foundation producing developer events, conferences, and workshops for open source projects including DPDK and Drone Code, and began his career at Trinity College building humanitarian open source software programs. Connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/trishan and on X at x.com/trishandelan.

About the Podcast
Eventapalooza is a podcast about events, experiences, and the people who produce them, covering what makes gatherings work, fail, and leave a lasting impression on the communities they serve.

Host bio
Tim Arthur is the host of Eventapalooza and founder of E3 Webcasting, a professional live event production and streaming company. With more than 20 years of experience producing video across the globe, he brings a background in marketing, technology, production, and event coordination to every conversation.

Most conferences spend 80% of their budget on a single day and walk away from the content gold mine sitting in their hard drives.

Aaron Griswold (known as Grizz in the open source world) is Head of Events and Media at FINOS, part of the Linux Foundation, where he produces the Open Source in Finance Forum in London, New York, and most recently Toronto. With 17 years in events spanning design/developer conferences, open source summits, and financial services forums, Aaron talks through what makes events actually work, why he refuses to livestream, and how he's built a post-conference content engine that turns 45 conference talks into months of dripped video, shorts, newsletters, and podcasts.

What You'll Learn

• Conference size: The 100-250 person range produces the highest energy-to-intimacy ratio, and FINOS deliberately held Toronto to 250 for exactly that reason.
• Hallway track: The conversations between sessions, not the keynotes themselves, are where the real value of a conference gets created.
• Content lifecycle: A conference talk is the midpoint of a story arc, not the endpoint, and everything produced after the event is what sustains community relevance.
• Drip strategy: Releasing all videos to your own website immediately while dripping them on YouTube over weeks preserves algorithm health without burying content from speakers who need it now.
• Room count as editorial signal: Session attendance tells you which speakers deserve podcast follow-ups, longer slots at the next event, and lead placement in your content calendar.
• Livestreaming tradeoff: Refusing to livestream is a deliberate choice to protect in-person energy, not a production limitation.
• Developer reach: The Linux Foundation's own internal research confirmed that podcasts, YouTube, and newsletters are the three highest-performing channels for reaching developers, validating what Aaron's team had already been doing for two years.
• Post-event promotion: The weeks after a conference are a marketing moment as significant as the event itself, and most organizers skip them entirely.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (00:00:00) Introduction: Aaron Griswold and 17 Years in Events
• (00:02:10) From the Army to Restaurants to Hand-Coding HTML: How Aaron Got Here
• (00:03:53) The First Conference: Converge SE in an Art Museum
• (00:07:01) Building All Things Open in Raleigh from 750 to 5,000
• (00:09:01) Bringing Open Source into Banking: The First FINOS Conference at BNY Mellon
• (00:10:44) New World Stages and the Off-Broadway Playbill Moment
• (00:15:25) Favorite Event: The Breaking Development Road Trip from Orlando to Jacksonville
• (00:18:22) Why the Hallway Track Is the Only Track That Matters
• (00:22:12) The Case Against Livestreaming
• (00:24:24) Why Aaron Refuses to Waste Conference Content
• (00:28:31) The Drip Playbook: HubSpot, Descript, YouTube Premiers, and Shorts
• (00:32:05) Room Counts as Editorial Intelligence
• (00:26:01) What the Linux Foundation's Developer Research Actually Found
• (00:35:08) Transitioning from Head of Marketing to Media Producer

Guest bio Aaron Griswold (known as Grizz) is Head of Events and Media at FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation and part of the Linux Foundation, where he produces the Open Source in Finance Forum across New York, London, and Toronto. He has spent 17 years building events across the design/developer, open source, and financial services communities, including co-founding All Things Open in Raleigh. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold | X: x.com/thegrizzwolf | FINOS: finos.org

About the Podcast Eventapalooza is a podcast about events, experiences, and the people who bring them to life, hosted by Tim Arthur of E3 Webcasting.

Host bio Tim Arthur is a film and video production professional with 20+ years of experience producing video around the globe. He brings a background spanning marketing, technology, production, and event coordination, and runs E3 Webcasting, which helps organizations broadcast, stream, and record live events with professional-grade reliability.

Most events claim to be about business, but fewer than 10% of sessions actually deliver on it — and Julius Solaris has the research to prove it.

Julius Solaris is the founder of BoldPush, a newsletter, community, and consultancy focused on the events industry. He previously founded and sold EventMB (2019) and has worked inside major event-tech platforms including Hopin. In this episode, he and Tim Arthur dig into why business events keep drifting toward entertainment, what experience design research actually shows about connection vs. content, and how the smartest conferences are rethinking what happens after the room empties.

What You'll Learn

• Business-first design: The highest-revenue events (earning $40–50M) use wellness activations and community moments as wrapping, but intentional, facilitated business-making on the show floor remains the core.
• Content vs. connection: New research from BoldPush and Encore shows that connection now outranks content as the primary reason attendees value events, but content is rising again, specifically in the form of hands-on learning.
• The masterclass boom: Workshops and masterclasses are selling out immediately at events Julius advises, while traditional keynote formats are consistently failing to satisfy the demand for deep learning.
• Post-event content strategy: Salesforce attributes 32% of Dreamforce revenue to content generated at the event, and their on-site studio-and-host model is becoming a benchmark for how to turn sessions into durable assets.
• Consumption design: A five-and-a-half-hour online event Julius produced had attendees requesting the recording, but the real move was chopping it into per-session chapters so people could navigate to what they actually wanted.
• Hybrid's unfinished business: Post-2022 inflation and the return of in-person demand effectively killed the hybrid investment cycle, leaving PTZ camera deployments and remote-direction workflows underdeveloped before they could mature.
• Hallway track is a planning failure: Julius pushes back on the romanticized 'hallway track': when a conference builds no structured connection moments, the coffee-line serendipity it relies on is a symptom of poor planning, not a feature.
• Hopin's strategic miscalculation: When Hopin pivoted fully virtual and let go of in-person staff, Julius argues the company forfeited what could have been a viable hybrid integration path at exactly the wrong moment.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (00:00) Julius's background: EventMB, Hopin, and BoldPush
• (02:43) Favorite conferences and what makes them work
• (05:10) Why business events drift toward entertainment
• (11:03) Content vs. connection: new research with Encore
• (12:20) The masterclass and workshop surge
• (13:35) Keynote rooms: why day-two attendance collapses
• (16:31) Post-event content: who's doing it well
• (19:02) Salesforce Plus and the 32% revenue figure
• (21:45) Making five hours of content consumable
• (24:01) Session booking, no-show rates, and overflow screens
• (27:58) The hybrid window: what got missed after 2022
• (28:19) PTZ cameras, remote direction, and what's still possible
• (29:59) Hopin's pivot and what it got wrong

Guest Bio
Julius Solaris is the founder of BoldPush, a newsletter, community, and consulting practice dedicated to the events industry. He previously founded and sold EventMB, a leading events-industry publication, in 2019, and held a senior role at Hopin during the pandemic-era virtual events surge. He speaks and consults globally at the intersection of event strategy, innovation, and technology.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliussolaris/ | Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tojulius/ | X: https://x.com/tojulius | BoldPush: https://boldpush.com/

About the Podcast
Eventapalooza is a podcast hosted by Tim Arthur covering the strategies, technologies, and people shaping the live events industry. Each episode features practitioners and industry analysts offering ground-level perspective on what's actually working.

Host Bio
Tim Arthur is a film and video production professional with 20+ years of experience producing content across global markets. He brings a background in marketing, technology, production, and event coordination to each conversation, with a focus on helping clients increase reach and value through creative production.

The best events don't fight the setting — they let it do the work.

Bill Mulligan is a Berlin-based tech professional, run club captain, and former research scientist with a master's from Oxford. In this episode, he shares his favorite event he's ever produced: a Harry Potter-themed ball at Oxford, planned while he was a student, complete with butterbeer, mandrake cakes, and 200 attendees in a former monastery. The conversation moves from Oxford to Berlin, covering how he applies the same location-first philosophy to weekly run club events and graffiti-themed experiences across the city.

What You'll Learn

• Venue as theme engine: The physical setting of your event should drive your concept, not the other way around.
• Built-in atmosphere: Spaces with existing character — a monastery, a Berlin club, a graffiti-covered street — reduce the decorative work you have to do.
• Stakeholder buy-in: When you give vendors and volunteers a clear theme, they often take initiative beyond your expectations, as the catering team did with Harry Potter food.
• The operator mindset: The event lead rarely gets to enjoy the event the way attendees do — lean into your backstage role rather than fighting it.
• Recurring events build community: Running a 200-person weekly event in Berlin has given Bill a living laboratory for what makes people show up consistently.
• Street art as event content: Integrating city history and public art into an event structure creates stops, conversations, and meaning that a venue alone cannot provide.
• Ephemeral moments have value: Not every event needs a highlight reel — some of the most memorable experiences exist only as personal memory.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (00:00) Introduction: Bill Mulligan's background
• (00:47) Research scientist to tech: a nonlinear career
• (01:25) What it means to be a run club captain in Berlin
• (02:00) Favorite event: the Harry Potter ball at Oxford
• (03:04) The venue — a former Oxford monastery as a natural setting
• (03:35) Decorations, house colors, and the catering team's initiative
• (03:56) Butterbeer, mandrake cakes, and going all the way on a theme
• (04:27) Dressing as Dobby: the operator's relationship to their own event
• (05:10) "On the cusp of social media" — why there are almost no photos
• (06:02) The one photo that survived: Dobby, duct tape, and the college master
• (07:01) Berlin as a different kind of setting: graffiti, clubs, and grit
• (08:04) The graffiti run: integrating street art history into a movement event
• (09:03) Berlin's first street art museum and the living nature of public art
• (09:33) Wrap-up and Amsterdam meetup

Guest bio Bill Mulligan is a Berlin-based tech professional and run club captain with a background spanning social science research and event production. He holds a master's degree from Oxford, where he chaired the college ball. Connect with him on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bamulligan.

About the Podcast Eventapalooza is a podcast exploring what makes live events work — from production and logistics to the ideas, people, and places that bring them to life. Host Tim Arthur speaks with event stakeholders, producers, and creatives about the moments that define their craft.

Host bio Tim Arthur is a film and video production professional with 20+ years of experience producing content around the globe. His background spans marketing, technology, production, and event coordination. He hosts Eventapalooza to connect event professionals with stories and insights from across the industry.

Most events are planned. A few are designed — and the difference shows up in how people move through a room.

Mallory Gott — co-owner of a Las Vegas restaurant and newly appointed executive director of the Nevada Psychology Association — brings a background in adult education and event strategy to this conversation. We cover what separates experience design from execution-focused event planning, drawing on two case studies: a contemporary African art fair in Marrakesh that used the city itself as infrastructure, and a Chicago regional conference that treated a single open convention hall as a multi-session learning environment.

What You'll Learn

• Citywide programming: Using a city's distinct architecture and cultural history as event infrastructure — rather than a backdrop — creates experiences that aren't replicable in a generic hotel ballroom.
• Early-stage access: Emerging events at scale give attendees proximity to artists, speakers, and gallery owners that becomes structurally impossible once the event matures and prices out general attendees.
• Open-plan learning design: Placing concurrent sessions in a single open hall, with deliberate sound design and physical demarcation, can produce organic audience movement that forces-free interaction couldn't replicate.
• Sound as session boundary: Managing audio bleed in multi-session spaces requires more planning investment than vendors typically expect — and under-specifying it turns a creative concept into a disaster.
• Curiosity as a design outcome: Ambient energy from adjacent sessions — applause, laughter, a rising hum — pulls in attendees who would never have entered a closed session room.
• Content extension strategy: Short-form clips and soundbites extracted from recorded sessions are more effective marketing assets than full recordings that get uploaded and ignored.
• Recording ROI: When production costs are already paid, not extracting short-form social and email content from that footage is a missed monetization and engagement opportunity.
• Experience vs. execution: Large-scale conferences often optimize for efficient execution at lowest cost; the events that stay with attendees are the ones where the producer had latitude to design for the full sensory and learning experience.

Time-Stamped Highlights 

• (00:00) Introduction — Mallory's background: restaurant, new executive director role
• (00:46) Favorite attended event: 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Marrakesh
• (05:00) How 1-54 used the city — Yves Saint Laurent compound, local architecture
• (09:42) The access equation: why emerging events give you proximity big fairs don't
• (13:34) Photographer Hasan Hizaj — buying prints, meeting artists
• (16:40) How 1-54 could extend the experience: evergreen content and the Architectural Digest model
• (17:08) Pivot to: Mallory's favorite event produced — Chicago regional association conference
• (18:54) Open-hall multi-session design — physical space as learning architecture
• (23:21) Sound design as session boundary — advocating with vendors
• (24:29) Ambient curiosity: how laughter and applause pulled in unplanned attendees
• (26:34) Content extension: what she'd do differently today with shorts and AI-assisted editing
• (29:10) The difference between experience design and event planning
• (31:09) Closing and Vegas restaurant invitation

Guest bio Mallory Gott is co-owner and co-founder of Winnie & Ethel's, a restaurant in Las Vegas opened in October 2023 following a competition win. She recently began serving as executive director of the Nevada Psychology Association and holds a background in adult education and large-scale event strategy. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mallorygott | Restaurant: winnieandethels.com

About the podcast Eventapalooza is a podcast about what makes events memorable, featuring conversations with planners, producers, and attendees on the design decisions that separate forgettable gatherings from lasting experiences.

Host bio Tim Arthur is a film and video production professional with 20+ years of experience producing content around the globe. His background spans marketing, technology, production, and event coordination. He approaches each project with a focus on increasing reach and value through creative, discerning production work.