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The opening remarks of 2025’s Make Great Famous Summit didn’t start in a meeting room at the Edition Hotel in Miami Beach, FL but they concluded there. Eduardo Placer gathered the attendees in the entryway, welcoming them, preparing them, and shimmying right along with them.
Placer taught those gathered a few steps and conga-lined the entire congregation into the meeting hall.
“We don’t have to just talk about belonging or teamwork,” he told the audience. “We can embody it together, right now.” Attendees from diverse backgrounds, including executives, entrepreneurs, and leaders, all temporarily shed their titles and roles and just became another member of the conga line.
For Placer, it was an opportunity to disrupt the rigidity of a formal event, demonstrate the power of Latin culture and queer joy that can bring people together in a polarized world, and create a moment none of the attendees will soon forget.
This is what happens when you hire Eduardo Placer.
The founder of Fearless Communicators is celebrating what he calls “A Decade of Daring” for the organization he created from scratch. Fearless has earned praise from presidential candidates, United Nations diplomats, Emmy-winning actors, TED Residents, and Fortune 500 leaders from companies like Google and Bank of America – Merrill Lynch.
But Placer and his company of stage-trained educators and communicators have a much wider remit. They’ve partnered with global foundations, voting rights nonprofits, , and LGBTQ+ groups that seek to unite those who may feel othered and alone in this world.
Placer knows the feeling. While the Fearless Founder is quick to point out that growing up gay in Miami to a Cuban refugee family was comparatively safe to what other members of the LGBTQ+ face in other parts of the world, that doesn’t mean it was easy.
“I wanted to sing and dance, be in beauty pageants, and in the 1980s, that just didn’t compute,” Placer remembers. “I’m an identical twin. My brother is straight. And I joke that the biggest difference between us is that when we played with our G.I. Joes, he played “War” and I played [singing] ‘WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR: The Musical.’ My brother played every position on the soccer team, and I was the only kid who finished a soccer season with a rock collection named after the Von Trapp children.”
The jokes land so well because they’re true, and because there is such deep struggle beneath them. At the same time Placer was struggling to understand his sexual identity, he was grateful to grow up in Miami, where he could be proud of his heritage. His education was grounded in his Cuban heritage and his understanding of himself as a proud Latino. His family fled Spain because of Franco and Cuba because of Castro. Placer has struggle and perseverance in his DNA.
But being out at eighteen in the mid-nineties was something else. Like Placer says, Will & Grace wasn’t even a thing yet.
College was the chance to truly become himself. Placer was part of an a cappella group. He got the chance to dress up and experiment with gender norms. He got to question, loudly and proudly, everything he was led to believe about “normal.” He still felt shame about being gay, but at least he could confront it head-on.
Fifteen years into his life as a professional speaker, MC, storyteller, and teacher, and ten years into being the leader of Fearless Communicators, Placer is still trying to perfect a world where people have the right and opportunity to express themselves as true reflections of who they are, not some idealized version of what they think they should be.
“You bring your own spark, your own creativity, and your own flair to a world that is constantly trying to optimize or machine-ize us as human beings,” Placer explains. “We are under-indexing muscles that make us who we are as human beings. When I speak or present or work with people, I’m trying to rebuild the muscle and strength of empathy.”
It’s needed more than ever. At the recent Alumni Society Leadership Summit, where Placer served as MC for the second year in a row, he led the audience in a collective scream.
“What I invite you all to do, on the count of three, is to scream,” Placer announced to laughs. Whatever the reason, whatever the issue, guests were invited to give voice to their anger and grief. And they did.
“Now that we have cleared the rage,” Placer said, “there’s something that we, as Latinos, have access to that I think is very special. And that is joy.”
The mission of Fearless Communicators is a decade in, and when we look around, we can see so many reasons why it needs to continue. It’s not fair to say Placer was made for this moment, but he made himself for this moment. It’s never been more important to be Fearless.
