Announcing this year’s compere: Jesse Thorn

In my experience, a successful conference should not simply be a collection of stories, but should themselves weave a greater narrative throughout the day. This is something that’s happened unaided at Build in previous years, but this year, we didn’t want to leave that up to chance. We are proud to introduce our compère, Jesse Thorn.

Jesse Thorn is the host and producer of The Sound of Young America, a syndicated arts and culture interview program distributed by Public Radio International and carried on stations around the United States. He also co-hosts Jordan, Jesse, Go!, a popular comedy podcast, and is producer and “Bailiff” on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. Jesse is the founder and principal of MaximumFun.org, a listener-supported, independent media outlet that produces and distributes comedy podcasts and puts on a popular annual conference known as MaxFunCon. Additionally, Jesse hosts and helps produce Put This On, a video series and blog about men’s style. He formerly hosted The Grid, a culture recommendation program on IFC: The Independent Film Channel.

However, a compère is but one piece of this puzzle. We’ve been working closely with each of this year’s speakers to better understand what ideas they want to share with you, and each of the stories that they are trying to tell. Our speakers have also been discussing their talks with each other regularly, which has shaped their presentations to not only avoid redundancy, but to cultivate overlap where it might prove valuable to deliver a greater message. This has paid off handsomely, as our lineup this year is already coming together to be one of the most interesting collection of stories, theories and ideas that we’ve ever given a home to.

On the day, we’ll be confidently handing over responsibility of the narration to one of this generation’s greatest storytellers. It is an honour and a privilege to have Jesse joining the Build team this year, and I for one am excited to see the results of this experiment. We hope you are too.

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