How Big Brain made intellectual nightlife hot again

Emily is “the gal that runs Big Brain”, a lecture series she started in March 2025 that hosts more than ten events a month across the Bay Area. The format is simple: a real lecture, but in a bar, with social time before and after. Almost every event sells out. I spoke with her about why adults still want to learn, why the bar setting matters, and how she built a sustainable operation around it.

Zelda: You started Big Brain in San Francisco in 2025 and now run lectures across the Bay Area. What made you want to start this?

Emily: I got into hosting because I love throwing parties and being creative with a theme. I’ve always liked organizing. But Big Brain specifically came out of a different feeling.

I was at a job I didn’t love and I was struggling. I needed more purpose. And this idea got me so excited and so creative that I thought about it 24/7. I’d seen the format of lectures in bars happening in other cities, and I just thought: I wish this was here.

I didn’t want to do work I wasn’t proud of in my corporate role, and when I realized Big Brain had taken over so much of my energy and motivation, I knew it was time to quit.

Why a bar? What does the lecture-in-a-casual-venue format unlock that an academic setting doesn’t?

A few reasons. The first is that academic spaces aren’t actually that accessible to the public. They’re expensive, you often have to be in a program, you don’t necessarily hear about events at universities, and they can be far. If I want to go to a talk at UC Berkeley from San Francisco, that’s an hour drive.

The other thing is the casualness itself. When you see a professor in a class, you think of them as a king or queen. You put them on a pedestal. At our events, you’re still putting the speaker on a pedestal in some way (they’re standing on a stage, they’re the one talking) but the environment is so much more casual. Someone asks a question during the Q&A and suddenly they’re just having a conversation with the speaker. That dynamic shift matters.

And honestly, I love a beautiful space. You walk in and you’re like, whoa, this is so cool. Instead of taking shots or dancing at a nightclub, you’re listening to something you’re really interested in. That juxtaposition of a really academic, smart thing in a really fun place makes your night feel exciting and different.

Walk us through how you plan a Big Brain lecture, from speaker to venue.

There are three main parts. The first is finding a speaker. We do a lot of our own research and outreach. We also accept applications. We have at least one call with every speaker. Depending on their track record, sometimes we’ll do an audition where they have to present to us. Other times they’re already credible enough that we skip that step, which saves us time. There’s a lot of email going back and forth: please send your lecture materials, please send your availability.

The second part is the venue. This is a little easier now because we work with over 15 different venues across San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose. But I’m still thinking about a lot of things when I match a speaker to a venue. I think about the topic and the demand. I think about the vibe: an artistic lecture should be in a beautiful, artistic space; an interactive one should be in something cozy. I also think about capacity. We want to fit as many people as we can, but we also want it to feel socially comfortable and not like the speaker is famous and standing on a stage you can’t reach.

Once I have everyone’s availability matched up to the right venue, I clone the event setup in Luma and then I add the title, the description, and the image. Right now a lot of this is manual. I’m working on building a system that uses the Luma API to automate more of it.

After that, marketing and graphics, and we’re done. Honestly, our events are very simple by design. I personally can’t be at every single one, so I need my team to be able to show up after their jobs and run them. As long as the space has good seating, projection, and a microphone, that’s really all we need.

You host more than 10 lectures a month now. How do you make a high-volume operation sustainable?

It’s really hard to let go. You have to find people you trust, build a process that’s consistent, and train them on it. But for me personally, balance is really important.

The honest part is that even when I can’t be at an event, I still get FOMO. These are literally lectures I picked. So I’ll hear from other people that one was so good and I wasn’t there and feel that pull. But trying to be at every single one would not be sustainable, and I think any community builder gets to a point where they have to make peace with that.

You’re very intentional about pricing and making sure the lectures are selling out. Walk us through how you think about both.

Our first event was super cheap, like five or ten dollars. That was me setting a price point a little randomly. I asked myself, what would I be willing to pay for this if I were a random person walking in? I’d looked at events similar to mine that cost $50 and thought, I would never pay that, that’s crazy.

But I also pay every venue, so I had to figure out the math. One of the first community spaces I worked with charged me 30% of ticket sales, and the more I talked to other venues, the more I realized that’s basically the standard in San Francisco. From there, you back into your other expenses and figure out how much to pay yourself.

We recently raised our prices from $25 to $27 so we could pay our speakers fairly without substantially raising the cost for attendees. We’re still making close to what we were before, maybe a little less, but now we’re able to thank the people who make these lectures possible.

On the sell-out side, I think there’s a balance between fitting the right number of people and selling the right number of tickets. It makes me so sad when a lecture is sold out and people email me asking for a ticket, but I just can’t fit any more people in the space. But when someone lands on our Luma calendar and sees that everything is sold out, including the lecture they wanted to go to, there’s a level of psychological exclusivity to it. They think, whoa, these are super popular, I really need to be on top of the next one. It makes people crave it.

You’ve talked about a tension a lot of community builders feel — wanting to do something meaningful but also wanting to get paid for it. How do you think about that?

I genuinely believe you can do amazing things in life, help your community, improve the world, and get paid for it. I think a lot of people in community spaces hear “why should I pay for this?” from the public — like, I could just invite my friend and they could give a talk to my crowd, why am I paying you? And I think it’s so much work to organize stuff like this. The people who organize deserve to be paid. It doesn’t just happen from nothing.

That’s what feels best about doing my work: I’m improving San Francisco, I’m supporting the venues and the people in them, I’m having a fun time, and I can do this for a living. I am so thankful.