Meet our 2026 speakers: Lena on Meaning to Be
We are welcoming Lena Reinhard (again) with their talk: "We Were Meant To Be" at FFConf 2026.
We wanted to also thank Lena for taking the time to answer our questions so we can all get to know them a little bit more before Friday 13th November.
About Lena and their talk
- Title: We Were Meant To Be
- About the talk: Between layoffs, AI hype, and a barely-recognizable industry, many of us in tech are wondering: now what? This talk takes you on a journey to look for answers in unexpected places — and finds something much greater & more beautiful on the other side.
- Lena's origin story: Look, see, make, make more, remake. Repeat.
The warm up questions
Your (very mini!) bio is six words: look, see, make, make more, remake, repeat. Which one are you on this week?
remake! It's a big theme this season: Remaking a tapestry into a sweater, repainting a drawing, rewriting my talk, rethinking big questions.
If you could press one poem into the hands of everyone working in tech right now, which would it be?
There are more that I will wave in front of people's eyes during the talk :)
About the work and the talk
Your career started in finance, and early on the industry went through the 2008 financial crisis. What did living through that leave you with that you're carrying into this one?
I was a bank clerk at a small, old South-German bank at the time, had just finished my apprenticeship and had many clients I'd been working directly with for a long time. The bank's overall investment posture was very low-risk, which meant that, fortunately, we didn't have much direct impact ourselves, nor on our clients, while the industry around us was crumbling, even more so as the economic outfall of it began. A few lessons I took from that time:
There's a lot going on that's very much outside of our control. Through all of it, we need to support each other.
The "self-regulating" free market and the way it works that I'd just been taught in business school was nothing more than an idealisation.
There need to be limits on how much power an individual can amass, as well as institutional oversight over their actions, and bodies that challenge their decisions.
Institutions with the ability to impact vast populations require governmental regulation and oversight.
Tax the rich.
Your talk refuses the idea that the future we're being sold is inevitable. Where do you already see people refusing it?
All my neighbors who refuse to let the littering drown out the flowerbeds they've planted in the street.
The people who protest, organize, and vote to strengthen democracies across the globe.
The engineers who are discussing on their teams how to best use AI in a way that actually serves them. [yes there are more :D]
Find out more about Lena online on their website or BlueSky.
Join us in November to see Lena's talk: 2026.ffconf.org