Just got back from my first Adobe Max conference in beautiful south beach Miami. It was a meandering journey to prepare for and to present my first “MC host” keynote. I’ve done several very large audience public speaking events before and don’t remember any anxiety or stress preparing for those–i just had to go on stage and show my products, use them live, and hope they didn’t crash. Someone that was always easy for me–i’m very comfortable with the products i build, and I love talking about them in my natural speaking voice and style.
For this event, my role was very different–i got to frame what firefly is, our vision for firefly at Adobe, and then i got to sit backstage and watch as my amazing creative colleagues ran through the demos.
Some of the feelings:
- just waiting for the day to come, was the most difficult part of the process. I was so glad the day of, and when it was my time to come out and speak i felt entirely at peace and just happy and excited. was awesome experience. Thank you to the amazing team that works behind the scenes–100+ folks–to make these things come together.
- Having to speak some “corporate speak” was the most difficult part of the presentation. The speech writer who worked with me was a like a jedi-knight, totally got into my head and had me ready. Thanks Steve.
- Getting to share my personal POV, feelings, and excitement–was just delightful and fun and really, a life highlight of sorts. I had done these kind of events for developers at Microsoft when i did several very large events including getting to be on stage with Bill Gates. but being at max, with my creative community that i feel so much more direct kinship with… was, AMAZING.
- I was able to sneak in some of my personal touches: latinx culture, my cat Avon Barksdale (referred to a video i made the night before to relax in my hotel room, of me and Avon dancing a Cueca together), my love for Peru and Chile. I had many colleagues tell me they appreciated those touches and the latinx community in particular gave me some lovely feedback; being seen and heard is so important to all of us, it was my honor to represent latinas and latinos in this context. Gracias.
Here’s the link to Forest Key introducing Adobe Firefly at Max 2026 cued for my entrance. I did a overall intro, followed by play-by-play commentary between presenters as we showed off the AMAZING new features in Adobe Firefly. Our incredible end-to-end video tools for both traditional and AI/generative video, Firefly Boards (which i’m obsessed with, one of my absolute favorite places to spend time ideating), the new Firefly Design and Firefly Builder, and the cherry on top, Firefly Graph!
So, much, fun. Thank you to the hundreds of folks building these products, this was such a proud moment for all of us on the projects at Adobe.
Final thought, it was so worth it to sneak in a ridiculous GenZ joke at the end–I got more groans than laughs, but it made ME LAUGH, and that was worth it!
