C.V.

Funny Bizz Conference – San Francisco

I am speaking about business and humor at the Funny Bizz conference tomorrow.

San Francisco friends, get your tickets here.

Some info:

Ever wonder how Silicon Valley’s top startups use comedy, improv and storytelling principles to create great content, stand out from the noise and ultimately sell more?

There is a movement beginning. The lines of business, entertainment and comedy are becoming ever more intertwined. Viral media, social spread and engaging content is king. Attention spans are shorter than ever. Consumers want infotainment, not information. Standing out from the noise is a necessity. To make a more memorable impact, craft a more compelling and entertaining story, and tap into the creativity of their workforce and community, leading companies are using comedy techniques.

What you will learn:

– How top start-ups build loyal communities using storytelling and humor.
– How to inspire, connect, and motivate your audience with the right message through great content
– How storytelling builds authentic brands for early stage companies from the inside out.
– What makes things funny in business content and how we can use humor to ultimately sell more.
– How to generate sales using viral media and humorous messaging.
– How story telling will improve our community management and engagement.
– How to craft and deliver better sales presentations and not just communicate, but inspire.
– What ingredients make a speech consistently funny and copy-writing hilarious.
– How to increase productivity, inspire engagement and build a creative culture through Improv techniques being taught at top schools like Duke, MIT and Stanford.

More importantly, people a lot funnier than me are going to be there. Here are three:

Tim Lee: Tim wasn’t supposed to be a comedian. A biologist by training, he graduated magna cum laude from UC San Diego with honors in biology. He went on to complete his PhD at UC Davis. He spent years developing simulation and analytical models of population dynamics before he discovered that this bored him to tears. When he tried comedy for the first time the tears stopped. Lee’s comedy uses scientific phenomena and tools to explain everything from the hair that collects on a bar of soap to how his standards drop rapidly with abstinence.

Venetia Pristavee: Venetia examines how storytelling builds authentic brands for early stage companies from the inside out: As the 7th employee of Airbnb.com, she has spent over four years building the brand & cultural foundation of a company gone global. She is a strategist currently providing creative services to early stage companies specializing in brand, community, media, culture & storytelling.

Bill Grundfest: Bill is the only human in captivity who’s won a Golden Globe Award (and three Emmy nominations) for comedy writing, and who’s also the Chief Creative officer of a Silicon Valley tech company. Bill founded NYC’s Comedy Cellar, where he discovered and coached the likes of Jon Stewart, Ray Romano, Louie CK and Chris Rock, all of whom found great success in spite of his coaching and guidance.

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