Conferences are an important part of culture at Kayako! Everyone is encouraged and supported to attend them. I work in Support team. The first person who made me dream about public speaking was my then manager, Sarah Chambers because I had seen her speak at Elevate and other conferences before.
The problem with me was that I am based in India and no doubt we have so many top notch conferences for developers/engineers but you’ll hardly find anything (at the same level as SD or Elevate) when it comes to Support. All such conferences are mostly in the US. This means visa becomes one of the biggest restrictions.
[I remember having a short discussion with Andrew Spittle (from Automattic) as well to make sure that he lets me know whenever WordPress does its next event in India!]
But I had decided that no matter how long it takes I have to speak at both Support Driven and Elevate even if it is only just once. With this started the journey towards making it happen….
I saw a tweet inviting proposals for Elevate Summit and I applied for it (This was in Oct, 2017 i think) Unfortunately, by the time I applied all the speakers had been selected. But, as destiny had it…I got an email by late December, 2017 asking me if I’d interested in speaking at the next conference in spring, 2018.
Now, comes the visa part. I talked to my manager about it and we worked on it in terms of what all is needed to make sure the visa gets sorted. We had so many last minute things to tend to…. But in the end it all worked fine and I got the visa. It was one heck of a month to live with anxiety.
While all this was happening, I got another email. This was to speak at a virtual conference about Remote Working. (Oh boi! I was just so excited.)I was planning to speak at one conference and now I had another one land in my kitty on its own. It was an amazing learning experience. I was probably the only speaker who was not a Director or CEO or CFO of some firm. #achievement.
Elevate had technically become my second conference now. However, I’d still like to call it first of its kind because the Remote Summit one was virtual and this was going to be speaking on stage in front of audience. But it happened and I got some amazing comments which gave me the confidence to keep going.
…. and it continued. While all this was happening I was also volunteering for SD Expo in June,2018. I came to know that I could still apply for speaking and so I did. I am already ready to go for my third conference! #woohooo
In all this I learnt that its always about the first step. For me probably the biggest hurdle was visa and not the opportunity to speak. That makes me think how many people lose on opportunities just because of the physical borders. Lucky for us that remote work is becoming a trend and people are able to work freely for whoever they want and from wherever they want.
With this I keep dreaming of more amazing this to happen and more learning to happen and making new friends. Three cheers to public speaking!
Sandeep Kaur 