Big Valley's Story Slam Recap

For our fifth season premiere, we’ve got something a bit different. As part of San Francisco Tech Week in early October, Big Valley hosted an event called Make Me Care: The 60-Second Story Slam. It was an open mic of sorts for entrepreneurs looking to pitch their company in, as the name suggests, 60 seconds, to a group of media, analyst and investor judges. We took the best of that program and turned into this podcast. Enjoy.A special thank you to all who attended and/or bravely participated, as well as our esteemed panel of judges: Don Clark, Katie Eggers, Dave Smith, and Chris Velazco.

Welcome to our special fourth anniversary edition of Pressing Matters!If you do the math, you'll quickly realize that I interviewed CNBC's John Fortt for our debut episode two months before ChatGPT changed the universe. So, yes, our anniversary podcast will be about AI, again. AI – AI in the world and AI in journalism for the third straight year. And I was feeling a little guilty about that, but really... it's not like it's even close to the same conversation we had last year, or for that matter, the years before. AI changes everyday and maybe every hour.So to guide us through the past year of change, we asked past guests Jon Swartz of Techstrong and Emilia David of the ISMG Group to come back and talk about AI in China, Hugging Face (who goes IPO next year), and what they predict for a year from now, when we'll be marking the fifth anniversary of not only this podcast, but a little technology called ChatGPT2, for this special anniversary episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech.I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Emelia and Jon. Here's our chat with them. Enjoy.Big Valley is hosting two events during SF Tech Week in October. We would love to see you there.Marketers' Hot Take Happy Hour: An Evening of Agree or Disagree | October 5Join fellow B2B marketing and communications pros at a rooftop bar for a happy hour built around the topics we love to debate — what’s working, what’s overrated, what needs to disappear, and where marketing and comms are headed next. Grab a drink and your AGREE and DISAGREE stickers, then make your way around the room weighing in on some of marketing’s most debatable hot takes that we’ll have on posterboards around the room. Register here: https://partiful.com/e/RxkakL6ey0GFQdeeTCGFMake Me Care: The 60-Second Story Slam | October 9Step up to the mic and tell your company or product story in just 60 seconds to a panel of people who hear pitches for a living — tech reporters (Don Clark, enterprise tech reporter from The New York Times and Chris Velazco, personal tech reporter), an industry analyst, and a venture capitalist. If you're a founder, start-up, builder or established company, this event is for you. Register here: https://partiful.com/e/6mK2jtOD2ggQrsLgv7YI

Sharon Goldman may be one of the most important voices in AI journalism today, but her path there was hardly typical. She didn't even get into reporting until several years after college, and when she did, she wrote for publications covering everything from the jewelry business to marketing to even TV Guide.But in a semi-serendipitous turn, she joined VentureBeat in 2022, a few weeks before its AI reporter left. She took over the beat a few months before ChatGPT changed her world and everyone else's. After a stop at Fortune from 2024 to 2026, also covering AI, Sharon is now on her own again as the founder and editor of the Ground Level AI newsletter on Substack, which in one month has already attracted thousands of subscribers.Sharon joined us to talk about her plans for Ground Level AI, something ChatGPT has helped her figure out, coincidentally, her late-blooming singer/songwriter career, and why she's a birder, not a bird watcher, for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech.I'm DaveReddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Sharon. Here's our chat with Sharon. Enjoy.

Richie Cotton is definitely one of the more different guests we've had on the pod, and I'm not talking only about his penchant for loud tropical shirts. He's a math guy, or a maths guy, as they'd say in his native England.He's been a data scientist, a government researcher, and even a math teacher, which follows family tradition. And for the past 10 years, he's worked with DataCamp, an online education site that focuses on data science and AI, and where Richie serves both as senior data evangelist and as a podcaster.In a sense, he's still teaching. But he's also an influencer, although he prefers "connector," with tens of thousands of followers. Richie joined us to talk about DataCamp's mission, how a boy from a small northern English town is managing in New York City, and those fabulous shirts of his, for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech.I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Richie. Here's our chat. Enjoy.

We've had some Renaissance men and women on the show before, but I'm not sure if anyone can outdo James Maguire, the Executive Director of TechVoices. He's a composer and pianist who has recorded an album of original songs. He's the writer of non-fiction books on American culture. He's currently working on a novel. And he's still found time to put together a 20-year run as a tech journalist, including the past 15 months with TechVoices, the site he founded in March 2025.James joined us to talk about his plans for TechVoices, his thoughts on how to fund journalism, and his life as a self-described creative dreamer for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including James. Here's our chat with James. Enjoy.

Chris Preimesberger is one of the deans of tech journalism, known especially for his 15-year run at E-Week, including nearly 10 as the magazine's editor-in-chief. But tech reporting is, in many ways, the second half of his career.He started in the 70s as a sports writer for the LA Daily News, where he covered a guy named John Elway as a high school baseball player, and later USC, UCLA, and the pre-Showtime Lakers. He did a stint as a sports information director at Stanford, he spent 10 years at the old Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto covering everything, it seems, but tech. And he even ran a desktop publishing business, which indirectly led him to starting his tech journalism career in 1999, since he genuinely understood software development.Now a freelancer for several titles, Chris joined us to share tales about Cary Grant and Milton Berle, his father's connection to Marilyn Monroe, and what he considers the three watershed moments in technology for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech.I'm Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Chris. Here's our chat. Enjoy. 

Gene Marks didn't set out to be an influencer. He wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and be a CPA. And he has been for more than 30 years, first at KPMG and now as President of his own business, The Marks Group. But some years ago, he offered to write a regular business column for The Philadelphia Inquirer and thus began a whole new aspect of Gene's career. Now, in addition to the Inquirer, Gene writes for Forbes, Inc. and Entrepreneur, to name a few, appears regularly on TV, speaks upwards of 60 times a year, and boasts more than 130,000 online followers as one of the top B2B tech influencers in America. And yes, he's still a practicing CPA.Gene joined us to discuss his evolution as an influencer, what he tells his clients about AI replacing workers, or not, as it were, and his days writing for the school paper at the oldest public high school in America, for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with top media and influencers in B2B tech.I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Gene.Here's our chat. Enjoy.

Jeff Burt spent his childhood wandering the world with his Army dad and digging deep into fantasy and horror stories with his mom. They even wrote a few superhero stories together just for fun.So by the time he enrolled at Keene State in New Hampshire, Jeff was dedicated to storytelling. He split his time writing for the school newspaper, where he rose to executive editor his senior year, and DJing at the school radio station. In the end, he chose writing, and after cutting his teeth at local papers in New England, Jeff joined the staff of eWeek in 2000. Despite admitting he barely knew much about tech, Jeff not only got the job, he kept it for 16 years and became one of the top tech reporters in the industry.Now a freelancer for several titles, Jeff joined us to preview the RSA Conference in San Francisco later this month, and he gave me a chance to reminisce about my upbringing on Cape Cod, where he lives, for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech.I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Jeff. Here's our chat with him. Enjoy.

Sean Kinney is yet another one of our guests who had at least one parent, his mother in this case, who was a school teacher. That's clearly a theme for journalists. What's a bit new this time around is that his mom later went into the insurance world, along with his dad, asking the tough questions to get to the truth of the matter, just like a reporter does.Sean does the same, just as an analyst and as a journalist. And with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona just weeks away, we talked to Sean, the editor in chief at RCR Wireless News/principal analyst at RCRTech, about what we should expect the truth to be at this year's show, 6G, Wi -Fi 8, AI and more AI. In addition to previewing Mobile World Congress, Sean joined us to discuss his early days as a reporter in, of all places, Key West, his shift from the Keys into telco wireless, and his love of Ole Miss football.Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing is the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech, hosted by Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley's Media & Influencers Practice.Here's our chat with Sean. Enjoy.

Jon may not be a philosopher, but as a writer, analyst, and podcaster, he certainly has the trust of the B2B community. Jon joins Pressing Matters to tell us about his mission to disrupt B2B tech media and analysis, his thoughts on the high percentage of AI hype versus reality, and how he's managed to live in Massachusetts for more than 30 years without picking up an accent.Welcome to Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Jon Reed.Here's our chat with Jon. Enjoy.