Directness
No twenty-minute runway before the point arrives.
Keynotes, Panels & Conversations
Luke Simianer speaks about what happens when people stop accepting broken systems as permanent.
01The range
Built From Experience. Not Theory.
Luke’s perspective comes from an unusual path: Army paratrooper, Purple Heart recipient, healthcare professional, software engineer, venture-backed founder and CEO.
Luke has built companies around problems most organizations struggle to solve. He built accessibility technology alongside blind and low-vision employees. He raised millions in venture capital. He built a veteran-heavy organization employing hundreds. And along the way he has had the other side of entrepreneurship too: rejection, failure, rebuilding, and starting again.
That gives Luke a range most leadership speakers can’t manufacture.
- Leadership
- Building teams that can move without waiting for the person at the top.
- Entrepreneurship
- Raising capital, surviving rejection, building companies, losing one and starting again.
- Accessibility
- Building with blind and visually impaired people instead of treating them as an edge case.
- Veteran transition
- What happens when the identity, structure and mission that carried you suddenly disappear.
- Technology & AI
- What emerging technology actually changes when you get past the demos and put it inside a real organization.
02Talks & topics
What Luke Speaks About
Bet on Yourself
Best forVeteran, transition and general audiences.
What happens when the plan for your life stops being available?
Luke went from the Army to homelessness to building a company with hundreds of people in it. This is a conversation about agency when certainty disappears, the decisions we postpone because we cannot predict their ending, and what choosing the harder path actually costs.
The receiptAt twenty, Luke was sleeping in a Ford Mustang with his dog. The decision he made that winter still governs how he chooses today.
Find the Seat
Best forLeadership, corporate and management audiences.
Most leaders are too quick to decide whether somebody is good or bad at the job in front of them.
Luke runs a veteran-heavy organization built around a different question: where does this person become unusually valuable?
It is a conversation about talent, autonomy, accountability and what changes when leaders stop trying to make every person fit the seat they were originally given.
The receiptChaz was a Navy Corpsman driving Uber who nearly quit during training because he struggled with the technology. Luke moved him to sales. He closed seventy percent his first weekend and eventually bought his wife a house with a pool.
Build What Should Exist
Best forFounders, operators and innovation audiences.
Luke has never started with a business idea. He starts with a person.
Both companies he built began by getting close enough to somebody else’s problem to discover the larger system creating it.
This is about finding problems worth solving, building with the people experiencing them and understanding why doing good and building a good business do not have to be competing objectives.
The receiptA blind colleague told Luke he had felt intellectually valued exactly once in his life. That conversation eventually became Clusiv, a Techstars company that raised more than $4 million.
What the AI CEOs Actually Told Luke
Best forBusiness, technology and executive audiences.
Luke spent a stretch evaluating emerging technology and speaking with leaders building at the front edge of AI.
What interested him was not what they predicted. It was how they were actually using the technology, how they were changing their organizations around it and what separated useful deployment from expensive theater.
This is AI without the futurism: what leaders can do with it now, what still requires human judgment, and what Luke took from those conversations into building his own company.
The receiptThe company Luke built afterward grew from zero to hundreds of employees in under two years.
Consume Less. Produce More.
Best forGeneral, student and early-career audiences.
It has never been easier to learn almost anything. It has also never been easier to spend your entire life consuming what somebody else made.
Luke’s argument is simple: your attention eventually shows up in your output.
This is a practical conversation about distraction, discipline and the widening advantage available to people willing to make more than they consume.
The goal is not inspiration. It is for people to leave knowing exactly where their attention is going and what they are going to do differently with it.
More territory
Luke can also build a conversation around:
- Hiring veterans and why they outperform
- Zero to hundreds of employees in under two years
- What 185 investor rejections teach you
- Losing a company you built
- Building inside a system designed to stop you
- AI and practical problem solving
- Disability, employment and subminimum wage
- Customer experience as the only real moat
- Military sexual trauma and what the system misses
- Faith and running a company on it
- Creating the relationships that change what becomes possible
Planning something else?
Tell Luke who is in the room, what they are dealing with and what you want them thinking about when they leave.
03What the room gets
Nobody leaves the way they came in.
Luke does not summarise leadership ideas the audience could have read before breakfast. He takes positions, shows his work, and gives the room something to argue about on the drive home.
The proof
Real companies, real decisions, real numbers, including the ones that did not work.
The application
The story buys their attention. What they do with it on Monday is the reason Luke told it.
The return
An hour of inspiration wears off by Thursday. Luke is after the problem sitting on their desk when they get back.
04On the record
Selected Speaking & Media
Watch Luke work, or check the record: every appearance here is linked to its event, its organizer or its published session.
Brian Kilmeade Show
The segment Luke appears on, covering ICE body cameras and the fight to prevent a government shutdown.
Urban Valor
Luke’s full interview with Urban Valor.
Political Trade Secrets
On the transition out of military service, and what civilian life fails to replace when the structure disappears.
Previous bookings
- Keynote speaker
WNCC Foundation, 50th anniversary
Keynote for the foundation’s 50th anniversary celebration, in the community where Luke’s own reinvention started.
Event announcement - Featured speaker
Veteran Social Summit, San Antonio
On VetClaims.ai, AI-driven innovation and veteran entrepreneurship.
Speaker profile - Panelist
Accessibility.com
Panel with Lori Samuels of NBCUniversal and Abid Virani of Fable, on the distance between technical compliance and a product people can actually use.
Session page
05Booking
Bring Luke Into the Room
Luke doesn’t need to give an audience another version of a success story they’ve already heard.
Give him the problems they’re actually dealing with:
- Leadership when the company is growing faster than its systems.
- Reinvention when the old identity no longer works.
- Building for people everyone else overlooks.
- Fighting institutions that have learned to live with broken outcomes.
- Losing something you gave everything to, and deciding what comes next.
Those are conversations Luke can have because he has lived them.
Give him the room. He’ll bring the receipts.
Available for keynotes, panels, workshops and select private events. Ask in your enquiry and Luke will answer directly.