I spent three months TERRIFIED of what I was hiding backstage.
By Louisgrenier · September 24, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I spent three months TERRIFIED of what I was hiding backstage.
My talk at Drive (Exit Five) had a jazz quartet hiding behind a 20-foot-tall traveler curtain that we only opened towards the last 10 minutes.
Yes, yes. A real one. With real, seasoned musicians. Drums, sax, keyboard, and contrabass.
Why a jazz quartet? Hold that thought…
Let me start with the end, after I walked off the stage and met attendees during the lunch break.
One question kept coming up: "How did you manage to find a jazz quartet to play with you?"
It took me back—dare I say, even kinda offended me—because that was the EASY part. My reply? “I just googled ‘jazz quartet Vermont’ and reached out to a few bands. That’s it really.”
Pretty anticlimactic, right?
So I didn’t stop there, “Actually, do you want to know the hard part?” (To which they’d reply, “ha yes of course.” People are nice.)
“Well, the hard part was to come up with the idea in the first place. To refine it over three months. To sit with the very uncomfortable feeling that there might be a reason no one else had hired a jazz quartet for a B2B event before.”
Because that was the point of the talk: BE MORE INTENSE.
I described it this way, “It’s *not* that you have bad ideas, it’s that you don’t make your ideas intense enough!!”
Everyone and their auntie can build things and steal attention from you, so whenever you have an opportunity to stand the f*ck out, you have to f*cking do it with sheer intensity.
So now let’s “circle back” to the “why.” Why a jazz quartet?
Well, I just couldn't deliver that talk in a non-intense way. No way. I had to SHOW what it meant. So I racked my brain. I came up with a few concepts—including having someone else lip-sync my keynote while I was standing backstage.
But I quickly zeroed in on “sound” as the centrepiece (something I’ve proven has been ignored by B2B companies). I remember talking about it to my brother, a jazz drummer, back in July. He got the concept immediately, which gave me the confidence to really go for it.
Then came the uncomfortable part: briefing Phil, the manager of said jazz quartet… I mean, you should have seen the look on his face after I finished explaining my plan. He looked petrified. He told me, “Okay but we’ve never done this before.” To which I replied, “Me neither!!”
There were many, MANY times where I could have de-intensified the talk and make it more… normal. I had to fight the internal voice telling me, "Maybe that's a shitty idea. Maybe there's a reason why nobody did it before."
But in a weird way, that Fear showed me it was a good, intense idea. Because if I weren’t afraid, if it were business as usual, then it would have meant it wasn’t intense enough, you know?
And look… the LOUD gasp that came through the audience when the traveler curtain was pulled back to reveal my jazz quartet was worth all of it.
So, what are you still hiding behind yours?
🐔