The LPM Method: Engineering a High-Stakes Keynote
Decompose public speaking into subskills, then optimise humour with a measured laughs-per-minute score.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 95%
Dharmesh Shah treats public speaking not as a talent but as an acquirable skill that can be functionally decomposed into subskills and improved one per year. The keystone subskill is humour, and he measures it with LPM (laughs per minute), a metric borrowed from standup comedy. He records practice talks in front of progressively larger live audiences, transcribes them, and runs custom software that maps every audible laugh against the timeline so dead zones can be shortened or injected with humour.
Origin
Developed by Dharmesh Shah over years of preparing the HubSpot INBOUND keynote, which grew from ~150 people at a Marriott to 10,000+ live plus hundreds of thousands online. LPM itself is a metric borrowed from professional standup comedians, not invented by Shah; his contribution is applying it to business keynotes and building the measurement software.
Core principles
- 01Talent controls the slope of the learning curve, not whether you can learn at all — most things are acquirable skills.
- 02You cannot improve what you do not measure: only audible laughter counts, not polite smiles.
- 03Attention is the precondition for message — if you lose the audience, nothing else you do matters.
- 04There are exactly two levers on a ratio: raise the numerator (more laughs) or shrink the denominator (fewer words between laughs).
- 05Build 'solo software' — tools written for exactly one user, which you can switch off the moment they stop paying.
How to run it
- 1
Reject the talent excuse
Decide the skill is acquirable. Accept that natural talent may raise someone else's ceiling or speed, but it does not prevent you learning the skill to a high level.
Pro tip Pick the skills you cannot delegate or talk your way out of — those are the ones worth the calories.
- 2
Functionally decompose the skill
Break 'public speaking' into its underlying subskills the way an engineer decomposes a system: stage presence, holding attention, story arc, slide design and visual expression, humour writing, humour execution.
Pro tip Pick one subskill per year and go deep on it rather than trying to fix everything at once.
- 3
Rehearse in front of progressively larger real audiences and record everything
Do practice runs with actual live audiences, escalating in size, and record the audio for every run. A laugh only counts if a real audience audibly produced it.
Watch out Self-assessment of what is funny is worthless. Only live audience reaction is signal.
- 4
Transcribe and score laughs per minute
Transcribe the recording and mark every point at which the audience audibly laughed. Compute LPM and plot it as a visual map of the talk, broken into 30-second or 1-minute blocks.
Pro tip Benchmark: standup comedians run very high; business talks very low. Above ~1.0-1.25 puts a non-professional in the top decile; 2+ is hard for a business talk because you also have a message to deliver.
- 5
Attack the dead zones with the two levers
Find the gaps in the map — e.g. 1 minute 17 seconds with no laugh. For each gap either shorten the segment (cut words) or inject something funny to break it up. Both raise LPM.
Watch out Do not force humour into a segment where nothing funny can honestly be said. Cut the segment instead.
- 6
Apply the punchline-last rule
The funny words must be literally the last words of the segment, then you stop talking. The audience needs about half a second to react and permission to laugh; talking over that window makes it awkward and kills the laugh.
Pro tip If the funny phrase reads awkwardly at the end of the sentence, move it there anyway — it works better even when it reads worse.
- 7
Amortise your setups with multiple punchlines
Once you have spent 75 words establishing context and scene, do not spend it on one laugh. Stack multiple funny bits off the same setup — a laugh is a laugh regardless of whether the story was reused.
Pro tip Watch standup comedians do exactly this: one story, several punchlines in punctuated succession.
In the wild
Shah, who is not a natural speaker, faced an unavoidable annual keynote that scaled from 150 people to 10,000 live plus hundreds of thousands online. Rather than delegate or avoid it, he decomposed the skill, picked humour as the highest-leverage component, and wrote custom software that scores his recorded practice talks on LPM and produces a per-minute laughter map.
→ He converted a dreaded, non-native skill into a measurable, improvable system, and now argues that if he can learn high-stakes public speaking, anyone can learn almost anything through practice and measurement.
Common mistakes
Treating funniness as a personality trait rather than a measurable output
Without a transcript, a recording, and a laugh map, you never learn which segments died. The whole system depends on measurement, not vibes.
Talking through the laugh
Continuing to speak immediately after a punchline removes the audience's permission to react. The laugh evaporates and the room feels awkward.
Chasing a standup-level LPM in a business talk
A business talk has an agenda beyond entertainment. Optimising purely for laughs sacrifices the message you are actually there to deliver.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and execs who must give a recurring, high-stakes keynote or conference talk and do not consider themselves natural speakers.
Not ideal for
Low-stakes internal updates, ad-hoc meetings, or contexts where humour would undercut the seriousness of the message.
From the transcript
“about it is Talent basically controls the slope of the curve but most things are actually acquirable skills”
“okay I'm going to functionally decompose this skill of public speaking”
“I have custom software that I've written that will say okay here are the points at which the audience laughed like actually audibly laugh that's…”
“so I have software that will calculate for last per minute”
“so once you deliver it then you have to stop talking and the reason you have to stop talking is the audience needs about a…”
From the episode
Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company
Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO)