SPEAK Talks Of LI Celebrating 1 Year Anniversary With Event Where It All Began

FARMINGDALE, NY — SPEAK, a platform for storytellers and people with ideas, is celebrating its one-year anniversary where it all began.

"SPEAK: Growth" is scheduled for 7 to 10 p.m. Thursday at The Nutty Irishman, at 323 Main St., Farmingdale. People can purchase tickets, $50 each, here. Eight speakers from different industries and backgrounds will be sharing their narratives related to the event's theme of "growth."

Speakers at the "Growth" event include: Jim Sabellico, Andrea De Loney, Dr. Nathalie Lilavois, Adrian Goodwin, Kathy James, Richard Luna, Sarah Cavanaugh, and Lea Garinis. They will each discuss what "growth" means to them in six-to-10 minutes, delving into three key components: their moment of truth, the moment of transformation, and the moment of impact.

SPEAK was founded by co-leaders George Andriopoulos, the architect; Fred P. Banny, the builder; and Jason Martin, the engineer.

Andriopoulos, a former TED Talks event producer who gave three talks himself, envisions SPEAK as a platform where he and his co-leaders take what they learned from TED and mold it into something different. Andriopoulos said TED Talks are "very necessary," but believes SPEAK can go places where TED cannot.

"I think what we do really well is, we create a platform for any type of speaker and any type of talk," Andriopoulos told Patch. "There are rules around TED Talks are 'Ideas worth spreading.' That’s their tagline. Whereas we are, ‘People with ideas and stories.’ A TED Talk is a unique, actionable idea that people grow on. For us, storytelling is what drives our talks, so if people just have an important story, something happens in their lives, then they tell the story. We know the importance of stories. We want to make storytelling itself the importance of this platform. But also, create something that is big enough to bring authority to a SPEAK Talk. That [people] do a SPEAK Talk and they’ve accomplished something major."

SPEAK strives to be inclusive of all different types of speakers, Andriopoulos said. The platform aims to not control the product too much so the authenticity of speeches shine through, he explained. He said it's "tough" collaborating with speakers to help them turn their stories into a SPEAK Talk, which has led Andriopoulos to his biggest lesson learned over SPEAK's first year in business.

"We’ve dealt with so many different types of speakers that sometimes, you have a preconceived notion of what their talk should be after you hear their pitch," he said. "But it kind of doesn’t go that way when you put your preconceived notions there. If you let the speaker drive the process and then we have their story in mind and we help give them the tools to turn it into a talk, that’s when we realize, 'OK, this is the right way to do it.' This is why we started this. We didn’t want to be a platform that put speakers in a box. We wanted to create a platform where people can freely tell a story without us putting restrictions on them."

SPEAK is a global platform with big expansion plans, but Farmingdale, the town where it all began, is where the co-leaders wanted to host their first anniversary event.

"We’re in other countries, we’re in other states, but we want make sure people know Farmingdale is our home," Andriopoulos said. "It’s where everything started. Farmingdale will always be a huge part of our story."

Becoming an international platform was the biggest challenge the SPEAK co-leaders faced.

"We want to be out there with the TEDs of the world, right?" Andriopoulos said. "So we knew we couldn’t start as a mom and pop and build our way up, we had to have a big vision initially, so we said from day one, we are a global platform."

SPEAK held its first overseas show in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Oct. 5 — one of 10 total shows in its first year. It has 100 talks in its library.

In the second year, SPEAK has lofty plans: between 75 to 100 events. The co-leaders want to expand into more countries and host shows all over the United States. They want to grow their YouTube subscriber base from 345 to over 1 million. It wants its podcast to go from the top-50 on Apple to the top-10. And they want to continue giving back.

"We’re a social enterprise, so we have a benevolent mission of going into public schools and helping to procure student speakers and coach them and train them to be public speakers," Andriopoulos said.

SPEAK puts on free shows at schools and is looking to get more schools onboard with the platform.

While SPEAK has its challenges and goals, Andriopoulos said two things stuck out as his favorite parts of the first year.

For one, Andriopoulos said he, Banny and Martin formed a "really special" partnership.

"It’s the first time in my business career where I’ve had a partnership that really makes sense, and we’ve formed a brotherhood through this partnership," he said. "That’s really important to me. It makes working fun every day."

His other favorite thing, he said, is working with so many speakers and learning "powerful" personal stories.

"Some of these personal stories may be very private to them. If you hear it and kind of resonate with the story, it becomes really powerful. So I’ve been very lucky to collaborate with most of our speakers this year, hear their stories, help them cultivate that into a talk and help amplify their voices."

While SPEAK is celebrating its first anniversary, Andriopoulos said he began conceptualizing it in 2016. He moved into his big loft office space for Launchpad Five One Six seven years ago. While his business management consulting business had nothing to do with public speaking, Andriopoulos felt he needed to host a speaking event there, maybe once a month.

Andriopoulos shelved the idea as he grew as a public speaker. He, Banny and Martin began fleshing out the SPEAK concept in 2021. They held their first show at 317 Main Street in Farmingdale in November 2022.

"To see it come to fruition and then it’s a year later, it’s incredible," Andriopolous said. "The feeling is just amazing, it really is."