By Alizeh Iqbal and Jen Yip
Our transition to a remote-first world this year has been a swift adjustment. Amid the transition, one thing’s apparent—when you attach "remote" to activities of the past, they become different activities. "Remote work" is not simply "remote" plus "work," but requires a palette of new skills and habits. The same is true for virtual events. We've learned through spliced sound bytes and hours spent fixated on our own little square pictures that the difference between an in-person event and a virtual one is like that adage about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. But that doesn't mean that virtual events have to be any less memorable. Instead, we need to figure out how virtual events can best preserve the atmosphere and serendipitous connection of IRL events—i.e. the experience factor, which distinguishes an event from, say, an informative blog post.
Moderators create this experience: a good moderator adds a third dimension to an otherwise flat, pixel-bound conversation. Zoom is becoming the platform du jour for the world's unrecognized Terry Gross's and John Stewarts to showcase their knack for interviewing and conversation. New platforms reward creatives with latent talents—early Twitter was for pithy quippers, Instagram for those with a good eye, and Zoom, similarly, rewards those whose warmth and insight draws our attention despite innumerable digital distractions.
Great moderation is tough, and the best moderators are inquisitive, thoughtful, attentive: they welcome a speaker like a guest to their home. Their presence magnetizes events and bats away Zoom fatigue—feedback from dozens of our zoom events indicate that a great host is the most important contributor to an event’s speaker and audience engagement.
We wrote this as a guide to help moderators in the RenCo community refine their craft. We’re sharing our thinking with you in hopes of catalyzing a discussion around how to host the most memorable conversations in this new format. If you have advice or ideas to add, we’d love to hear from you.
BEFORE THE EVENT
Attendees leave a well-moderated event feeling like they would want to get coffee or a beer with the speaker, especially because they feel like that connection has helped them better understand how they themselves can become a better X or achieve goal Y. They want to hear the story of the whole person, not just some of their resume highlights. They want an event, in other words, to help them actually get to know someone—their personal history and development. Our feedback forms often indicate that people are interested in the speakers' challenges and victories, their times of growth and slough.
The best moderation might be summarized as an act of "we." In as swift and authentic a manner as possible, the moderator should align sides with the speaker and make clear that their success is codependent. Moderation is like improv—the goal is not to make yourself look good, but to make your partner look good, and, in doing so, odds are you'll both look good. Moderation is a way of presenting yourself and others that inverts everything we're told about, say, a job interview or meeting presentation, where the goal is to highlight personal contributions and strengths. It is equally an exercise of IQ and EQ.
Prepare for the event
As a moderator, your preparation and engagement will make or break the event. An event starts long before the event itself. It begins the moment you prepare to understand your guest. When making preparations, be sure to remember the goal above: to get the speaker to share their personal story and development.
Some points to consider:
Do your homework. Level up your Google game: read their writing, scroll their Twitter feeds, and watch past interviews to figure out what they’re excited to talk about.
Do a pre-event call. Use this conversation to help your guest know what to expect and get a sense of who will be in the audience. Figure out what they care about and listen for tidbits that you can use to build out your roadmap for the event. What are they passionate about sharing? What will make them stand out as a speaker? In your conversation, don’t just focus on your guest’s CV; dig into why things happened and what motivated them to do the things they did. Here are some things you can ask:
What are your goals for this event? Teaching or conveying a specific message? Marketing a book? Discussing a top-of-mind question?
What topics are you most excited to discuss with this group? What do you want to avoid? Ask the speaker if there are topics they get asked about frequently and would rather not get into; e.g. “if you’re an angel investor, people probably always want to pitch you on their company. That’s probably not something you want to get into in this forum and that’s ok.”
Personal big picture questions: What part of your thinking/experiences do you believe are unique and formative? What’s been a unifying thread in your career? What challenges are you most proud of overcoming?
Ask if the speaker is ok with having the session recorded by pitching the value of recording. E.g. “We usually like to record these sessions so we can share them with folks who aren’t able to make it. Is that ok with you? We’re also happy to do this off the record if that’ll make you more comfortable being candid.”
No surprises. By understanding your guest's domain and story, and communicating before the event, you can eliminate unwelcome elements of surprise. You're there to help your guest tell their story and look good doing so, which is difficult to do with an errant, unexpected course of questions.
Nail the tech you are using. Make sure you know how to record the session, monitor the chat for interesting questions (you should assign someone to help you with this if you find it hard to listen to the guest and stay on top of the chat), remove inappropriate audience members, etc.
Create a roadmap
It's crucial to develop a story arc for each event. Our brains are wired for stories, and maintaining narrative enclosure is arguably the best way to counter audience distraction and fatigue.
As Sonal at a16z aptly puts it, a good story addresses what's being talked about, why it's important, and what its implications are. Be flexible to play with the order the way the story unfolds—even after a thorough prep call, your guest might decide to share ideas in an order you didn't anticipate. Structure, but don’t script the conversation. Organize questions by theme, and rank the themes by importance/significance so that you can transpose between groups of questions while guiding your overall story.
Here's an example of a roadmap developed by Alizeh for a RenCo conversation with Mark Wiliamson, COO of Masterclass. Pay particular attention to the top grouping of questions, as these pertain to the story Alizeh wanted to capture:
DURING THE EVENT
During an event, the audience should feel inspired and the speaker should feel appreciated and engaged. The best conversations have a natural momentum that feels “casual yet informative.” In the events where we’ve managed to achieve this rapport, this is some of the feedback we’ve received:
“The conversation was insightful, honest, and down-to-earth.”
“Best event I've attended in quarantine. The dialogue was so smart, refreshing and candid. And Alizeh did a great job of moving the conversation along but also choosing interesting bits to focus on.
“I always find myself wanting to stay on longer”
“The other night was fantastic. The questions and comments were so insightful -- you’ve clearly curated an excellent group. I could’ve kept going for another hour!” - from a RenCo speaker
Here are some tips for creating a welcoming experience for the speaker, and a warm, inclusive, and engaging atmosphere for the audience:
Context: Infuse warmth with a personal, specific intro
Make it fun. Be lighthearted or joke with the guests before the event. Share something personal, like a fun fact about your guest (e.g., he used to be a coffee farmer in Hawaii).
Introduce the speaker as a full-fledged human. You're talking to a person with hopes, fears, desires and demons, not a LinkedIn profile. No reading bios aloud! Cover your speaker’s background, a personal quirk or story, and explain why you are featuring this guest with this audience (e.g. “Anna has built three different successful startups in the past and is a poet herself—the perfect guest for our audience of people working at the intersection of technology and the arts.”). Consider inviting a friend of the guest to give a warm intro; you can ask the guest for recommendations in your pre-call.
Set the high-level context for the conversation. To start the conversation, ask guests big-picture questions that they can answer with specific stories. What drives them, and what was the moment that they realized it? What are they most proud of recently? Frame your speaker's passion topics, and double down there.
Start with topics of common human interest (e.g. career journeys, mentors, personal motivation). Press for stories that reveal tactical lessons that the audience can apply in their own lives. Avoid topics that are too esoteric for most people to appreciate (e.g. getting into the weeds of technical topics for a non-technical audience).
Set the right tone
Be curious. Tone is everything: when you ask questions, let the curiosity be genuine and palpable in your voice—your audience will mirror you. You can kick off a conversation with a few expository statements to set context and ask with genuine curiosity, “What were you thinking when...?” or “I’m curious about your understanding of X.”
Create moments for audience participation. Inject energy into the room by polling your audience with a fun, quick-to-answer question. Tell everyone how to respond to your question (e.g. in chat, by raising their hand, by sending a Zoom emoji, etc.) and then once they’ve responded, acknowledge their response. E.g. Mark Wiliamson, the COO of Masterclass asked everyone “Who do you think made more money with his MasterClass: Gordon Ramsey or Wolfgang Puck? Put your answer in the chat.” After waiting for audience members to respond, he acknowledged the sentiment in the room with something along the lines of, “Most of you said X. Actually…”
Bring your audience in with inclusive language. As the moderator you speak for the audience. Frame your questions to make your audience feel like they’re part of the conversation. E.g. “Many of us are interested in” “We’re curious whether…”
Project confidence with nonverbal cues: Nonverbal cues can advantage or disadvantage your performance. Your posture should be confident and composed, and big, like you spotted a mountain lion (hopefully the event is far less nerve wracking, of course). Don't tilt your head, pull your shoulders down, look into the camera, and keep your hands at shoulder level when you gesture. When gesturing, use sloping, rounded motions, as though you're inviting guests inside. Vary your vocal intonation—a great hack is to pepper your speech with adverbs/adjectives, because our voice naturally reflect the adverb/adjective ("I'm REALLY excited to be here.") And finally, remember that the ears of audience members need rest too—a good way to ensure pauses is to finish sentences at the end of a breath, so you're naturally forced to inhale silently.
Don’t hero worship. Treat all guests, regardless of their seniority or unique set of experiences, as an equal to you when you’re onstage. What not to do. :)
Don’t put your guest “on the spot.” Treat your featured guest as if they’re a guest at a dinner party in your home. Don’t try to one-up or go for “gotchas,” or ask them to give away confidential information or comment on/criticize their competitors or past companies.
Manage transitions
As a moderator, you are aiming to a cohesive, satisfying story arc, which requires you to manage transitions well. Here are some tips:
Be present and listen for speaker and audience cues. Oprah’s first rule of advice for interviewing: “The first thing you need to know is that you cannot work off a list of questions, because if you do you won't listen and you will miss the most important question: the follow-up question.” If you’re thinking about what question to ask next, you aren’t focused on what the speaker is saying. When the speaker (or audience!) seems eager to talk about something, ask more questions about it! Pro tip: ask another attendee to help you queue questions if it’s hard to listen and read the chat at the same time. We usually have one other person running the backend of an event and bucketing audience questions by theme. Here’s a screen capture of how we manage audience questions behind-the-scenes:
Invite people who post questions in chat onstage. Choose the best questions from the audience using your discretion and audience cues (e.g. “+1” in chat from others). Transition to an audience question by connecting it to a previous topic or to the speaker’s background (Eg. “Earlier you were talking about... Jane {person in the audience} has a question about this. Jane, do you want to ask your question?”)
Acknowledge and appreciate the audience’s contributions. When someone from the audience asks a great question or makes a point that dovetails on something the speaker said, acknowledge their contribution. Even a “thank you for the great question, [name]” can make audience members feel appreciated for their contribution and encourage others to participate.
Get Deeper
"The specific illuminates the universal, and never the other way around." - Eudora Welty
Great moderators draw out specific stories, not summaries. It’s hard for audience members to learn from or implement high-level advice, like “work hard to grow your network.” Stories on the other hand, draw a listener in and serve to both clarify and cement more generic points of advice. A few tactics to encourage your guest to go deeper:
Consider using an open-ended prompt. These prompts frame the topic or issue you want to hear about, but they leave lots of room for your guest to take the conversation in a direction that’s top of mind or interesting for them. E.g. “So let’s talk about what happens here…” “Tell me about the situation with…”
Master the probe. If your instinct is telling you that there’s something juicy one or two layers deeper than the answer the speaker gave, don’t move on right away. For instance, imagine a speaker mentions that she grew her responsibilities as an operator, even while those around her were getting layered. End of answer. Don’t just jump to the next question, engage with follow-up questions: “When layering was happening who was invited to those meetings? How did you make sure you were in the meeting? Help me understand that process.” Other ways you can probe: “Can you give us an example of..” “Tell us more about…” “I’m not sure I understand.. Can you explain?”
Offer several hypotheses for why something happened. When you’re trying to understand a situation, instead of asking your guest directly “So what happened there?” you can offer a few credible explanations for your guest to react to. E.g. “Is it possible that...” “Do we think that...” Pro tip: using the word ‘we’ lets you speak on behalf of the broader audience or society at large so you’re not making accusations.
Offer your own observations. Too many direct questions can start to sound like an inquisition. To keep a conversation flowing but to break up a line of questioning, consider offering your own observations on a situation. Frame these in a way where your observation isn’t confrontational or critical. Phrases to borrow: “And part of that seemed to involve...” “I think everyone was waiting for…” “It ends up feeling like...”
Play out an interesting hypothetical. If your guest is particularly knowledgeable in an area where there are still a lot of unknowns, tap into their understanding of a situation by framing a hypothetical. Eg. “What would happen if…”
Work through snags
If someone rambles: If either the speaker or an audience member starts to ramble, don’t panic, but regain control of the room. Listen to what they’re saying and paraphrase one thing they’ve said that pertains to the topics you’d like to cover during the conversation. Then connect that point back to a followup question that’s on topic. E.g. “You made a really good point when you said X. This relates to Y (original topic). I want to double-click on this because many of us are curious about…” If an audience member you’ve called up on stage to ask a question is offering statements instead of asking a question, politely ask if they have a question for the speaker. If they're having trouble with their thoughts, give them enough space to have a shot at making their question coherent and, if it's not coming together, help them by attempting to summarize their question.
If there's an awkward silence: Silence is okay if it's contemplative. But to avoid feeling like you've run out of material, generate more ideas than you think you'll need and keep a few in your back pocket. If you’ve run into a dead end with a line of questioning, don’t be afraid to try a new tack and introduce another topic with a new line of questioning.
If an audience member asks about a topic that was on the “don't talk about list." Sometimes an audience member asks a question that puts the speaker on the defensive eg. “Your competitor did X, what do you think about that?” In this situation, your job as the moderator is to drive the conversation forward. Borrow the “yes and…” technique from improv and broaden the question to elicit a more general observation about a trend E.g. “Yes and what that really highlights is the importance of X, so [speaker] what do you think of X? Another tactic we’ve seen work really well here is for the moderator to interject immediately with a joke or turn it into a light moment and redirect the conversation. E.g. "We don't want to get Jason in trouble with his old boss! Next question."
If you lose focus on the speaker. If participants start debating a topic as a group, you and the speaker lose authority in the conversation. Find a wedge in the debate, like a point someone just made, and use that to bring the focus back to the speaker by asking him/her/them a related question.
End on an appreciative note and review key takeaways
Keep an eye on the clock. We’ve found that people don’t have the same patience for virtual events as they did for in-person events. The expectation is that Zoom events are content rich and end on time. As the moderator, you should begin to wrap up the conversation 5-10 minutes before the designated time.
Flag that you’re reaching the end of a session. Instead of dropping an abrupt “well, looks like we’re out of time” comment, slide gracefully into a conclusion with “we’re coming to the end of our time together but we can take one final question.” At RenCo, we usually choose the most interesting question from the audience and bias towards inviting someone onto stage who hasn’t yet spoken, but we’ve seen other fun endings including lightning round questions or a turn-the-table question that give the speaker an opportunity to ask the audience for feedback on something that’s top of mind for them. Make the final bit of content punchy and memorable if possible.
Tell them what you’ve told them. Finally, thank your guest and your audience and end with the key message you want your audience to leave with. This takeaway should encompass both content and how you want your guests to feel after leaving the event. E.g. “Thank you Alex [speaker] for spending time with us today and thank you to everyone who joined us for bringing your energy and questions tonight. I hope you leave tonight feeling more empowered to X (e.g. create your dream job) with a better understanding of how to Y (e.g. build a network of professional allies on the Internet).” Remind your audience that you’ll send out a feedback form after the event and that their feedback is both appreciated by the speaker and helps to improve future events. If there are additional resources you’d like to highlight for the audience, reference these in the conclusion. E.g. “for those who are interested in learning more, check out [speaker’s] book.”
AFTER THE EVENT
Capitalize on the momentum from the event to strengthen your relationships with both your speaker and audience.
Send a thank you
Send an email to the speaker right after the event. This should be a sincere, warm, and thoughtful note that reflects on specific aspects of the conversation you enjoyed.
Close the loop with feedback
We send out a “Quick Feedback Requested” email to attendees the morning after every event. Here’s a sample of our feedback form. It should take attendees under 60 seconds to fill out. A few days after you’ve collected feedback, share relevant constructive feedback with the speaker. Providing feedback cements a positive impression and helps you build relationships.
CONCLUSION
Moderation is a skill, like many, that requires deep practice and preparation to render the outward appearance of simplicity. Any great improv cast appears to possess the moment effortlessly, but beneath the look of unrehearsed ease are hours and hours of rehearsal. Like improv, moderation is all about co-creating a memorable story and experience through curiosity, a desire to make others look good, and warmth. Learning how to moderate is an exercise in natural conversation itself, and is a reflection on the ways, as speakers and listeners, we reveal ourselves to one another. Listen with care, engage deeply, channel the room's energy, even if that "room" is a few pixels and a Wi-Fi connection. Your guest and audience will have a great time.
Thank you to Jen Yip, Kali Borkoski, Mishti Sharma, Stan Chen, David King, Brie Wolfson, JLai, Dan Hui, and Jeff Diament for their ideas, edits, and contributions to this piece.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
The Daily, NYT podcast with host Michael Barbaro. We listened to many episodes of The Daily and took inspiration from the phrases Barbaro uses to get his guests to open up. These ‘phrases to borrow’ made their way into our section on how to ‘Get Deeper.’
“How to Moderate Talks, Panels, Meetings, More (Virtual and Beyond!)” a16z podcast by Matt Abrahams and Sonal Chokshi. Matt Abrahams, lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business; principal and co-founder of Bold Echo; and author of Speaking Up Without Freaking Out — shares frameworks and best practices for moderation and communication across all kinds of mediums and modes, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi.