Monthly Archives: March 2026

Drones and presentation skills

In Mikko’s hand, a drone that destroys drones. Behind us on the screen, a container that is actually a transportable drone factory that can make dozens of drones per day. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

What’s the current state of drone warfare and drone defense in Ukraine 🇺🇦, Finland, and elsewhere? How does the future look like? 🚀

How does it sound when the topic is presented by one of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, Mikko Hyppönen, who is also perhaps the world’s #1 expert in drones in terms of presentation skills? 🎤

📌 Mikko’s content is always relevant, interesting and engaging for the audience.

📌 He always begins and ends on time.

📌 His visuals (PowerPoint) were full of insightful pictures and video. 

📌 He had brought with him a bunch of props. In this case it was products of his own company Sensofusion, and a bunch of other drone-related artifacts. 

Now I’ve held in my hand the kind of optical fibre the drones leave behind them and that now covers vast areas in Ukraine. 

What you see in the photo is a drone that kills drones.

📌 Drones are scary, but as always, the more you know about a topic, it becomes slightly less scary. Drones are not omnipotent.

❓On another note, I asked Mikko how he prepares for his presentations nowadays, as compared to in the past, when he was still honing his presentation skills.

He’s a modest guy. His reply was that as he’s recently joined a new business, the main thing is to spend time learning lots and lots of new subject matter. 

However, he added there’s one thing that hasn’t changed in his presentations: 

He’s always considered himself to be an interpreter of making complex technical topics understandable and interesting to the general public. 

This continues to be in the core of his presentations, wherever he speaks.

Have you ever listened to someone who’s able to distill a complex topic so that the audience gets it? 🔥

Is it harder to be a contestant than the master of ceremonies at a speech contest?

A speech contest trophy from way back when.

Many years ago I was a contestant at a public speaking contest. Tomorrow I’ll be hosting this same Toastmasters contest in Tallinn, with fantastic speakers from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland 🔥🔥🔥

For the contest speech, you spend from 5 to 7 minutes on stage. As the master of ceremonies tomorrow, I’ll be on stage from 11:35am until 6pm. It already feels like running a marathon.

They say the shorter you need to make a speech, the more preparation it takes. The contestants have done a huge amount of preparation for their speeches and they deserve all the respect from the audience. 

Wearing my “winning shoes” at a speech contest, telling a story about a duck and a couple of other animals.

Hosting an event is hard work, too, and requires careful planning and practice. Tomorrow there’s a minute-by-minute schedule of what will happen on stage between the opening words at 11:20am until the closing words at 6pm. 

And something always goes wrong 😃 You need to be prepared for that, too. 

The best thing is that you always learn something. And you improve your routine. And it’s fun.

May the contest begin! 💥