Hero Conf Is Changing for the Better

Our Call to Speak is RE-OPEN.

This month we sent out the exciting announcement that we are returning to Austin for Hero Conf 2021, June 2-3. Sign up to stay updated if you didn’t receive our email!

On a less proud note, when examining our initial speaker lineup, we realized there was a group of people entirely missing, and other groups vastly underrepresented. Only 10% of all our Speakers were People of Color, and we had 0 Black people speaking. That’s unimaginable and unacceptable. 

The diversity on our stages would not reflect the diversity of the broader population, and it revealed a bias in our selection process. We are not OK pushing forward knowing this. 

Therefore, we are reopening our speaker selection process, after taking action to eliminate that bias.

To eliminate bias from our system:

1) we have paid 2 consultants to audit our process for the call for speaking pitches and speaker selection and made changes accordingly.

2) we’re expanding our network so we can find amazing digital advertisers who are doing great work that we haven’t heard about.

We hope you are all safe, healthy, and taking your own action to create a more equitable world.