Reclaiming the All-Hands
I spend most of my time on "serious" projects, but the last couple weekends I decided to take a break and solve a very specific friction problem..
The latest result of those weekends is Talks.fyi.
The communication tax
In any growing business, there is a hidden tax on communication. We know that sharing updates across teams creates shared ownership. We know it uncovers hidden skillsets. Yet, we rarely do it well.
Too often, "internal communication" is synonymous with management updates. The real value, however, lives in the peer-to-peer exchange. It is when an engineer shows a designer a new workflow, or a marketer explains a win to the product team. Most of the time, the barrier to this "bottom-up" sharing isn't a lack of ideas. It is the tool.
We have all been there. You are organizing an all-hands session and you are suddenly juggling different Slides, PowerPoint, or Keynote versions. The actual content gets buried under a "tech setup" shuffle. When the barrier to entry is a complex design suite, the team stays silent.
Lowering the floor
I built talks.fyi to make presentations fast and distraction-free. The goal was to reclaim the spirit of the lightning talk and make it accessible to everyone in the building.
The philosophy behind it is pretty simple:
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Zero accounts. You shouldn't need a login to share an idea with your colleagues.
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Privacy by default. Everything stays in your browser's local storage. There are no massive cloud uploads.
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Speed. Image uploads and Giphy search alongside curated gradients mean you spend five minutes on the deck, not five hours.
Meet Talky: Your 90s-inspired assistant
To keep things from feeling too corporate (and to give me an excuse to learn zDog animations), I have introduced a bit of personality into the mix. Meet "Talky."
Talky is the Talks.fyi mascot, inspired by the helpful (and nostalgic) pre-AI assistants of the 90s. While modern software is obsessed with complex LLMs, Talky is just there to throw a bit of fun into the process and help you navigate the tool. He is a reminder that while the work we do is serious, the way we share it doesn't have to be. He is there to cheer you on and ensure that the process of building a deck feels like a creative break rather than a chore.
Better than a keynote
The best sessions I have ever attended weren't long-form speeches. They were high-energy bursts of information from the people actually building the product.
If you want to improve how your team collaborates, stop asking for "perfect" presentations. Give them a place to get their thoughts heard without the overhead. By lowering the floor, you invite the quiet experts to contribute to the collective knowledge of the business.
Instead of one thirty-minute talk that puts half the room to sleep, try five 6-minute talks. It forces people to be concise and keeps the momentum up.
Talks.fyi is live now. It is offline-capable, portable, and built to get out of your way. Use it to share something cool you are working on.