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.