Thank you for saying something about the speaker lineup being entirely white men. Your comment was a humbling, but necessary, lesson in the limits of our processes.

It turns out that most of us don't read the published version of our blog posts and assume that they're pretty close to the drafts that gets circulated ahead of time. In this case, the draft had a very diverse lineup that got swapped out at the last second for fear that we didn't have permission to include the original speakers in our marketing. (This blog post is now updated with a new more diverse list of speakers)

Now that begs the question of why we have so many pre-existing relationships with white men who have given that permission. But at least we have started to fix the public statement to be closer to our intention. We intend to put a diverse line up of speakers on stage at Medium Day.

Your comment is how we realized our mistake, so thank you!