Speaker Slam® did not start as a company. It started as a one-off event, and the decision to make it more took about five minutes. This is how it evolved, drawn from the announcements Speaker Slam® sent its community along the way.
2016: One Night at Revival Bar
Before there was a competition, there was a Toastmasters group at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto called CSI Pitchmasters, where Dan Shaikh and Rina Rovinelli met. On October 19th, 2016, they held the first Speaker Slam® at Revival Bar, a venue the owner comped for the night. Marcos Mendosa was crowned the first champion, judged by Farley Flex, Carol Schulte, Mo Waja, and Calvin Strachan. Toronto, it turned out, was ready for a speaking competition like this. Read the full origin story in How We Started Speaker Slam® and Six Years of Speaker Slam®.
2017 to 2019: The Competition Takes Shape
Joze Piranian, a Pitchmasters friend with a lifelong stutter, took the stage and won, and was named Inspirational Speaker of the Year in 2017. The first Grand Slam, in November 2017, drew 200 people to Lula Lounge. In 2018 Rina quit her job to go all in, Dan followed in August, and that November the Grand Slam moved to the 500-seat Jane Mallett Theatre. 2019 was the peak of the live era: sold-out monthly competitions of 200 or more at Lula Lounge, the Emerging Speakers program launched at Staples Studio and outgrew it for the YWCA, a Youth Speaker Slam hosted by Sam Demma and Lillie Rovinelli, Speaker Slam® as the main sponsor of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers, and a Grand Slam that put 600 people in the Lyric Theatre, the 29th Speaker Slam® event in three years. Speeches from the stage were reaching audiences far beyond the room, on their way past 500 million views.
2020 to 2021: The Pandemic Years and Emerging Speakers
2020 opened on the stage. Reinvention ran in January and Purpose followed in the late winter, both in person. Then the pandemic closed the venues and, in Dan's words, "our entire business model was taken away." The online competition the two had always talked about became the plan within weeks, announced in April 2020 as the first-ever global Speaker Slam®.
Speaker Slam® moved online and kept going, running Amplifying Black Voices, Kindness, Resilience, Identity, and Self-Worth through the year, and closing with a 2020 Grand Slam held online. It was also one of the few organizations that went back to a live room the moment it could: Family was held in person on October 21st, 2020 at the Lincoln Alexander Theatre in Hamilton, between two online competitions.
2021 continued online with Love Lessons, Self-Acceptance, a Youth Competition, and Amplifying Women's Voices, and returned to the stage on September 29th for Body Beautiful, the first in-person event in two years, judged by Brian Olds, Laura Slinn, Cheryl Wood, and Ian Tyson. That competition was featured on AMI-TV through the Breaking Character documentary.
Alongside the competitions, Speaker Slam® ran Emerging Speakers, a monthly training program and the first version of what would become the Academy and later the Momentum membership. In October 2021 the company marked five years with a free three-day Momentum Bootcamp on the anniversary dates, and that December the Grand Slam returned to a theatre: a hybrid finals at the Paradise Theatre in Toronto on the theme of Rebirth, where Marjorie Aunos was crowned the 2021 Inspirational Speaker of the Year.
2022 to 2023: Back Online, Then Back to the Stage
The online format continued into 2023, with speakers entering from around the world and judging panels that included Eric Edmeades, Angela Lauria, and Brooke Castillo. It reached its final edition with Body Beautiful in March 2023, with finalists from Canada, the US, Estonia, Sweden, and Australia.
2022: Beyond the Stage
In April 2022, Speaker Slam® launched the Get Conference Ready Speakers Academy. By July it had evolved into Booked & Paid, with a stated premise: being a great speaker is 20 percent of the speaking business, and marketing is the other 80. The same month brought partnerships with Archangel and Speaker Hub.
In August 2022, after a two and a half year absence, The Comeback returned the competition to Lula Lounge, where the first-ever champion Marcos Mendosa returned and won again. The community's collective book, Our Yellow Brick Road, hit number one in public speaking. In November, the first Momentum Conference brought Speaker Slam® to the CBC Glenn Gould Studio for the first time, alongside the 2022 Grand Slam, and CityNews featured the story.
2023 to 2025: Momentum
The Grand Slam made the CBC Glenn Gould Studio its permanent home. The 2024 edition was pulled together in six weeks, the shortest turnaround in the competition's history, to avoid the weeks Toronto was consumed by the Eras Tour, and sold out anyway, with more than 400 people in the room and online. Speaker Slam® ran the Rock the Pod LinkedIn challenge and an Inner Circle in 2023, and in October launched the Momentum membership: twice-monthly classes on storytelling, personal brand, and the business of speaking, with a certification track running from Inspirational Speaker to Thought Leader. The Brand Builder Competition gave members a stage for positioning rather than storytelling, and the Command the Room corporate training program was born out of the same group.
Alumni stories accumulated: Mike Shoreman's documentary and TEDx talk, Joze Piranian's documentary, Danielle Campo McLeod's Canada's Walk of Fame recognition, and more than a thousand speakers on the stage.
2026: Season 10 and the Next Model
In February, a ten-year wait ended: the speakerslam.com domain, taken when the competition launched in 2016, came up for auction on the day of the 2024 Grand Slam. Dan won the bidding war from an Airbnb while the team got ready for the show, and the new site launched on it a year later. The 10th anniversary season ran five competitions and a Grand Slam. In June, Speaker Slam® broke its own model and launched Momentum Speakers, the agency built on the decade. Season 11 was announced with four themes for 2027, twelve speakers at every event, and the top three from each competition advancing to the Grand Slam.
One speech can change your life. It has been the line since the first night, and it is still the whole idea.