Top Tips
Ant Cauchi is PepTalk’s co-founder and a digital veteran with over 25 years of experience leading innovative companies. A proper Londoner at heart, now based in New York City, Ant has spent his career turning ideas into impact.
Q: What excites you most about the partnership between Peptalk and VenueScanner?
A: There are a few things that really excite me about this partnership. Firstly, the Venuescanner team are great to work with, very much like our mindset at PepTalk, they are open to ideas and also very quick to implement, which is so key to making partnerships work.
Secondly, integrating the ability to book any of the world’s smartest experts and talent, seamlessly wherever a client may need, has been a vision of ours for a while.
To see this start to come to life, where bookings can happen off-platform and wherever the customer is, is a really exciting evolution for us, and one we want to scale a lot more in the next 18 months.
Q: In your view, what makes a truly great event?
A: Four key elements that make an event truly memorable for me:
- A unique or interesting space or room (especially if you haven’t been there before)
- Great experts or speakers, people who help uplift you and give you some new knowledge or fun to take home and talk about
- The network of people there — a great event requires the right mix of personalities to meet and share stories with.
- The red wine, of course!
Q: What’s your favourite venue in New York, and why?
A: It has to be Forest Hills, it’s just a fantastic venue, with great history that features the best talent, it just has a magical feel to it, and also it’s slightly off the well-beaten track of Manhattan, so it feels like a new find every time.
Q: When you come back to the UK, what hotel or restaurant is your go-to?
A: I love Charlotte Street Hotel as a place to meet and have afternoon tea and have spent a lot of fun time around that area. For food, my go-to splurge is always Roka, as I can never get enough sushi.
Q: You’ve worked with thousands of speakers through Peptalk. Do you have a personal favourite, and what makes them stand out?
A: This is a tough one, as we have so many amazing people. Still, I remember the first time the excellent, honest Josh Connolly, a mental health speaker, did a live session with us when we were only a few months old. I found myself tearing up at nine in the morning and, realising that the impact of a great story (even virtually) could have a huge impact.
Q: How do you see the future of workplace events and culture evolving?
A: I think people are craving more human in-person meet-ups, as society still reboots post-COVID to the ‘back in office’ culture and the world of AI grows around us.
I think these don’t have to be huge, big end-of-year events; they can be more intimate and often, connecting on different topics, micro or macro, with different experts’ input, be it outside voices or internal, which gives more time for connection.
Q: What’s the most memorable event you’ve ever been part of at Peptalk?
A: There have been so many, but I felt very proud this year in Orlando when one of our speakers, Allie K. Miller, stood up in front of thousands of people at the conference. I truly heard and saw the reaction that this one booking made on people… It was a nice moment, if not always nerve-wrecking, ha.
Q: If you could host a dream event anywhere in the world with any speaker, what would it look like?
A: That’s a tough one, but I’d probably bring together three or four of our top sports experts from different worlds — Olympians, Formula 1, tennis, and football — to share their journeys and unpack the stories that got them there. I think Andre Agassi would be my star guest here. For a little top-of-the-world feeling, we could host on the rooftop of the Standard Hotel in New York.
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