StreamAlive: Conversation with Lux Narayan

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  Lux Narayan is a co-founder and the CEO at StreamAlive, the audience engagement platform that makes live sessions come alive, especially on PowerPoint in Zoom and Teams. A serial tech entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Unmetric, a company that was acquired by Cision.

Lux enjoys presenting and his talk at the TED main stage on “lessons from 2,000 obituaries” has been watched by millions. A lifelong comedy fan, he has performed at the Comedy Cellar, NYC. He also enjoys writing and is the author of Name Place Animal Thing, an inspiring fable for grown-ups about hope, positivity, and living one’s best life.

In this interview, Lux talks about StreamAlive.

Geetesh: What problem did StreamAlive set out to solve for presenters that traditional slide decks struggle with?

Lux: Thanks very much, Geetesh, for this opportunity and for everything you continue to do for the presenting fraternity.

Most presentations are monologues that go talk-talk-talk-talk as the presenter goes slide-slide-slide-slide-slide. StreamAlive aims to transform presentations into dialogues. That way, a presenter’s slides can go listen-talk-listen-talk—exactly like a conversation. In short, StreamAlive is an audience engagement platform designed for presentations made to ten or more people.

There are two things that make StreamAlive one of its kind:

1. It transforms chat on platforms like Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet into real-time visual interactions that give a voice to the audience. Examples include world maps, polls, word clouds, and a lot more. Hence, participation is zero friction for the audience, and does not require a second device, scanning a QR code, alternate tabs, etc.
2. StreamAlive is now zero friction for presenters using PowerPoint. Everything we’ve built in StreamAlive over the years is now available as a PowerPoint add-in. This give presenters the ability to have their audience type in meeting chat and have that chat author their presentation slides in PowerPoint in real time.

Geetesh: Do you believe every presentation needs interactivity—or only certain types? Also, how can presenters avoid “interaction overload” while still keeping audiences involved?

Lux: No, I don’t but I would argue that most presentations need interactivity, and even more so when delivered virtually over a platform like Zoom or Teams. If a presenter is only going to talk through the entire session, they might as well have shared a video.

My grandfather was one of the first public speaking teachers in South India. I remember how he would encourage speakers to ask their audience a question of some kind at least once every five minutes. That rule holds true even more now with dwindling attention spans and therefore dwindling retention spans in training scenarios.

People learn and lean-in better when they are engaged and when they are involved. Hence, for any presentation to be engaging, it would be good to have some forms of interactivity at various points.

For virtual instructor-led training, absolutely, and every time.

Geetesh: What excites you most right now about how people present—and what worries you?

Lux: I am excited about the fact that more people are beginning to think of presentations as conversations, as dialogues and not just monologues. What worries me is a possible lazy interpretation of what constitutes dialogue and engagement. Very often you see people claiming an interactive webinar when all that makes it interactive is one or two clunky polls and a Q&A at the end. It’s not a true conversation by any means.

Geetesh: Also, if PowerPoint were invented today, what’s one engagement feature you think it would include by default?

Lux: I love PowerPoint. It helped me get my first job. It’s been around since 1987, one of the most enduring software of all time. How many other software do we know that have lasted under almost unchanged for so many years?

PowerPoint was invented for classrooms, boardrooms, courtrooms, and other physical rooms. The world has changed since 1987. However, once we moved to virtual meetings on Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and WebEx, we continued to use PowerPoint in the same way as it was before. Monologues that occasionally ask people for a binary yes/no or a poll answer.

That’s not a true conversation.

If PowerPoint was invented today, I think it would incorporate features like what we have in StreamAlive. A slide would be a canvas for conversation – one that encourages the audience to participate in a frictionless way and with open-ended responses too, not just closed-ended polls.

Geetesh: Is a trial version of StreamAlive available for users to play with it? If yes, can you share more details?

Lux: Absolutely anyone can get started for free. They can use our web application, our awarded Zoom application, and our PowerPoint add-in- all for free. The only limitation is the audience size. You can only have a single-digit number of audience members participating in the free version. To get started, simply visit the StreamAlive site, and click Sign Up.