Last weekend I gave a talk at TEDxYale called Trust by Design. I haven’t quite come down from it — equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. More on that in a moment.

The premise of my talk was simple: every company is now effectively a technology company, where AI, automation, and digital platforms are the operating systems of modern business. Your technology decisions determine whether people can depend on you. Whether they can trust you. That hidden connection between technology decisions and trust is one that too many organizations don’t recognize until something breaks. Trust isn’t a communications problem or a compliance checkbox. It’s a design discipline.

I talked about what’s at stake when we don’t deliberately design for trust, with stories of companies that have suffered failures, from CrowdStrike to 23andMe to Boeing. I shared practices for designing trust in from the start — before your architecture is set, before your product ships, before users find what you missed. When you design for trust from the start, you don’t just avoid failure. You build solutions people believe in and can rely on. You build technology worth trusting.

The other six TEDxYale speakers were each remarkable in their own way.

Elihu Rubin, a Yale professor of architecture, showed photographs of ordinary buildings from around the country, tracing how they evolve over decades. I found myself unexpectedly moved. Both sets of my grandparents raised their families in New Haven, in the buildings he was describing, the streets he was tracing. I took an architecture course in college, sitting next to the same friend who had just watched me speak, and I briefly considered switching majors. Since Saturday, I keep noticing cornices and Frankenstein buildings that have grown into themselves over time. That’s what a good talk does: it changes how you see.

Sofia Costa Franco, a college sophomore, spoke about the importance of live theater with a clarity and confidence that made me forget she was nineteen. Her argument was about the irreplaceable nature of shared experience, the particular electricity of watching something in a room with other people when anything can happen. I feel this every time I watch my son perform in his college theater group, and every time I sit in a Broadway theater, waiting for the curtain to go up.

Arya Ökten, a graduate student in biology, explained the brain-gut connection using hand-drawn cartoons and the kind of plain language that makes you wonder why scientists don’t always talk this way. Making complex work accessible to everyone in the room is one of my favorite things to witness.

What struck me about all of them, and honestly about myself too, was watching terrifically accomplished people visibly uneasy before they took the stage, and then seeing them overcome it. The red dot (where every TEDx speaker stands to deliver their talk) has a way of equalizing everyone.

But getting to that red dot is the part nobody sees.

I’ve given a lot of talks. Keynotes, university lectures, fireside chats, panel discussions. I think on my feet. I’m generally comfortable on a stage.

But a TEDx talk is different. Fourteen minutes, no notes, no teleprompter, no podium to lean on. You memorize a script — every word, every pause, every transition — and then you stand on a small red dot and deliver it to an audience while two cameras record everything for YouTube. There is nowhere to hide and no way to recover gracefully if your mind goes blank.

Here’s what you should know about me: my memory is not my superpower. I can synthesize, analyze, connect ideas across domains. Ask me to recall something verbatim, and I will let you down. Even something I wrote myself.

So the lead-up looked like this: I practiced in the kitchen, in the car, in the shower, on walks. My husband and all three of my kids listened to me run through the talk over and over. They challenged my ideas and how I conveyed them, told me where a transition didn’t land, where I was saying words but not quite meaning them yet.

The night before, I ran through the talk a few more times while my kids struggled to stay awake on the couch. On the way to campus, I repeated sections aloud in the car like a person who had completely lost it. My daughter picked out my outfit, did my hair and makeup, and told me I was ready. My son knew the script cold — he could have walked up there and delivered it himself — and made it clear he would if I needed him to. And my best friend was there, back on the campus where we met as college roommates all those years ago, cheering me on like she always has. The investment, kindness, and genuine care of my loved ones meant more than they know.

My parents weren’t there. My mom has been gone for thirteen years now, my dad for nearly four. But I felt them. I wore my mom’s blue blazer (she had far more fashion sense than I ever will). I spoke on a campus where my dad went to college, in a town where both of my parents grew up. They came to every soccer game, shuttled me to flute lessons, drove me to summer camps, sat through my PhD defense not understanding a word of it and beaming anyway. They would have been proud.

The theme of TEDxYale 2026 was Hidden Connections. It fits all of it: the talks, the moment, the people who made it possible.

After it was over, my kids and I walked around campus, exploring old haunts and seeing students throw frisbees on the quad. I showed them the classroom where I taught in the fall, the residential colleges, the courtyards that look exactly as they did when I was a student there. We had dinner at Yorkside Pizza, a restaurant that has been a New Haven institution for decades. When we were ready to head home, we found our car had a flat tire. After wrangling a tow truck and an Uber ride, I took a deep breath — glad the day was done, and glad it had happened at all.

I’m proud of the talk, proud of doing a hard thing, and genuinely touched by the people who supported me. The video will be on YouTube in about a month. I’m curious what people will take from it, what will resonate, what will spark a conversation.