Every now and then, a recurring tweet shows up in my timeline. It will be someone complaining about being asked to speak for free at events and doing it ‘for the exposure.’ These complaints usually get a lot of support in the form of likes, retweets, and people replying “You should NEVER speak for free!”

I don’t agree at all. That’s why I’d like to offer a different perspective on things and explain why ‘exposure’ can be worth it and the upside of speaking ‘for free.’

But first, why is my perspective worth sharing? Because I’m both a paid speaker who refuses to speak for free, and I’m an event organizer who asks speakers to… speak for free.

Does that sound like a contradiction? Let me explain why it isn’t.

The wonderful and opaque world of speaker fees

Let’s begin answering a fundamental question: how much does hiring a speaker actually cost? Frustratingly, there’s no single answer except: “it depends.”

The fee I charge for my speaking gigs is plus or minus 100 thousand euros. That’s not ±100K, but between -100K and +100K.

That’s right. I’ll happily pay 100K to have a 5-minute speaking slot in the middle of an Apple keynote next to Tim Cook.

But, what if you want me to speak on a different continent in two days for an oil company, about a subject I’ll have to do a lot of research for? And for an audience that would rather be somewhere else? Yeah, I’ll probably ask to be paid at least 100K.

So my speaker fee ranges from -100K to +100K depending on the circumstances. The same goes for pretty much every paid speaker in the world — including you.

What about a professional speaker whose profile clearly states, “My speaker fee is 100K”? Well, I can assure you that’s not the fee they get — or even demand — every time they speak, because it all depends on the circumstances.

Of course, there are hundreds of personal factors that influence a speaker’s fee, but these are some of the most common questions that I’ve seen affect people’s decisions:

Is it a 100% new talk or one I already did?

Is it a 20 person audience or a 1000 person audience?

Is the audience a group of students or the board of a Fortune 500 company?

How busy am I that week?

Am I promoting myself or the company I’m invited by?

Is it close to my home?

Is it outside my regular work hours?

Is the event about a topic I like?

Is it a private or open event?

Is it one talk or is there a chance I’ll be invited more often?

Is there a chance my company will end up doing business with this company?

Do I like the company that’s asking me?

Will I learn or gain something by attending this event?

When I’m invited to speak at an event, my agent calls them and tries to figure out the deal. She’s aware of my preferences and knows which events I like and which ones I’d rather avoid.

She has access to my schedule and knows that if it is an interesting event, outside working hours, close to my home, and one that I don’t have to prepare for, I’m more willing to charge a lower price.

But if she knows the talk will be an energy drain, for a company I don’t like, in a week where I’m busy, in a place I don’t like going to, she will know to quote them a higher price than usual.

It really does depend

One time I got asked to speak at a corporate event, and their budget was about 25% of what I would ask in similar circumstances.

So did I decline? No.

What I got instead of my normal fee was a guarantee that I would be backstage for an hour with their CEO. This was a Fortune 500 company, and the prospect of having real one-on-one time with their CEO for an hour was worth more to me than money.

At our next conference ( TNW2021, September 30 to October 1 in Amsterdam, be there! ) we’ll have close to 200 speakers on stage — but we get about 5000 applications from people who want to speak.

What would be a fair fee for us to pay the speakers we end up inviting? The answer is still: it depends.

The billionaire CEO who flies in on his private plane? No fee

The author doing a European book tour to promote his bestseller? No fee

The company CEO wanting to pitch their new product? They’d have to pay us

The diversity expert who we want to give an audience? We pay them

Some speakers use public conferences to reach companies that will book them for commercial fees — even though their profiles suggest they never do unpaid gigs. We’ve had speakers at our events who charge hundreds of thousands of dollars per speaking gig. But at our event… they speak for the ‘exposure.’

Why? Because we have representatives and decision-makers of all the Fortune 500 companies you can think of in our audience. Those decision-makers pay attention, and if a talk resonates, they approach the speaker and invite them to speak to their board or employees. It’s not uncommon for these speakers to get booked for five or six speaking gigs based on that one presentation at our conference.

In this system, everybody makes money, and everybody wins. It’s the market at work, and it really works.

So should you get paid to speak at an event?

Don’t get me wrong, my answer to that question is an unequivocal ‘YES!’

I’d just like to add the caveat that there are more currencies than money, and only you can decide whether an event can be seen as an investment or as a waste of time.

When my team and I approach speakers, we try to figure out as soon as possible what their business model is and whether we can help each other. If a speaker makes money from speaking and only does gigs for a set fee, well, then we probably can’t help each other.

But I respect their position, and everybody else’s. People approach speaking in a myriad of different ways. Let’s take book authors as an example.

I know authors who don’t even need to promote their books through speaking gigs because they sell fine on their own. For those speakers, doing an event is just an excellent way to supplement their income — but unfortunately, we might not be the right place for that.

Then there are other authors who love meeting their audience and promoting their book and only charge travel costs. Those are the ones we know we can work with because we can help each other.

There’s even a third type, authors who want to pay us to speak at our event, and we’ve declined because their topic didn’t match our audience. So you can see fees and the reasons behind them can swing wildly in any direction.

‘Never speak for free’ is too simplistic

There’s no such thing as a fixed speaker fee, and every event has a different audience and potential outcome for you as a speaker.

Sometimes you can speak for free, and sometimes you shouldn’t. But don’t get hung up on just direct money, because you might get value from participating which far outweighs any monetary value — it all depends on what’s valuable to you.

So saying ‘you should never speak for free’ is too simplistic to help anyone.

But saying ‘you should get something out of each speaking gig, and make sure you know what it is and what it is worth’ is more layered and helpful advice.

This more layered approach also doesn’t mean you’ll end up doing a ton of speaking gigs ‘for free.’ It helps you to think about what you really want to get out of speaking — which could end up being more cash.

I once compared notes with a very well-known author. I asked him about his highest-paying speaking gig ever, and he mentioned a number that blew me away.

When I asked how he had justified the number, he shrugged and explained: “I just didn’t want to do it, so I told my agent to ask them ten times my usual fee, and then they said yes.”

And that’s sometimes how speaker fees are established.

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Your startup isn’t ready for Europe’s privacy shake-up — but here’s how it can be

For decades, people have proclaimed the now-common refrain that “privacy is dead.” I often think back to Scott McNealy, then CEO at Sun Microsystems, claiming in 1999 that “you have zero privacy anyway… get over it.”

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that leaders at startups hold such a strong disregard for privacy, but I do find many taking the stance that the world’s strictest data privacy laws don’t apply to them. If you fall into this category, you ought to know that privacy isn’t dead, and a new era of privacy is being quietly ushered in across Europe.

Earlier this year the European Commission (EC) issued its long-awaited update to ‘Standard Contractual Clauses’ (SCCs), which represents the most frequently used mechanism to transfer your customers’ personal data out of the EU, including to the US.

If you’re a business that operates in or with Europe, these new updates – and the constantly shifting privacy landscape more generally – matter. If followed incorrectly or not taken seriously at all, it can be extremely costly.

So, let’s look at some of these new privacy updates in more detail and I’ll then share some lessons I learned while working on privacy issues at a startup that processes vast amounts of user data.

A new era of privacy, and the fine print you probably missed

The question of where your data exists and who has access to it is becoming one of the most complex and significant questions in startup land.

On the one hand, the booming SaaS startup ecosystem means that we are now more reliant than ever on the cloud, where servers often reside abroad. On the other, there are ever-changing regional data rights as different jurisdictions embrace data sovereignty and privacy rights for users.

This friction has now made its way to the courts, and just last year the EU issued a ruling (dubbed ‘Schrems II’) that invalidated the ‘ Privacy Shield ,’ or the mechanism that was being used to get data out of Europe and into American data centers for processing. Then came the update to the SSCs.

The basic premise of this update was to bring in new SCCs to govern the transfer of personal data from the EU to third countries, designed to better protect Europeans from mass surveillance, specifically a concern with regard to the US.

If you’re operating in or doing business with European residents, international data flows are probably an essential part of your business in an increasingly digital global economy. You might not even be aware that your digital product relies on microservices from a partner that sees user data processed in a third country.

Let’s take for example our product at Mixpanel. We provide SaaS-based product analytics technology, which by its nature, tracks user behavior within apps so product experts can improve the user experience.

If you use our product, until recently you’d have been sending data to us that was processed in the US, perhaps without fully realizing the implications. We’ve now got full EU data residency to overcome this issue, but we’re very much in the minority.

And this should be the number one issue concerning startups. Has our surface area for liability and risk just been hugely expanded? If I put this in simpler terms: you’re a fintech that has contracts with seven companies providing services via APIs. Those seven companies also contract with a further 10 companies each, which now means your risk surface has expanded from seven companies to 70.

So, what can busy startups do to reduce their risk and ensure they’re delivering on privacy obligations for the people that use their services?

In my view, there are three golden rules that can help a startup navigate this complexity.

There’s simply no avoiding this issue in the long term. People increasingly care about data privacy and with the changes to the SCCs the EU has further signaled the importance it attaches to data residency. With local regulators soon to release their guidance and interpretation within member states, now is the time to act.

The movement for improved privacy isn’t dead, it’s just getting started.

How to use social media to land your first programming job

This article was originally published on ult by Will Johnson. . cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world.

Landing your first job in tech can be hard. Especially when you have no experience in the field. I’ve worked in factories and call centers most of my adult life. I only learned how to code when I was 33 — this was in my free time outside of my 12-hour shift and while raising six children with my wife. I’m not going to lie, it was hard. I applied to countless jobs and felt the sting of rejection time and time again. “No experience,” they would say, even if I killed in the interview. I was at the bottom of the ladder and dying for a break.

I started using social media to break into tech

The traditional approach wasn’t working, I had to switch it up and think outside the box. No one wanted to take a risk on me, probably because anyone can say they are ‘hard-working’ and ‘passionate’ when it comes to software development — it’s not enough. I decided to show how hard-working and passionate I really was using the power of social media.

Step one was creating a Twitter account where I would begin to document my journey or “learn in public” as Shawn Wang once described it. I had zero followers and didn’t know a single person working in tech. I started by throwing up a picture of whatever I happened to be learning at the time, then pictures of books I was reading, courses I took, meetups, podcasts and side-projects. Twitter was a living archive of my learning journey.

Is it a waste of time to post about everything you learn? If you’ve got no followers, no one will see, right? Wrong. The people who created the courses you take and wrote the books you read are also using Twitter (or some other social media). Tag the instructor, author, creator or website in your post — that’s what I did. I’d tag the author of the book I was reading, I would tag the meetup accounts and the organizers. Those creators love to see people getting value from the things they made, so you’re actually doing them a huge favor.

In February, I started my Twitter account and by October I had landed a job in tech and built some great relationships in the community. I’d jump on calls with my new connections and learn as much as I could. One person would introduce me to another and so on, and like a snowball, my presence in the community grew and grew until eventually, I landed on a podcast (aimed at Junior developers) and was asked to speak at a conference outside of the country.

What I’d inadvertently done was create a solid reputation for myself in the community and for me, it went much further than any resume could. Doing this allowed me to create a story, a unique one where I was controlling the narrative.

I was motivated by others

It wasn’t just me using social media to record my learning journey… Kyle Shook , another developer on Twitter, was always posting these really cool CSS animations. They were highly detailed and you could tell he put a lot of time and effort into making them. Well, his hard work paid off. A company saw what he was doing and contacted him with an offer.

Another tech influencer, Dhanish Gajjar was using Instagram to post the notes he was taking, the courses he was learning from, and the problems he was solving. He also created CSS challenges for other developers to participate in. He would post something he made and would ask others to submit their version. Similar to Kyle, a company reached out to Dhanish with a job opportunity, and he still works there today.

I’m not saying you should quick your job search and become an influencer. I’m trying to show what a powerful and effective tool social media can be in as a developer. Most of us (especially early on) are scrambling to learn and master as much as we can, but no one can see that unless you show them. Build your learning portfolio and see what opportunities come your way.

Helping others was important

One other point: I made sure my ‘learning in public’ wasn’t all about me. If I’d take a course, I’d help the instructor out by answering a couple of questions or directing them to a link that could help them. By helping others solve problems it would reinforce the information I’d learnt, it was win-win.

This also showed potential employers that I was willing to help and communicate — skills that are very important for developers, especially with the rise of remote work. Most of your communication is done via the same medium (slack, email, GitHub). So showing you’re an effective communicator ahead of time gives the employer one less thing to worry about when considering you.

My big break

Leading up to my first full-time job, I leveraged the network I had created as much as possible. People in my network would recommend me to employers and even act as my reference, through this I got a few freelance clients which allowed me to prove my skills. Then as I mentioned earlier, my big break finally came after six years laboring in factories.

I can’t say one thing worked more than the other — it was the compounding effect of everything: the network, the hustle, the friends, the learning. And it doesn’t just end when you get a job, it will help you with your next one and everything else you want to accomplish in your career.

Don’t worry about trying to be or look perfect. I know Instagram is full of developers who have amazing desks and take beautiful pictures. But that’s not important, all you need is your phone a couple of minutes to post, don’t think so much about it, the most important thing is to just start. You never know who is watching but some great things can happen when you put yourself out there, and everyone is rooting for you whether it feels that way or not. We want to see you win and reach your goals and celebrate your progress.

Recap:

If you’re not having any luck with the traditional job search, use social media to showcase your hard work and ingratiate yourself in the community. The relationships you build and potential opportunities are worth the effort. It was a tough long journey for me but I kept showing up every day and that’s how I got my first break: a remote gig that I love. It’s a complete 180° from everything I’ve done in the past, and if it’s possible for me it’s possible for you.