Access4 brought their partner community to the Hunter Valley for their Annual Community 2026 — a room full of people running high-paced tech-channel businesses. I spoke twice: once in the morning with the data, and once at the gala that night with none of it.
The morning keynote, Hunter Valley.
The Access4 community is made up of managed service providers and telco partners — small and mid-sized businesses where the person who owns the company is also the person carrying the escalations, the payroll and the after-hours phone. High-paced, high-accountability, and very used to being the one who copes.
That's the audience this material is built for. Not a wellbeing session bolted onto a conference agenda — a conversation aimed squarely at people who are good at performing and much less practised at admitting the cost.
Booking one speaker for both slots only works if the two pieces aren't the same piece. The morning talk earns the room's attention with evidence. The evening talk spends it.
Twenty minutes opening the day: what the numbers actually say about mental health in tech, and what they don't. Burnout rates, how few people ever speak to a professional, and the gap between how common this is and how rarely it gets said out loud in a room like this one.
Every figure on screen carried its source and its date. That matters with this audience — they audit things for a living, and a statistic without a citation loses the room faster than no statistic at all.
Fifteen minutes at the gala dinner, leading into an R U OK? fundraiser. No slides doing any heavy lifting, no statistics. My own story — the depression, the panic attacks, the climb back — and what it actually took for someone to ask me the question properly.
It's placed deliberately: the ask that follows lands differently when the room has just heard why the question matters, from someone who needed it asked.
Conference and gala photography: Matt Kemp.
“…the moment that'll stay with me longer than any roadmap slide was Diego Nievas. A room full of high-performers and business owners will talk margin, pipeline, and product all day and quietly take their own mental health for granted while doing it. Diego forced a pause. I commend him for the work he's doing with #MindMiddleware — the industry needs more of that conversation, not less.”
“We need more people like Diego Nievas to talk on R U OK? topics year-round. Great presentation and a great message to every human being that participates in this crazy game of life.”
Both posted publicly on LinkedIn after the event.
Conference keynote, leadership offsite, gala or awards night, or a workshop the day after. New Zealand, Australia, and remote.
Mind Middleware