USF siblings Harikrishna and Krishna Patel are bringing TEDxTampa back for the first time in nearly a decade.

“The whole city’s coming together and everybody’s going to walk out with one question: ‘What is stopping me from changing the world?’” Harikrishna said.

TEDx is an event series launched in 2009 featuring live speakers and organized under TED guidelines, according to TED.

TEDxTampa will bring community leaders together on May 2 for an evening of leadership talks and networking in downtown Tampa.

Harikrishna, 23, is a senior cybersecurity engineering major and Krishna, 20, is a senior biomedical sciences major. The two first got involved with TEDx through TEDxUSF in September 2021. 

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The 2021 event was the first TEDxUSF in three years and brought together about 100 attendees. The night’s theme was “Spotlight,” and aimed to highlight students, faculty and staff.

This year’s TEDxTampa is already sold out and will host over 1,000 attendees, and Harikrishna said the theme “Lift as You Climb” will focus on leadership.

“The subline is the story of your success is going to be written by the ones that you’ve lifted,” he said.

The siblings spent two years in the Middle East from 2022 to 2024, when they volunteered with TEDx teams in Qatar and Dubai and helped build a Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi. 

Krishna said the experience gave them a chance to see leadership in action.

“The way that this temple was brought together was exactly just that – every single person was leading, but for the purpose of giving back,” Krishna said.

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This year, the siblings are leading a team of 50 volunteers from USF and the University of Tampa to put together the TEDxTampa event. 

They’ve been planning the event for about six months and said most of the work is “pretty much done.”

The siblings organized the lineup themselves, receiving over 500 applications from across Tampa, with 11 speakers being selected by the organizers, Harikrishna said.

“We wanted to choose a leader in every single industry who has demonstrated this [theme] in their own lives,” he said. 

The speaker list includes John D. Couris, CEO of Tampa General Hospital, Brian Murphy, CEO of ReliaQuest, USF President Rhea Law and “White Collar” actor Tim DeKay.

“Right now, we’re getting messages and emails from people saying, ‘Hey, we want to come to this event,’” he said. “And these are the people in the highest positions in Tampa and perhaps even in the state.”

The evening will begin with a networking session at the Tampa Museum of Art at 5:15 p.m., followed by the main program at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts at 7 p.m. 

Harikrishna said what he likes the most about TEDx is its ability to “change someone’s life.”

“[TEDx] is a place where people expect change after they come,” Harikrishna said. “Whether they change after watching the talks or after being at the networking event, they expect that.”

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At the 2021 TEDxUSF, one of the speakers the siblings selected was Taylor Wells, a man who was sentenced to life in prison at 18 and served nearly 30 years. 

Harikrishna said Wells reached out to him after the event, telling him the talk had “completely changed” his life, and said five employers contacted him because of it.

“Seeing change in people’s lives and seeing it happen to all the speakers—where they get an opportunity to speak somewhere else—things like that are what really stay with me,” he said.

As the event draws near, Krishna said she’s feeling “stressed” as final planning details come together. However, she’s also “excited” to see people come together to “uplift the Tampa community.”

“One of my favorite things about hosting these talks is seeing just how many people are filled up in the room who want to be better, do better and give back,” she said.