Surviving a Keynote Disaster: How We Turned Panic into a Win
What would you do if you’re on stage delivering a keynote demo in front of thousands of people — and suddenly your computer dies? This is exactly what happened to me
In this video, you can see me panic. I’m up on stage with Polita, ready to deliver an exciting demo we’ve rehearsed countless times. An audience of thousands is watching us, but even more nerve wracking, the company’s founders and CFO are judging us from the first row. We need to go through the motions, following the exact lines that the teleprompter is feeding us. But suddenly, my computer dies.
As I’m typing through the demo, I realize something’s wrong. “Where did my monitor go?” you can hear me squeak. I try a little joke, and you can hear the audience laugh. That’s reassuring — they are supporting us, but we need to find a way out of this. I fill the void by loudly wondering how to fill time while the computer turns back on. But it doesn’t. I even try unplugging and plugging the monitor cable. Maybe that will help. It doesn’t.
And now the audience is clapping! It’s one of the best feelings — whatever happens, I can feel the support of Polita and the audience. We’re going to get through this excruciating moment together.
“I have no idea how to continue without the computer,” you can hear my disappointment. “We might need to skip this demo.” Polita wonders if we could nevertheless give chocolates to everyone in the audience. But the audience has already noticed a miracle, even while Polita and I are still fixated on the dead computer: my code is back on the big screen.
What happened is that the team backstage decided to play back a recording of the demo. I look up and think my computer is somehow back. But it’s not; it’s moving by itself. When I realize this, I know I have to start narrating the demo — not at the rhythm of the teleprompter, but at whatever tempo the recording is playing.
We then deliver the demo we wanted to give — me following the recording, while Polita adjusts to the answers I’m giving to our already scripted conversation. With Snowflake, we translate thousands of restaurant reviews to English, rate them, extract the top topics that people complain about, and use a Snowflake Cortex SQL function to compose an email to the restaurant owner using the data we just compiled by calling LLMs with SQL. Isn’t that cool?
So what can we learn from this?
- Embrace Audience Support: Having a demo fail can happen to anyone, and the audience will join you with their support and love. Enjoy the moment, and the audience will enjoy it with you.
- Have a Backup Plan: In this case, the backstage team was ready to play the recording, even if in my panic, I had forgotten about that.
- Rehearse the Backup Plan: It’s good to have a backup plan, but we could have rehearsed it too — then we would have felt even safer while going through it. Luckily, Polita and I were ready to play.
My infinite thanks to Polita Paulus, Julian Forero (who made the whole keynote happen), and everyone else involved on and off-stage, including the awesome audience we had that morning.
The best part of a keynote disaster? Countless people came afterward to express their amusement and happiness at having lived through those moments with us. They felt the panic, thought everything was lost, and then could feel the accomplishment of saving the day, learning new SQL tricks, and even getting some delicious chocolate as a reward.
If you want to learn how to translate, do sentiment analysis, extract topics, and write emails with Snowflake Cortex, check out the demo video I had pre-recorded , and this quickstart guide.
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Try this out with a Snowflake free trial account — you only need an email address to get started.
I’m Felipe Hoffa, Data Cloud Advocate for Snowflake. Thanks for joining me on this adventure. You can follow me on Threads and LinkedIn (while increasingly less on Twitter). And subscribe to reddit.com/r/snowflake for the most interesting Snowflake news.
