Lara Hogan

Etsy’s engineering director on promoting performance, honing her spidey senses and finding ways to speak up in a restricted industry.

- Ruth Hamilton

Those readers who frequent the web conference circuit may well recognise Lara Hogan’s face; she regularly takes to the stage to share performance advice at events. However, recently she’s branched out into a new topic – and a brave one at that: the secrets of successful public speaking. “I cannot tell you how nerve-wracking it is to get up there and try to tell people that they can be good [at presenting]!” Hogan smiles. “I gave the first version of the talk last week and it was definitely intimidating.”

Although Hogan is a pro now, her start in public speaking was not as smooth. “For my first conference ever they had sent me an email to invite me and I was like, ‘Woah, I wonder how they got my information? This is pretty massive. They must have read my blog posts or something, ’” she recalls. “Then when I was standing by the side of the stage and they were introducing me, I realised that the biography they were reading was definitely not mine.”

To this day, Hogan’s not sure who the organisers confused her for. Add to that the fact that she realised a couple of days before the event that she’d been scheduled for a keynote rather than the track talk she had been expecting, prompting a last minute rewrite to make her presentation broader and more accessible, and a cringeworthy moment when an audience member asked a question that Hogan thought was a joke (it wasn’t), and it’s a wonder she ever returned to the stage at all.

“Yeah, it was awful and terrifying. And it definitely was ... how do I put this? A good learning experience, ” she laughs. “I tried to look at it like OK, how could I prepare differently? What could I learn about what to ask the organisers about what they want out of the talk before I write it? Those kinds of things. To try and make sure the next one was going to be way better.”