A lot of journalists and media teams need credible experts quickly for interviews, commentary, quotes, and podcast episodes.

But expert sourcing still often depends on:

• personal network

• PR agencies

• social media posts

• manual search across multiple platforms

We re building SpeakUp to make expert discovery easier for media teams, and I d love to learn from others in this space.

For event organizers, speaker sourcing often looks much harder than it should.

You need to:

• find relevant speakers

• compare them quickly

• check fit for the audience

• manage outreach

• keep track of replies and decisions

We re building SpeakUp as an AI platform to help event organizers find speakers faster, but I d love to understand where the biggest pain really is.

I ve been thinking a lot about how hard podcast guest booking still is.

Most podcasters either:

• search manually on LinkedIn

• ask their network

• rely on agencies

• or spend too much time on cold outreach

We re building SpeakUp to make podcast guest discovery and expert matching faster, but I d love to learn from real workflows.

We re working on SpeakUp - an AI matching app for speaker booking, podcast guest discovery, and expert sourcing for media and events.

I m curious how people think about this category.

If you needed to find a conference speaker, podcast guest, or media expert, what would make you trust an AI-powered platform faster?

Would it be:

We re building SpeakUp an AI speaker booking and speaker discovery platform for event organizers, podcasters, journalists, and media teams.

One thing keeps surprising me: even in 2026, many teams still find conference speakers through spreadsheets, scattered LinkedIn messages, Google Forms, and agencies.

If you ve ever had to find speakers for events, what was the hardest part for you?

• finding relevant experts

• checking if they are credible

• outreach and follow-up

• comparing multiple speakers

• managing the whole process

1. Y Combinator startup will pay humans to help AI agents when they get stuck. (This is what I read today.)

2. At the same time, I see how Indian employees in production have cameras on their heads, and the AI learns from their movements (practically filming their firing process).

3. In addition, there was already a site where AI agents hired human actions for stablecoins.

• First, AI worked for us.

• Now we are starting to work for AI.

• And eventually, will AI work (without us)?

I don t want to portray a Terminator scenario where people will have to unite against AI, but what future awaits us in terms of cooperation/non-cooperation with AI?

Over the past few months, we ve been talking to a lot of you using Velo.
Real conversations, and people trying it out, sending clips, pointing things out.
And almost everyone said some version of the same thing: It sounds like me but something feels missing.
At first, we thought it was about accuracy. Maybe the voice wasn t close enough. But the more we listened, the clearer it became - that wasn t the issue.
The issue was how it felt. The tone stays a bit too samey. The emphasis doesn t always land where you expect it to. And the little natural shifts that make your voice yours just aren t fully there yet. It sounds right, but it doesn t feel alive.
So we went back and started reworking how we think about voice cloning at Velo. Not just matching how you sound, but capturing how you express. The way your voice changes when you re explaining something, when you re just talking casually, or when you actually care about what you re saying.
That s what we re building now. The next version of Velo is focused on higher fidelity voice cloning. More nuance. Better pacing. More natural expression.
Something that doesn t feel like a generated voice reading your script, but closer to you actually speaking.
We re still building it, but it s coming together fast. We re planning to ship this soon.
If you ve used Velo before, we d love to know - what do you think about Velo's voice cloning or other workflows? What would make it feel right?
We re listening.

1. I've always been on the personal brand side. More and more founders are building it now (sometimes even before the product is ready while it's still in development, before seed fundraising). The CEO builds their position so the product sells more easily at the official launch.

2. But I have experience with people who built the product, scaled it, and only then did we discover who was behind it.

Honestly, with the first approach, I'd be concerned that people invest more in me as a person than in the product. People would idealise the founder and overlook the product's flaws (which could hurt development and constructive feedback).

+ I noticed the most common mistake that many people who started building a personal brand first, connected their product to their personal accounts (emails, social media, etc.) and started having a problem selling these things, because they cannot "give someone keys" to their personal profiles.

We thought we were ready.

Bigger deals. Fewer customers. Better margins. That was the dream.

So we built enterprise features. SSO. Advanced permissions. Audit logs. A whole new pricing tier starting at $2,000/month.

We spent 6 months. Three engineers. One dedicated product manager. Endless meetings about "enterprise readiness."

Update: The Deel Leaderboard will no longer be going ahead today for the Paris event.

We re teaming up with The Pitch by @Deel, a global startup competition where up to 100 winners will receive $50k in funding and up to 10 winners will receive $1M+.

Let me start from the creator s perspective:
I personally don t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).

But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).