

Mariana Lucia Marquez
Public Speaking Coach & Founder, Metaspeech
I never set out to build a communication training company.
For fifteen years I had lived between two worlds: dance and business.
As a startup co-founder I had sat on the board of an e-commerce business doing $8 million in revenue, built from a student apartment in New York City. At 27, I walked into the national library in Buenos Aires with an idea — Argentina needed a national audiovisual archive — and convinced the director to hire me on the spot to build it. A few years later, working as a choreographer in London, I was selected for Sadler's Wells' development programme — one of 21 artists chosen from 500 applications.
Then in 2015, I found myself at Campus for Mums at Google, where someone looked at my background and said: have you ever thought about working with entrepreneurs who pitch to investors? Because the way you understand the body could be exactly what they need.
Metaspeech was born from that conversation.
Over seven years I worked with hundreds of founders at the highest-stakes moments of their careers — investor pitches, accelerator stages, BBC's Dragons' Den — and with corporate teams throughout. Collectively, the founders I coached raised over $1BN.
After a stint as Head of Internal Communication & Coaching at insuretech unicorn Zego, I relaunched Metaspeech with a sharper focus on corporate leaders bringing the Metaspeech Method to teams at Google, Salesforce and Allianz.
Through my own journey and hundreds of my clients', I am convinced that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost always smaller than it looks.
Walking into a room that isn't expecting you and belonging there anyway is a skill. And skills can be learned.

