Heavybit's Guide for Fireside and Panel Moderators

Few people will tell you this, but the moderator role is about a million times harder than that of the panelist. Moderators have to:

• Translate: Translate panelist stories into actionable advice for the audience;
• Entertain: Keep the audience engaged by teasing out conflicting POVs and approaches;
• Be Brief & Paraphrase: Expertly do all this in about 10 min of total speaking time since the rest of the 30 min will be spent steering the conversation of others. As a moderator, you’re a maestro. So here are a couple things to keep in mind that might help you:

Energy

People retain more information if they’re engaged. Engagement is as much about energy as it is about the words that are said. As moderator, you’re setting the tone in the room so you might have to stretch yourself to keep the presentation pithy, interesting and entertaining. The presentation isn’t about you or even about the interviewee/panelists. It’s about delivering an engaging educational experience for others. Your energy and ability to dig into questions make you a vessel for that experience.

Audience Translation

Your job is to translate stories, anecdotes and panelist answers into actionable advice for the audience. So who’s in the audience?

• Series Seed to Series B Developer, Enterprise, Infrastructure and B2B Saas Founders: Heavybit founders fall into this category and tend to have a strong grasp of technical concepts while having varying degrees of go-to-market knowledge. Expectations around budgets, headcount, GTM ops, and tracking systemes need to be right-sized to appeal to founders. Eg. This stage of company rarely has an official CISO or large specialized budgets for marketing
• Senior Practitioners: More often than not, specific conferences and presentation topics appeal to practitioners in the space. Unlike some of the founders in the room, pratictioners might be intimately familiar with buzzwords, ops and automation on your topic, might have a strong understanding of tactical processes, and may have experience as a specialist in larger and more established companies. Sometimes these practitioners attend your talk because they want to hear some of the early challenges a startup faces in their area of expertise.

Entertainment

• Break the fourth wall. Feel free to poll the audience. You can ask them about their job titles, those who feel they measure their efforts well, team size, etc. You can also just call on specific individuals in the audience if you think they’ll offer additional insight.
• Conflict is Often Interesting: You can call out panelists/interviewees to offer controversial opinions, or stop the conversation and ask for clarification. The worst panels are those where everyone agrees on everything and nothing new is said.
• Tease Out Newsworthiness: There are basically 6 tenets of newsworthiness. We already talked about conflict, others include:
• *Celebrity and brand recognition: Insider stories about recognizable people or companies are interesting to audiences.
• *Timeliness : Did your panelist/interviewee’s company recently do something big? Announce a fundraising round? earnings call? launch some new pricing rollout or product? Does a well-known outside event affect their approach? Should it?
• *Epic Narrative: The more people affected by an event or potentially affected by an event, the more newsworthy it becomes.
• *Uniqueness or Oddity: You can only really tease out 1 or 2 weird examples otherwise these just become a collection of random thoughts.

Humanizing Senior Execs

• Insider Stories: Frameworks and ideas aren’t helpful unless they’re grounded in concrete examples or efforts. Sometimes the best stories are the failures or messy early hacks.
• Break eye contact with the panelists. Look at the panel, ask a question, and then look at the audience's reactions or comments. This gets the panelist to better empathize with the audience (and read their energy). It means panelists can tailor their answers and energy accordingly.

Brevity & Paraphrasing

• Intro:
  • State Objectives: Why is this topic important now, and what do you hope to accomplish with this session?
  • If the Emcee hasn’t already done it, offer brief intros of panelists/interviewees: 1-2 sentences will do. Make it a quick couple min in total in order to get to the meat of the conversation.
• Respect the Audience: It’s okay to cut off those who or overly verbose or ask another panelist/interviewee to intervene and offer their thoughts. You know when something is too vague or too in the weeds and it’s your job to true the course of the conversation and do it quickly.
• Recap: If someone goes way off track, repeat the actionable points to audience members and move on to your next question. You should also list a couple takeaways at the end of the panel presentation in order to highlight the salient points.