The industry built a velvet rope.
We built a door.

The friction machine

Here's how the speaker industry works today. A bureau takes 25 to 30 percent of every deal. Speakers often pay just to be listed, then wait in a catalog hoping an agent remembers their name. Bookings that should take a phone call take weeks, because three layers of middlemen each need their meeting. And who gets on stage is decided by relationships and rolodexes instead of by what actually happens when the lights come up.

That model doesn't serve speakers. It doesn't serve the companies and associations hiring them. It serves the rope.

The SPEAKEASY answer

SPEAKEASY is a marketplace with the middle removed. Speakers create a free profile: one tight video, a headshot, and six sharp answers. Clients answer the mirror of those six questions and get ranked matches with a plain-English reason for every single one. Then the two parties talk — directly. We never sit in the middle of the deal, never touch the money, never take a cut. Zero fees for speakers. Zero fees for clients. Zero commissions. Book at the speed of a phone call.

Built blind, on purpose

SPEAKEASY collects zero demographic data. There is no gender field, no race field, no age field — anywhere in this system. That's not a settings toggle; it's the architecture. Search, matching, and ranking operate exclusively on the Six Questions, topic tags, fees, booking speed, and location. Photos and video appear on profiles because clients deserve to see stage presence, but no image, name, or inferred demographic signal is ever used in ranking, matching, or sorting. The only currency on SPEAKEASY is the quality of what you deliver to an audience.

Trust is the house rule

Every profile is reviewed by a human before it goes live — real speakers, real videos, no bots, no fakes. That's the verification we owe every client who walks through this door. What we don't run is a bureau-style interrogation of every claim, because that's just the velvet rope rebuilt. We trust speakers to tell the truth — about their fees, their speed, their past clients, and who they really are on a stage. Don't inflate. Be real. Deliver real impact. On SPEAKEASY your reputation compounds with every room you move, and nothing kills a speaking career faster than a profile your performance can't cash. We verify the door. You earn the room.

And to be plain about it: verification is a quality bar, not a guarantee. Every booking, contract, and payment is strictly between speaker and client — SPEAKEASY never touches the deal and assumes no risk in it. Do your diligence like the professional you are.

Who's behind the door

SPEAKEASY was founded by Mitch Mitchem — keynote speaker, founder and CEO of Human HIVE, and author of F*CK YOUR FRICTION: How to Fight Back Against the Systems Stealing Your Time & Money. After two decades and millions of audience members, Mitch watched the same machine skim the same cut from every stage in America and decided the fix wasn't a better bureau. It was no bureau.

SPEAKEASY is part of the HIVE philosophy: Amplify, Not Automate. Technology should elevate people, not replace them — and it definitely shouldn't stand between two humans trying to make something great happen on a stage.