Rodney Hart: Hello and welcome into another episode of Event Perspectives. This one I’m really excited about, maybe a little intimidated for, because I have Will Curran, who is host of many podcasts and really should be the star of this show. He is currently the VP of go-to-market for Voxo, who has some AI solutions I’m sure he’ll talk all about. But before anything, Will, welcome. How are you doing?

Will Curran: Thanks so much for having me, Rodney. I’m stoked to be here. I mean, we get to talk about events. What better thing to talk about and spend all day talking about?

Rodney Hart: I know it’s insane too. I think the audience has to be ready for your DJ set. Like, this is just going to turn into a rave or something.

Will Curran: I’m here to bring the energy. You know, that’s what everybody knows me as.

Rodney Hart: And before I get to the icebreaker question, because that’s normally how I start, Will, I don’t know if you knew this or if I ever shared this with you: as the world was shifting in my last role before RainFocus, we were all taking on different digital event certifications, and one of the classes I took was taught by you specifically.

Will Curran: Was it the one where I was live drawing everything?

Rodney Hart: You were live drawing. You had the Endless Events setup. Ever since I’ve seen you speaking, it’s been a thrill for me. But I won’t make it weird yet. Let’s just get into this.

Will Curran: I’m happy to make it weird. Here’s a fun fact you probably didn’t know: that was the first time I had ever done the live drawing, and now it’s like a staple of Will presentations.

Rodney Hart: Listen, there is something true and beautiful about events. When you’re at a pressure point, you need a solution, you come up with something, maybe better than you would have if you had eight months to solve it and make it super safe.

So I’m going to start with an icebreaker question. You can only pick one for the rest of your life: movies, TV, or books.

Will Curran: Oh, okay. Good thing you didn’t say music. That would have been a really hard one. I say movies. I’m hardcore about movies. TV shows are great, and I think there are a lot of TV shows that are better than movies now, but for me the whole experience of going into the theater, sitting down, and giving it your full focus for two hours and letting a self-contained journey happen for you is a next level for me. And the fact that movies have kind of died out a little bit is sad to me.

Rodney Hart: Which would you miss the most: TV or books?

Will Curran: Probably TV. I love books, and they were very important to me early on in my career, but the ability to sit down and read for a long period of time has definitely been lost to me. It’s something I want to get back to. But TV is also a great way to unplug. Throughout the day I do so much thinking and talking that sometimes I just want to disconnect.

Rodney Hart: I think this is a good sign that this is going to be an honest conversation. I feel like the podcast answer I roll my eyes at too often is someone saying books. I’m a big Audible person. I try to get twelve books in a year. But yeah, I think there’s nothing like unplugging at a movie or a nice TV series.

Great. We’ve kicked this off, but we’re going to steer the ship back toward events. Will, I spent a lot of time going through your LinkedIn, and I needed AI help to get through it. It’s impressive and illustrious. I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT, taking screenshots of LinkedIn pages and asking for good interview questions. And I will say: AI is what told me that you started your first events company at 17, because I missed it. ChatGPT did not miss it.

For so many people on this podcast, everyone says they fell into events. For you it feels like this has been in your DNA. You were wired for it from the start. Tell us a little bit about your journey into events.

Will Curran: This is definitely my life for sure. I’ve known only events and this whole world. It essentially started with me being a very nerdy kid who was really into technology and computers. Then I was lucky enough to discover electronic music at a very young age, and that had me stumble into DJing. Now I’m actually getting back into it because I’m at a different stage in my life and I want to get back to my roots and the passion I really care about, especially since when I first started, I did it because I purely loved it. And the fact that you could get paid to DJ at events was amazing to me.

As my company started to grow, I eventually pivoted away from DJing around age 19 and focused on production instead. Basically, I started as a DJ, and it was great because at 17 I had to learn how to manage clients, manage dates, how to build the energy of a room, how to interact on the mic. I was a very introverted person before I became a DJ. Having to get up there and talk was how I eventually learned the skill of MCing. That’s when I started becoming more extroverted, I would say. Through college I grew it as a production company, and when I got out of college I started focusing more on event management and full-scale services. Before I even graduated college I had produced an event for 100,000 people, which was pretty exciting.

Rodney Hart: At what point in that journey did you have the moment of “oh, this is a career”? Was it something you reflected back on, or did you kind of know going into it?

Will Curran: That’s a great question. In the beginning it was very much: a lot of people just saw me as a DJ. I remember my pre-calculus teacher in high school being like, “What are you going to do, DJ the rest of your life?”

Rodney Hart: And look at you now.

Will Curran: Look where I went. I think at that time I also had the defiant nature of being young. But I don’t think I ever saw DJing as the ultimate end-all career, especially once I started seeing the production side of things. It really started clicking as a career when I was in college and I could buy the gear I wanted, the food I wanted. It started feeling real. And then when I started hiring employees. My senior year of high school, my guidance counselor came to me and said, “Hey, we have this entrepreneurship scholarship you can apply for.” I want to be clear: the reason my teacher was saying “are you going to DJ the rest of your life” is because I hated homework and never did my math homework. School was always a means to an end because I was already finding passions and ways to make money outside of it. But when I got an entrepreneurship scholarship my senior year to go into college, that was the first time someone had told me the word “entrepreneur.” And I think my parents were also like, “Woo, you can get college paid for because of this DJing thing.” That’s when I started going, “Okay, this is really legit.” And once I started hiring employees, it was all downhill from there, in a positive way.

Rodney Hart: In a positive way, yes. So was Endless Events what you had started, beginning pre-college and then through college?

Will Curran: Yeah, it started as Arizona Pro DJs, which is the worst brand name you could ever come up with, because it locked me into a specific state and meant I was only DJs. Then we started doing production and people were like, “Oh, I didn’t know you did these massive productions.” And I was like, “This name is really dumb. I really should change it.” At that time a lot of bigger DJ companies were calling themselves entertainment companies, so I thought, “We’ll call ourselves Endless Entertainment.” That name had a lot of things wrong with it too, so at that point we were already starting to move away from DJing. I realized that the technical production side of things, the AV side, was really where my passion was. By freshman to sophomore year of college, I rebranded to Endless Events because we knew we were capable of doing more. This was especially true as we started creating a lot of content marketing, which is how a lot of people knew us. We were talking about everything event-related: AV, production, event tech, catering, venues. We realized our passion as a team was to do the entire event experience as much as possible.

Rodney Hart: In that process you started hiring people. Was there a contract, an event, a moment where you suddenly went, “Oh my, it’s serious now”?

Will Curran: There were different stages. I remember the first time I got paid $800 to DJ going into freshman year of college and I was like, “Oh my god, I’ve never seen this much money.” Then through college, starting to do production work, our big AV moment was when we started doing all the Comic-Cons. That’s when we really moved from being a local AV production company to being a company that was all over the country. We had to ship gear. We had teams that were 50 or 60 people deep for these events. I remember managing 100 breakout rooms simultaneously for the first time. That felt very real.

And we were literally at a student council conference when we got the call that we had won the Comic-Con contract. My head of events pulled me aside, because we were all trying to capture as many leads as possible at this student council event, and she goes, “We got it. Don’t tell anybody. Keep them focused. But we’re going to go out to dinner tonight and celebrate.” That was a big moment for me.

And then where it really started becoming game-changing was when those brands that were on my dream list for years just all of a sudden started calling, asking for advice, asking for help planning their events. When it hit that level, that’s when you were like, “Wow, where do you go from here?” And I think that was the hardest part: when you hit kind of that top level.

Rodney Hart: And you’re leading me right into my next question, which is where did you go from there. I believe it was 17 or 18 years for Endless Events. What materialized in those next steps and what was that decision moment like before transitioning to your current role?

Will Curran: The pandemic hit and we saw massive growth, more than we’d ever seen before. We were really well positioned because of all of our content to be the event technology leaders. Everyone was asking about technology and events: how do we do virtual? Everyone just turned to us. Then coming out of the pandemic, I had an entire leadership team. I had built a business that ran completely without me. I hadn’t been on site at events in years. And I was like, “Okay, what’s next?”

It kind of came to the point where people on my team were suggesting that maybe I should hire a CEO to replace me. At first that hurt. It felt like they didn’t trust me. But I realized that they fully trusted me and actually wanted me to go on and grow and see what the company could do without me. So I ended up deciding to retire from my company, hire a CEO to replace me, and Endless Events now runs completely on its own without me. I still own it, and honestly they’re doing better than I ever did. The company is running super efficiently and doing bigger events than ever before. It was definitely time for me to move on.

So I entered a short early retirement. I thought: I’m retired, I’m going to be done for the rest of my life. And then what you realize is…

Rodney Hart: You got bored.

Will Curran: I got bored really really quick. And I kind of need that next level. That’s when I started moving toward the event tech space. My role at Voxo is very much synonymous with the last few things I’d been doing, which is being really focused on sales and marketing processes and how you do sales and marketing better than ever before. I’ve always been interested in being at the bleeding edge. I’m the app guy. I always have some little gadget that will make your life easier. I love reading every article about every product release.

What’s interesting is that this role at Voxo kind of came to me as a chance to be in the AI space. I’ve been very on top of AI trends. I’ll tell you a little about how I heard about them: I was heading into Event Tech Live and I reached out to Adam Parry, who we both know very well. I had this thought that AI is proving itself to be really good at summarization. It takes notes, summarizes videos and podcasts, writes articles. I started thinking: what are we doing at events that can utilize this technology? We really need to be summarizing all the sessions and capturing them and doing things with AI with all the stuff that happens on site. I asked Adam, “Is anyone doing this, purposely built for events?” And he said, “Oh yeah, there’s this company called Voxo.”

I went to their website. He said they were going to be at Event Tech Live. I told him I’d hold judgment until I saw a person. I did my talk at ETL on gamification, got done, opened up the report, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I was talking about.” I went straight over to the booth, met Johan, and was like, “Yeah, this is amazing. How can I use this?” I was telling everybody about it. “Hey, this is the future right here. How do we capture everything happening at events and then use that as an extra piece of data?”

Rodney Hart: And it’s so interesting. I think you’ve said so many things I want to jump off on, from hiring a CEO to replace you to Voxo. But let’s talk about the solution. I was always on the client side, responsible for implementing and exploring event technology. So much of it was: I’ve heard the pitches, I want to see it in action. I had a similar experience at Event Tech Live in London. I had done a panel session with four different speakers, and when I saw the summary after the fact, because one of the client speakers had shared it on LinkedIn and sent it to me, I was looking at the summary thinking: at first I was like, “Did you make this?” And then I realized, oh, this was a sponsor company called Voxo. The craziest part was the summary and the identification of who said what. Having done a panel session, I was like, “Whoa, this is crazy good.”

So when you think about Voxo and bringing it to market, is the summary more for people who were in a session and need a refresher? Is it for sessions they couldn’t go to? What do you see as the core use case?

Will Curran: I think that’s the first step, to be honest. Most people think about attendees wanting reports, taking notes, remembering everything, and I think that’s a great benefit. But for me, I’m always thinking about the business case of events and how we maximize revenue, maximize ROI, all the high-level strategy. That’s when I start to think about where the true value is.

I do think there’s going to be a future where our AIs are constantly listening and know everything we know, remember all the sessions we attended, and find ways to integrate those automatically into our strategy. But in this stage of where Voxo is, the real big value is the ability for it to become another marketing asset. I truly believe that right now, in 2025, events are the marketing channel that companies should be investing in. Content marketing is kind of declining and AI can create amazing content, right? But the problem is: how do you maximize as much as possible from that event? All that revenue, all that cost you’re putting into it.

First I think: what if I could turn all these sessions into content marketing for the next 12 months? But where I think the real super power is: the ability for speakers to get an asset that they want to promote, instantaneously. Because our speakers are probably our best marketing channel. They have audiences. They have the knowledge. When they say really smart things, which they do all the time at events, it’s happening at your event. You need to capitalize on that and share it. So then people say, “Oh, I want to go listen to this really smart person. I want to absorb all this content.” The ability to generate an instant report that the speaker can share right after their talk builds that momentum and excitement as it’s happening, versus a speaker who just posts, “Going to XYZ city for this conference,” and that’s the best marketing you’re going to get from them. Now if they have this report, they can actually share the things they learned and get people thinking, “Oh, if that’s the kind of stuff happening at that conference, maybe I want to attend.” That’s where the value really is.

Rodney Hart: And it’s so interesting that you reference demand gen, because when I think of it from the audience acquisition side, there’s so much work you put in. But inside our user conference where we use Voxo, there are 70 sessions. At various points there are seven or eight sessions happening simultaneously for 30 to 45 minutes. As an organizer, you can’t listen to every session. You just hope the presenter is really good. You hear bits and pieces. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken at conferences and thought, “Man, I really wish the organizers heard that.”

I’ve got two follow-on questions. We used it and saw massive success, and I’m going to share some data. We left the summaries ungated. We saw massive uptake. Our audience is very keen on new solutions and technology, so that’s probably part of it. But comparing to video on-demand, I would say 15 to 20% of our sessions are available as full replay video. In one week’s time, the number of people who consumed those AI reports dwarfed an entire year’s worth of on-demand video content. So the question I have: is it easier, is it faster, is it better? What does that mean for video content? Are AI summaries and video replay partners, or competitors?

Will Curran: Such a great question. For so long I had to urge everyone to record as much content as possible because you can re-release it, it has so much value. But when I think about where the future is going and what attendees want, I just think of myself. I always say, “Oh yeah, I’ll watch those on-demand sessions later,” and they sit in your bookmarks for years. Now it’s just so hard to sit down and watch that long format of content. And there’s something really hard about being like, “Do I want to watch the newest episode of ‘The Last of Us’ or an hour-long talk about event strategy?” The answer is usually I just want to turn my brain off.

I think the reason AI summaries are more successful is that when people are looking at post-event content, they’re kind of coming in with their own prejudgments. Advanced users like you and myself have been in events for so long that we’re not necessarily looking for the newest technology. We just need to know: am I looking at the right thing? Am I heading in the right direction based on these key takeaways? The reports work as a great way to get that confirmation.

Also, a lot of times we don’t have time to pick through 20 sessions. But we might pick one on-demand session to say: I missed this one, or I didn’t attend the conference but I heard great things about XYZ keynote. A lot of times what we’re looking for is a summary to see where things are going, and then deep dive into one single piece of it. That’s where the summaries make a really great opportunity: give people a taste and then say, “Okay, I know where I want to deep dive.” That’s also why it’s a great marketing asset. It’s just enough where people go, “I like where most of these sessions are going,” versus committing to one hour-long YouTube recording.

Rodney Hart: That’s great advice. And one unanticipated benefit of Voxo summaries for me has been another way to understand sessions. You can see the feedback scores, but being able to dive into what was actually said in a session is valuable. We provide slide decks for about 90 to 95% of sessions, so there’s a reference point for every session. But if you look at a top-three session and try to go through the slide deck, the best sessions sometimes have three words and a big picture. “Oh, they talked about AI on this slide. What did they say about AI?” Meanwhile, Will’s live drawing session gets five stars and zero reference material, and I have no idea what happened.

One more question: we used Voxo in a post-event capacity. Now I’m months out from our user conference and already thinking about next year. Is there a way to use last year’s content or summary in the audience acquisition strategy? Does it need to be reskinned? Is that something you’re thinking about at Voxo?

Will Curran: Yes. And one thing I love to mention for the audience is the “topics you might have missed” feature. It looks at your event and says: here are a few topics you might want to cover for next year. So from a post-event into next year standpoint, as a planner that’s valuable for understanding what overall trends you totally missed.

On your more specific question about using that content for audience acquisition moving forward: if you have speakers coming back, and I hope and believe that anyone who kills it in a talk should be asked back, then let’s say Will Curran’s coming back to do 2026 event trends after doing 2025 trends. You take his report from last year, post that as a LinkedIn ad or in an email to past attendees, and say, “Look, we’re having Will come back as a speaker. Here’s what his session was last year. Get ready, because this year’s going to be even better.” That gets attendees excited, especially those who attended and really enjoyed that session.

So my first suggestion is: reutilize that content to promote returning speakers and say, “Look what they did last year. Let’s get hyped about what’s coming.” Then I start thinking about ways to take all of the content from these entire event reports and daily reports and do even more with it. Right now that might not all exist, but this is very much just the beginning of where things are going in the AI space and what Voxo is capable of doing.

Rodney Hart: I couldn’t agree more. I think for a really long time, pre-AI, there was too much quantity in event data to process. But large language models thrive on more data. It’s about figuring out how to apply a fresh human creative lens on top of that. There’s always going to be a role for that. Events for years have had gold inside the data that they’ve missed. A 4.85 versus a 4.81 session score, you could differentiate between those. But taking the comments, the content of the session, the summary, and connecting the dots across your top trending sessions: that’s pretty exciting to see where Voxo and AI in general are going in shaping this industry.

Well, I feel like we could keep going. But instead I’m going to say thank you so much for the time you’ve already given us. I want to ask you the question we ask all of our guests. The events industry can be stressful and routinely makes the lists of stressful jobs. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given, or maybe wisdom that you’ve cultivated over the course of your career in events, that you’d share with fellow or aspiring event professionals?

Will Curran: If I had to give one piece of advice, I love giving lots of advice, and hence why everyone should come watch one of my trends talks, but the number one thing I always come back to is this: people get told all the time to “think outside the box” when it comes to the challenges or ideas they have for their events. What I instead challenge people to do is crush the box. Just take that box, throw it away completely, and start brand new.

Let me stretch this out and really think about what the future could look like. One example: we know attendees want more white space and more time in the cities they’re traveling to. They don’t want to be stuck inside a convention center 24/7. We also know there’s a lot of food waste at events, and food and beverage is usually one of the top two expenses alongside AV. What if you could solve all these problems with one solution? Instead of spending all this money on mediocre hotel or convention center food, you go out and say: “Here’s two hours. Here are the ten restaurants within walking distance.” You communicate to those restaurants that people are coming so there are no long lines. You give attendees a 10% discount. Maybe you even get some commission back from the restaurants for sending them that business. Now you’re generating more revenue, attendees are enjoying local food in the city they traveled to, and you’ve eliminated the awkward round table where you’re seated next to someone and thinking, “Oh hi, you’re here. I am Will. Let’s not really talk, though.”

I also say that sometimes we overprogram our events. What if instead you did one keynote at the beginning of a three-day conference and spent the rest of the three days just letting people talk about it, absorb the concept, and implement it? These are all crush-the-box ideas. As planners we need to do this more often because far too often we cut and paste the same things year after year, either because it’s easier or because we assume that’s what our attendees want. In reality, some attendees want crazy ideas. They want to be put in a swinging chair 30 feet in the air and have meetings that way.

Rodney Hart: I love that advice. In my experience in the industry, we do want to do things differently. We try to shake things up. But there is still a gravitational pull to the same formulas. And especially now with new generations coming into the event space, so much of our day is spent on a hamster wheel. Sometimes at events I feel like the event has gotten started, it’s going full speed, and I’m still trying to figure out what I wanted to change. Halfway through planning I think, “Oh man, I would have really loved to change something,” and then it becomes a “next year” conversation.

Thank you very much for your time and all of the wisdom from your very illustrious career. 40 Under 40, there’s a whole lot of things on your LinkedIn. At this point I’m shooting for 100 Under 100. The older you live the more inclusive that list gets.

Will Curran: I know you well enough that you need to be on one of those lists. I’m going to make it happen.

Rodney Hart: Anybody who’s listening, I hope you took something away. If you’re listening and want to get involved and be one of the interview guests yourself, find the link in the description here. You can send a request and it comes to me. We’ll find time and get it scheduled.

Will, before I let you officially go, I’ve got a round of lightning questions if you’re prepared.

Will Curran: Let’s do it.

Rodney Hart: The rule of this, and I follow it about 10% of the time, is: I ask a question, you answer, I move on. I’m not supposed to react.

Will Curran: All right. I’ll try not to say something too controversial.

Rodney Hart: If you were running an event, who is your dream guest keynote speaker?

Will Curran: Christopher Nolan. I want to know how that man thinks about storytelling. And I just want to meet him at some point in my life.

Rodney Hart: What is one movie that everyone should watch?

Will Curran: “Coherence.” My favorite movie is “Inception” but everyone’s seen “Inception.” “Coherence” is about a group of people having dinner and then something weird happens. Just go watch it. It will blow your mind, and then when you hear about how they made the movie, it will blow your mind even more. It had a $20,000 budget. It’s amazing.

Rodney Hart: It’s on my list. Which is harder to plan: multi-day virtual or multi-day in-person events?

Will Curran: Definitely multi-day virtual. How do you capture people’s attention to stay in front of their computer for that many days in a row? We were lucky that during the pandemic everyone was locked in rooms and couldn’t do anything better, but once virtual started coming out and people had choices on where to go, you were getting one day out of them, maximum.

Rodney Hart: What is your current favorite mobile app?

Will Curran: I’ve gotten into continuous glucose monitors. Dexcom has come out with the Stelo, and you can get it on Amazon for around $80 and it lasts you a whole month. Being able to monitor your glucose trends in real time has been absolutely game-changing for me. Dexcom Stelo paired with my Oura ring has been amazing.

Rodney Hart: There is so much information in that. That was the geekiest thing said so far on this show. I love it. Keynote speaker or panel discussion?

Will Curran: Keynote speaker. Panels just become yes-sessions. You get short snippets for answers. When you give a speaker time to ruminate and tell you stories, I would much rather have a keynote speaker blow my mind than five people agreeing with each other.

Rodney Hart: Window seat or aisle seat?

Will Curran: Window seat. I just post up and don’t move the entire flight, even if it’s 18 hours. I lock in, put on a movie or YouTube, and just don’t move.

Rodney Hart: Put me on the aisle. I need to be able to flee. If you could host an event anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Will Curran: In space. Hands down.

Rodney Hart: In the world. That doesn’t count.

Will Curran: I count it. That’s a solid answer.

Rodney Hart: I’ll allow it. What’s your go-to comfort food during event planning stress?

Will Curran: Pretzels. I love pretzels, hands down. Dry or soft, I can do any kind of pretzel. Even just the snack-size dry salty ones. You get carbs and salt and boom, you’re good to go.

Rodney Hart: And I’m guessing that glucose monitor is watching every pretzel.

Will Curran: Keeping an eye on things for sure.

Rodney Hart: Closing event party: live music or DJ?

Will Curran: Definitely a DJ. Live music is cool but it’s really hard to find a great band. And everyone loves a great DJ now. I want the time for a really good DJ.

Rodney Hart: And that’s actually the last question, because now it’s off to you to run a DJ set. That was what we discussed. Will, thank you so much for the time. This was a lot of fun.

Will Curran: Likewise. This has been a blast, man.

Rodney Hart: All right. Until next time. See you all later. Thanks everybody.