Rodney Hart: Welcome into Event Perspectives. Really excited about this episode, joined by Sanya Khera from Intuit. Much like always with these episodes, we’re going to kind of dive in and probably geek out on a couple of different things. And I think in this one in particular, maybe some event data. So hopefully that doesn’t scare off too many people. Stick with us. Sanya, how are you feeling? Are you ready for this conversation?
Sanya Khera: Hey, Rodney. Thank you so much for inviting me here. I am super excited to talk to you. We talked a little about it before this, but I’m super excited to dive into data a little. Not scary. Yeah, excited about this conversation.
Rodney Hart: Cool, so before we dive in, we’ll have a little bit of fun, you and I, as well as hopefully for the audience. I like to start with an icebreaker to kind of get us warmed up, even though I feel pretty confident we’ll have a pretty healthy conversation. I don’t know if you need the warmup, but I’m going to get you warmed up anyway. So for today’s icebreaker, I think the question that I want to ask you is, what’s the best event you’ve ever attended and why?
Sanya Khera: Ooh, okay, that’s an interesting one. I’m going to say the most memorable event that I ever went to. That was the first event I attended here in the United States, in New York. I was invited for that, and got a scholarship through India. So I was super excited. I was like a little child. And it really opened up my eyes because I actually saw the scale of the event and how amazing an event can be and how impactful it could be. So I learned a lot.
It was about data science so I learned a lot about data science there, but I think the thing that stuck with me and was the most important for me was just the human connection. The people that I met there, I am still in touch with some of them. So that was the biggest part and that opened up my eyes. Like, oh my gosh, okay, events, conferences, that’s a thing.
Rodney Hart: And so this was your first time attending, you were not in events, you were just purely an attendee of this event, is that correct?
Sanya Khera: Exactly. Yeah.
Rodney Hart: Okay. And what stood out from that experience? I always find it so fun to think about that. And I think you hit on it. But it sounds like it was a data science conference. So again, even more things for us to talk about getting into this episode. But was there anything that stood out in particular about that that made it so memorable?
Sanya Khera: Okay, yes, absolutely. I was at that data science conference, super nerd, ready to geek out, ready to learn everything. So a workshop was something I was focusing on. So I wasn’t really keen on talking because I’m kind of introverted that way. And so I was anxious about it. I was like, okay, I’m not going to focus on that. It’s fine. But it was so natural. All the people that also attend conferences, it’s very natural for everyone. Everyone’s on the same plane, like, okay, I want to learn, but I also want to learn from you on how you’re getting ahead in your career or what you are doing yourself. So that was a really interesting piece. Also, they did an amazing job at helping us mingle with each other. They had this little game at one of the experiences they had, and they handed out small little slips of paper and they had symbols on them and you had to find people with similar symbols. It was such a natural, easy experience. Like, okay, I don’t have to do anything, I just need to find someone with the same thing. So, yeah.
Rodney Hart: I love this answer. I love how it’s getting us started in this because I think sometimes, as I know you’re on the event organization side focusing on the implementation of technology at events, and in my role kind of building events for people who build events, you can get lost in what you’re doing but also forget just some of the simple, sometimes just really human ways of bringing people together. And sometimes our most valuable asset is just the fact that the people are coming and that’s what you need, facilitating and thinking about ways for driving that.
Sanya Khera: 100% all the time. You hit it right.
Rodney Hart: So let’s talk a little bit about your background. We’re already getting the sense you were going to a data science conference. I don’t think many of us in the event industry are signing up for too many of those, specifically career related. Tell us a little bit about your background, what you did before events, and what brought you into events.
Sanya Khera: Yeah, so I am an engineer by profession, in applied mathematics and computer science, so that’s what I studied. That was the basis of data science. And I was like, okay, this is amazing, I love it. It just tingles my brain and this is great. But having done that, I worked for a couple of years within data science and analytics itself, and it was going great until this opportunity knocked on my door. They said, hey, we have this interesting thing and we are looking for someone to help us with data within events. What do you think? And I had never been in that space. I had been an attendee. I love the energy. But being on the other side of planning really intrigued me because having been on the side where you’re working on recommendation systems, working on figuring out what the data is actually saying, you’re disconnected from the actual experience of how it gets translated. How are the product managers translating this? I don’t know what is happening to those insights I’m providing. So being on this side, when this opportunity knocked, I was like, okay, I have to try it. And here I am creating experiences now.
Rodney Hart: And tell us, how long have you been on this side of events?
Sanya Khera: On this side, it’s going to be about four years now.
Rodney Hart: Awesome. Okay, well we are going to unpack some of those four years. I think it’s such a great background. So let’s talk a little bit about that first experience. Was it a role on the corporate events team or corporate marketing team specifically looking to elevate the data and the understanding? Tell us a little bit about what that initial role was, because I think we’ll jump into the challenges you’re working through now and the interesting pieces. But I’m curious, when you got the role, what was the initial focus?
Sanya Khera: Yeah, so as we know what the events world is like, it’s a lot of fun, it’s a lot of energy, it’s a lot of chaos at the same time. So that’s how it was and we were just exiting the virtual world that we were in. This was about 2022 when I joined. So it was moving away from virtual to hybrid to now it’s mostly in-person. Still hybrid, but focused on in-person. So that was the time where our team was still figuring out, okay, what do we do with virtual? What do we do with hybrid? How do we create these hybrid experiences? And then the basis of it obviously is data, right? Because I want to create these experiences, I have all of this technology, but then I don’t know how to interpret what the people are doing. With virtual events, it’s so hard to understand on the other side of the screen what the person is feeling, how they’re engaging. So what are the signals we can pick up? What are those signals we can tap into to understand if these events are actually hitting the mark for the attendee and for our business? So that’s where I started.
Rodney Hart: Right. And okay, so I’m going to get to that question, but I think we’re going to spend a lot of time on it. So I want to ask a few other pieces first about how the role has changed. That was, I remember that time pretty well, coming in at the time when technology for in-person enterprise events was, here at RainFocus, living through the virtual stuff and then coming out of it was a really interesting time. I’m curious, how have you seen the emphasis of virtual versus in-person change? We’ll get back to the data. I’m just curious, having seen maybe coming into the role where virtual was pretty prominent to now this world where I think the term hybrid, we see a lot less than we did two or three years ago.
Sanya Khera: Exactly. Yeah, I think now the distinction is more of like in-person or completely virtual. There’s no in-between in the background. There are hybrid components obviously for everything, but that’s not top of mind for everyone. We don’t talk about that much. Right now, I think having moved on from that hybrid side of the world where we are is interesting to me because we’re hyper-focusing on just in-person events. But the role of technology is now more of, how do we support those in-person events and make sure that in-person event is happening at the most optimal level? That’s what’s happening with technology.
Rodney Hart: And what would you say when you’re looking at optimal, and I know we’re going to keep coming back to event measurement, but when you say optimal, what are those pieces? What are those measures that you’re looking at at Intuit?
Sanya Khera: So I always look at it from two different lenses. One is optimizing it for the attendee, making sure they’re having the best time, and then also optimizing it for our business. Because at the end of the day, we are also running a business over here. So we want to make sure that we’re optimizing both of those experiences together. The things that I want to look at to optimize the business side of it is what impact are we hitting? And I’m going to talk about ROI. But it’s so hard how we define ROI for all of these different events that we have. For in-person specifically, it becomes really hard to track, right? If someone attended the event, what did they do after that? Did they really love this particular feature that I talked about with them at the event? And did they actually end up buying it right after the event or one year after? So it’s really hard to pinpoint that and to understand where that conversion point occurs. So that’s where I’m focusing, working with our product and sales teams to figure that out, because they do that day in and out for their marketing and sales initiatives. Events always take a backseat and that’s one thing I’m trying to change within our teams.
Rodney Hart: I’m with you there. It’s a journey. I think it’s something we’ll continue to work on. I’m curious to get your take. Recently I was having a conversation around event measurement and what we’re looking at, and there’s a Gartner stat that we talk a lot about here at RainFocus, which is about how CMOs are shifting a lot of their budgets from purely online tools, whether that’s targeted ads and things like that, to offline things like events. I think we kind of are seeing the importance of events continue to grow. But we all know events are also pretty expensive to run, to bring people together, for people to attend. So I’m curious to get your thoughts on this, because I think you have that exposure to some of the online tools where a lot of measurement is native, where the returns or the conversions are fully baked in. So you kind of know your ROI. We ran this ad, we got these conversions. They went down this path. Where I think events have struggled, but the more CMOs want to spend their money on events, the more they’re probably going to demand clarity about what is happening with all this money. So I’m curious to get your take of online tools and measurement versus what we’re maybe trying to build from an infrastructure perspective in the world of events.
Sanya Khera: Yeah, 100%. So I started off with just using these hundreds of different tools that I have and literally going in manually, figuring out, okay, what are the primary connectors we have within all of these different tools and different datasets, and then how are we connecting them and how do we actually make sense? Insert all the event data as well into this measurement. So just doing it very manually in the beginning. I think right now I’ve started this initiative to just build those data pipelines to make sure that we are attributing it correctly. And I’m actually working with other data scientists right now within the product to figure out what the attribution model is for these multimedia channels we run, ads and everything else. How do we define weights to, let’s say, a sales initiative that went out, or a campaign that we ran, whether it was on social, whether it was email, versus an event that someone attended? So how are we distributing weights to actually say, okay, where does this one lead get attributed to? It took me four years. I’m in my fourth year and it’s still getting there.
Rodney Hart: And so I’m going to ask, are you doing, I mean, I’m sure there are some complicated answers or pieces of it that are specific to Intuit. But I am curious how you are doing that. I think I’ve had these conversations before with other event leaders and I think that’s often the statement, like, well, somebody came to the event and then made a multimillion dollar enterprise purchase. It wasn’t just the event that made them make that decision. But I’ve kind of always said, yes, but we have tools where we’re kind of vetting this all out. And so to me, there is a way of probably looking at that data. I’m curious, with the other data scientists, as you’re working on these models, what are you finding and how are you working across that attribution problem?
Sanya Khera: Yeah, it’s at a very nascent stage right now. So we’re still trying to figure out what’s the right solution. But like you said, this one user came into the event and after that made that purchase. Do you just attribute it to the event, or the first touch that they may have had, like an ad they saw or an email they got? What do you do? So it’s like the first-touch model versus the last-touch model, which was the event. That is the interesting problem that we’re trying to solve right now. You have to run experiments and we’re running experiments right now to see which makes the most sense and where we land. Because in my mind, I am really biased. I am going to be like, most of the weight of these should be going to the event. Because if you look at it, anyone who attends the event has put in money, they have put in energy, they have put in time to be here. So this is one of the most high-intent channels that we have. Events are one of the most, not like your marketing channels or your sales channels. Events are where they are putting in an equivalent amount of money and time.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, right. You know what, I think with brains like yours attacking this problem, we’re going to get there. And I think what you just said, I’d love to get your opinion on, because these are super high-intent actions. A lot of the time I think we measure our marketing efforts by the amount of engagement we’re getting across different platforms. And we’d be lucky to see people spending, across our emails and across our website and across our other videos, like minutes of time that we would say this person is very engaged. Coming to an event, you have decided that you’re going to spend hours, days of your time. So I think that intent is extremely clear. I think the relationship you’re building with your customers is that much more clear. And though it’s probably not the first engagement, I don’t know if we’re trying, even though probably somewhere in the back of our minds we are, to say events are the best. It’s really kind of an effort to measure channel performance across the board and how do these all relate and stack together. Is that right? When you’re thinking about it and building these models, is it really an attempt to understand where events fall compared to these other things, or the overall cycle, or how effective is this channel versus that channel?
Sanya Khera: I think in my mind step one is to have these teams get that realization that events are also a channel. I think that’s step one. Because most of the time it just gets sidelined. We have marketing, we have sales. And even those two, supposedly the best or most recognized channels, they don’t talk to each other. That’s what I’m realizing. They’re in their own worlds, doing their own attribution, attributing that one lead to this marketing effort or also that sales effort. So the worlds are so separate. The reality is that there isn’t that one uniting factor within sales, marketing, and events, which is like a different world in itself, that needs to be happening right now. So that’s the step-one problem we need to solve, and we need people like us, or someone in marketing who also understands events, and someone in sales who also understands that, working together.
Rodney Hart: I’m going to ask another question that is going to feel like it’s just out of a playbook, but it’s not, it’s AI. So I’m curious to get your take. Here at RainFocus, we’ve recently really doubled down in terms of the ways and lenses that we’re leveraging AI, both in our day-to-day basis, but also tackling new things. And I think when I think of the data challenge and problem, especially at organizations like Intuit, there are so many different data points and signals. But I feel like AI is crafted to be able to handle a lot of inputs and kind of model them. I’m just curious, are you seeing AI helping you solve these problems or do you see that happening in the future?
Sanya Khera: So to start off with, I have been surprisingly an AI skeptic for the longest time. I’ve used it as a user, tried it out for myself, asked random questions, been on ChatGPT the whole time. But when it comes to work and actually trusting it with the work that I do, the data that I use, theoretically it should be understanding everything much better than any human can, right? Because of the compute power that it has. But in the past, the models have not been that great where you would actually be able to trust the insights that they provide or the answers they would give you. Because I have seen a crazy amount of hallucinations happening and the amount of confidence AI has sometimes is misplaced.
Yeah, it’s been a journey because the work that I would do, let’s say in an hour, it would take me a couple of hours, if not more, just to prompt it to understand what I’m looking at, for it to clean the data and then understand everything. But that was the past. Right now, it’s a different world, Rodney. It’s crazy. I have been on Claude for the longest time and the world that you’re talking about, for it to be able to understand all of these different signals, it is working. I think the caveat is providing clean data. I think that has been my biggest thing because it won’t understand the context from the get-go. You will have to make it used to it, store it in the memories, but it will still need clean data for it to act on and for it to give you the insights that you’re looking for.
Rodney Hart: I totally agree. I love what you called that too. Claude’s one of the tools we’ve been leveraging a lot. I’m very bullish on the idea of data connectors, right? The idea of bringing these sources of data into a tool to let it leverage this information, whether that’s pulling in from your CRM system of choice or your registration system of choice. Hopefully it’s RainFocus, but you know, pulling those data sources in and being able to model off of that. You’ve also said something I’m extremely passionate about, and maybe if it’s coming from these data sources it will be cleaner, but it’s clean data. I’m curious to get your take as someone focusing on events and measurement, coming into a team where sometimes I felt like I was the person looking to make sense of things. Everything was great and now show me the numbers that say everything is great. And it’s like, do you want to know the number? Do we want to compare year over year? Because I can tell you year over year, but you’re not going to want to hear it if this number is not better than last year. So from your perspective, as you’re kind of working on these pieces and looking to make those evaluations, what has that experience been like, coming into a team and really helping them understand with clarity, hey, this is what’s happening, or these are the things that are working at an event?
Sanya Khera: Yeah, you started right. Like you have experienced it and I have experienced it and I think it’s an event-industry-wide thing. We run on experience. The events industry runs on, I did it this way before and I’ve done it for the last decade and it worked beautifully well and we’re not going to change it. And that’s how we’re going to keep it. My experience has been this: the mindset shift takes a lot of time. And the data also says this. This is literally what your user, your attendee, is saying. But not by saying anything. What they do, what they see, is signals. When a user directly talks about it, like, I love this conference, great. But what are they actually doing? They’re not going to say that. So you’ll have to look at the signals, you’ll have to follow their path. And that is through data. That is how you actually understand them. Okay, they were saying something, but what were they actually doing? They say they attended the event for networking. Are they actually networking? Or in the breakout sessions, are they just attending one after the other? What are the signals saying to you? You have to listen to that as well. Mindset shift takes a lot of time and it’s still a journey.
Rodney Hart: I’m going to ask this last question before I transition to the next one. When you’re looking at data signals and things that you’re measuring now, I want to know what are your favorite things that you’re measuring or looking at as indicators? And then what type of data are you not currently collecting from an event perspective that you wish you had?
Sanya Khera: Okay, favorite data points and metrics. So I love the voice of the attendee. I’ll call it VOA, and that has been my project. With voice of the attendee, I love looking at the signals: okay, what did they favorite in sessions and what sessions did they actually end up attending? Versus using favoriting as a tool or a metric that we basically have as a feature every time for all the events, but are we actually looking at it? I haven’t looked at it for the longest time but now I am, and I love just seeing the experience of what they favorited, at what time are they favoriting things, what time are they scheduling sessions, and then what they actually end up attending. That piece really tells me what they are there for and what they’re doing. And to dig a little deeper, you have to segment it by the different types of attendees that you have, because not all attendees are going to be similar. We have firms that are really small, one or two people just running those firms. This is the accounting industry we’re talking about. And we also have mega firms. So their experiences are very, very different and the things they’re looking for are very different.
To answer your question, I think those little signals that no one’s looking at during an in-person event, that’s what I am looking at. What’s the data not having? So from an output perspective for a particular cohort or segment of attendees, what did they talk about, the surveys that we give out to them in terms of the sessions, the post-event and pre-event surveys, and their experience in terms of the marketing material we were sending out, the emails, whatever we were sending. The data that I don’t have would be the social signal. I would love to see the social signal attached, to say how did they respond to us or how were they engaging with us in terms of the social campaigns we sent out, the user-generated content they themselves create about the event. That I don’t have, but would love to include in VOA. So basically campaign signals, social, emails, sales, and then also the in-person piece of the event in terms of surveys, their engagement throughout in terms of sessions attended, exhibitors they talked to, salespeople they met at the event, customer service people they met with. All of those different signals together say, okay, if your team is obsessed with NPS, your top line is NPS, the NPS is X. But then what led to that NPS? And my ideal state would be I can also say their propensity to buy these different products is this right now, and right after the event or three months after the event, this is what they actually did and bought. That would be my amazing ideal state.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, so that’s kind of the dream state. That’s where you’d want to be, knowing propensity to buy or having some of those indicators for measurement afterward. Yeah, I know, I’m working on it too. It’s tough, but it’s there. I think we’re data people, so it’s, how do we pull meaning from what is the signal versus the noise? But I’m confident.
Sanya Khera: Exactly. 100%. And I think RainFocus did an amazing job with that. We talked about it in the past, but Encore, I’m forgetting the word.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, Encore. Yeah, we do our Encore session after our user conference, yeah.
Sanya Khera: I love Encore sessions because that just satisfies the data side of me. Yes, this is what I was doing, but I want to know what the other people were also doing. What was the whole experience? You give such a beautiful picture to that. So that’s one of my favorite thoughts.
Rodney Hart: You know, for me I think it’s how I’ve always looked at things and it’s really fun to get to build events for people like you who are building events and thinking about events in this way. And so unpacking it, I like it. Right now you’ve already got my brain thinking about what are some other slides I might be able to produce, whether it’s cohort views. It would be fascinating to break down some of those metrics, like the ambitious schedulers who don’t attend, versus the attenders who don’t schedule. You have all sorts of cross-sections in some of those data points.
Sanya Khera: Yeah, and what are they doing? What do they really want to do? How can I help with that?
Rodney Hart: Yeah, exactly. Cause I think that’s the fun part. I want to make sure you’re here again next year. The NPS is one thing to look at, it matters to have a kind of a score that you’re relying on. But once you have that score, especially whether it’s significantly higher or significantly lower than what you wanted, you need to have the data infrastructure and these things that people like you are building to really understand what happened. Because as good as it might feel to be like, everyone was happy, great, we’re going to tweak and change things because that’s what we are, we’re events people. What if we’ve changed the wrong things? What if we got rid of the pieces that they loved? Suddenly we’re happy about having done something different, but we removed the piece that made everyone happy. Like those slips of paper that led to people networking, and you didn’t even realize how important that was.
Sanya Khera: Yeah, data can be humbling here. What you think is working, what it actually shows is working, is a different world. It can be so humbling.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, we’re going to have to clip that. That’s good. No, you’re right. Because it’s true. Sometimes we want to believe what we believe was working and then you go, wasn’t it.
Sanya Khera: Yep. You’re so attached to the idea of that because you love it. And it’s very different when you’re there as an attendee and there’s so much going on, so much in your head. You’re not just thinking about one experience. You’re thinking, okay, I need to catch my flight, I need to check into my hotel, I need to freshen up, I need to come back. I have all of these sessions that I have bookmarked, these people that I want to meet, and who else is out there like me. Who’s solving my problems? I have these issues. So who do I talk to? I want to talk to someone and that’s why they’re there.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, no, that’s good. I’m going to shift us to the next topic, even though I could keep going on that one. Something that we like to ask everyone who comes on the show is about their favorite piece of advice. This industry is famously a very stressful one. It can be, you mentioned early on in the episode, it can be chaos, and I think we’re all probably a little drawn to it. But if you were talking to someone new in the industry, what would be your favorite piece of advice to give?
Sanya Khera: You hit right on it, Rodney, when you said that we’re kind of attracted to that chaos, because I definitely am. I was on the other side. I moved to this side because it’s so exciting. So many emotions running all the time. We’re running towards deadlines. Our event deadlines are never going to move. So we have to hit them no matter what. And everything seems important all the time.
The thing is it’s not like a basic product release that people are doing usually. They can move it out another week, another month, and that’s fine. We cannot. We don’t have that luxury. So how do you balance that energy with a lot of emotions running, chaos running, and that deadline looming over your head with keeping your calm and cool? I think that’s the biggest one.
Again, it’s not the end of the world. It is completely fine if some experiences are not the crazy amazing experiences that you were thinking they were going to be. Because what you, my friend, are running towards is execution and getting things done. And I think all the events people, all of us, are getting-it-done people. So that’s what we’re going to do.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And focusing on that end execution is such good advice. Don’t get lost in the fact that getting lost means forgetting to execute, which is where you’re really creating the problem. The attendee likely won’t know that you actually wanted there to be fireworks after that session ran, but couldn’t for some reason. But they will know if something that was supposed to happen on the schedule is not in the room. Executing the plan is more important than getting lost in the things that aren’t going to be there.
Sanya Khera: Exactly. Analysis paralysis is my favorite word because I get lost in that all the time, specifically for us data people. It’s like, oh, maybe we didn’t look at another signal, maybe we didn’t look at another. Let me look at that. Let me compare with another event. Our event last year. So I personally get lost in that analysis all the time and I have to bring myself back and say, hey, okay, cool. Let’s get on getting this done. Even if you’re 80, 90% there.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that so much. Even though sometimes I don’t mind getting lost in the analysis paralysis sometimes, but like you said, at a certain point you’re not being productive. You’re infinitely not productive. You know, I found myself crunching numbers deep into formulas and thinking, what does this number even mean? Anyway. What am I measuring?
Sanya Khera: Yes. Just do it.
Rodney Hart: No, that’s a great answer. I’ve got one last thing, Sanya, if you’re up for it, which we call the lightning round. You’ve completed the episode and now I’m going to run you through a series of questions that you’re supposed to give the first answer that comes to mind and I’m supposed to not say anything else. And I fail every time, but I’m going to try.
Sanya Khera: Ooh, that’s going to be hard. One answer, one word. Okay, let’s do it.
Rodney Hart: All right. Yeah, just, if you’re ready, I’m going to just fire these at you.
Sanya Khera: Let’s do it. Yeah.
Rodney Hart: True or false, you prefer small intimate events over large-scale events.
Sanya Khera: That’s so hard! Okay, I love large events to explore because I’m a little girl in a candy shop. I love that excitement. But I also love the small events when I really want to talk to someone or engage with someone. So, hard to answer.
Rodney Hart: Both.
What is one book that everyone should read?
Sanya Khera: I have a whole library in front of me, I wish I could show you. One book that I love is The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. It’s a very soft intro into stoicism and I think all of us events people could actually use it.
Rodney Hart: I’m going to put it on my list. That is one I have not read. I will put it on my list.
Sanya Khera: You should try it for sure. It’s life-changing.
Rodney Hart: Which is harder to plan, multi-day virtual or in-person events?
Sanya Khera: Oh, that’s so hard. Okay, I’m going to say multi-day virtual. Because even though I work in event tech all the time, I’m still going to say multi-day virtual because of the engagement part. To keep the attendee engaged for a couple of days for virtual, that’s another thing.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, I agree. The best airline is…
Sanya Khera: I like some Middle Eastern luxury, so I’m going to say Emirates.
Rodney Hart: Emirates, probably one of the fanciest flights I’ve ever been on. Window seat or aisle seat?
Sanya Khera: Window seat for sure. I need the views.
Rodney Hart: Networking sessions or educational workshops?
Sanya Khera: Oh my gosh, that’s hard. Educational workshops so I can just hole in and learn and be my nerdy, not-so-talkative self. I’ll choose that.
Rodney Hart: Spoken like a true data scientist. True or false, networking is your favorite part of attending events.
Sanya Khera: When it’s natural, yes.
Rodney Hart: Okay, fair. If you could host an event anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Sanya Khera: Somewhere tropical. It has to be somewhere tropical with another day to design the events, just to chill and do nothing. So maybe Thailand, Hawaii, Costa Rica. There are many options.
Rodney Hart: Love it. All three. Just do a tour of all three. What’s your go-to comfort food during event planning stress?
Sanya Khera: That’s hard. It has to be something nutritious, not crazy heavy, but also satisfying. So I’m going to choose a protein smoothie. I love this one by Earthbar. It’s here in San Francisco and they have the Rockstar and it’s this blue-looking smoothie. It’s like salty and sweet. It’s the perfect combination. There’s no one particular flavor. It’s crazy good.
Rodney Hart: I’m ready for one right now. True or false, you pack gym clothes when attending an event that you’re planning.
Sanya Khera: Yes, and I rarely use them.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, the idea counts in my book. The idea counts. The number of times those shoes never left the luggage. I don’t know why I do it, but we do it. And final question: you’ve got a closing event party, live music or a DJ?
Sanya Khera: Oh gosh, I am a rave girlie so I’m going to say DJ. Anyway.
Rodney Hart: Love it. Sanya, thank you so much. This was a ton of fun. I hope you had some fun as well. Anybody who’s been listening to this conversation, please feel free to go get engaged with Sanya. LinkedIn would be the best place, I’m assuming?
Sanya Khera: It is, yeah.
Rodney Hart: If you’ve got event data problems that you’re trying to solve, I think Sanya is your person. Thank you so much for joining and to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in.
Sanya Khera: Thank you, Rodney. Thank you for hosting.
