We’ve spent eight years building events across 40 cities, watching this industry get better and better at scale — bigger stages, more tracks, sharper production. And somewhere in the last two years, instead of worrying about what AI was going to do to that model, we started getting genuinely excited about it.
Here’s why. A lot of a conference’s traditional job — the keynote, the market update, the “here’s what’s happening in the industry” session — is information delivery. And information is getting commoditised fast. If an AI can hand you a sharper, better-researched summary of a keynote before the speaker’s even finished delivering it, the pure content isn’t the reason people still get on a plane. What’s left after that is the part that actually matters, and we think it’s a better business to be in.
We’ve delivered 687 events for 440 clients across 40 cities since 2018 — Microsoft, Coinbase, Avalanche and Ethereum Foundation among them. Crypto saw this shift coming before most industries did. Anyone who’s spent time in a Discord AMA or a Twitter Space knows the “come here to learn what’s happening” pitch stopped being the main draw a while ago. That pushed us to figure out early what people were actually paying for. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it: they were paying to be in the room, to be trusted, and to meet the people who move their business forward.
That’s the opportunity we want to talk about.
The Floor Still Does Its Job. The Deals Happen Somewhere Else.
We want to be clear about this, because we think people get it wrong in both directions: the mega event isn’t dying, and it shouldn’t. Getting an entire industry into one hall for a few days still does something nothing else replicates — a huge volume of quick connections, real open Q&A panels where you can push a speaker on something they didn’t plan to answer, and a genuine read on where the whole market’s head is at. That’s real value, and we still build a lot of it for clients.
The floor is quantity — it’s where you meet more people, faster, than anywhere else. The quality gets formed off the floor, in a much smaller room.
What we’ve become convinced of, having run enough of these now to see the pattern clearly, is that the floor and the deal-making room are doing two completely different jobs. Two formats consistently deliver the highest return for our clients:
Where partnerships and decisions actually get made — almost never on an agenda, almost always over a meal or in a closed room with no signage.
Big enough to cover real ground, small enough that it still feels like a room, not a hall.
Push past around 200 and you’re back to floor behaviour — good reach, weaker signal. Go under 30 and the cost per relationship starts working against you. The 30–70 and 120–180 bands are where we consistently see the ROI numbers that justify the spend.
So the move isn’t choosing one over the other. Run the flagship for reach and connections. Build something in the 30–70 or 120–180 range alongside it for the relationships that actually convert. And increasingly, our clients aren’t waiting for the next flagship to do this — they’re running a recurring cadence of these smaller gatherings, same core group, different city, every quarter. Trust compounds across repeated rooms. It doesn’t happen once.
What No Screen Can Give You
Here’s the part we feel most strongly about, and it doesn’t get said enough in this industry: some of the highest-value moments we build for clients happen nowhere near a meeting room.
Some of the strongest relationships we’ve watched form at our events happened on a racetrack, not a stage. We’ve put competitors side by side in supercars and watched them talk like old friends by the second lap. We’ve run sailing sessions where six hours on the water did more for a partnership than six months of calls. There’s something about doing something physically demanding, or slightly nerve-wracking, alongside someone — sharing a real experience together — that builds a kind of trust a dinner can’t quite replicate, and a video call absolutely cannot.
You remember the person who nearly spun out next to you at 200 km/h. You don’t remember who sat two seats down at the keynote.
Clients who invest in experiences like this for their top-tier partners and VIP guests see it come back to them, consistently, in the strength and speed of the relationships that follow. This is the piece we’d encourage anyone building events in 2026 to take seriously: budget for experience, not just content. A well-run curated experience — supercar racing, sailing, whatever fits your audience and your brand — isn’t an add-on to the “real” programme. For your top clients and partners, it might be the most valuable hour of the entire trip.
Five Things We Believe Are True Now
None of this is theoretical for us — it’s what we’ve watched happen across hundreds of events, and it’s shaped how we think about building them going forward.
The floor earns its keep on reach, discovery, and genuinely useful Q&A and panel debate. The smaller formats earn theirs on outcomes. Good programme design uses both, deliberately, rather than picking a side.
With deepfakes and synthetic thought leadership everywhere, showing up in person and standing behind an unscripted answer carries real weight. The sessions with the most impact are often the ones with no recording and no livestream — the value is that they can’t be redistributed.
A product launch works best hands-on, with the engineers standing next to you. A strategy offsite works best when teams are solving a real problem under pressure. And a well-run drinks reception is doing real work too — it’s where a lot of the actual bonding happens.
Anything public is already free and already summarised. What’s left — the founder’s honest read on a bad deal, the operator’s real account of what actually broke — only gets shared off the record, in a small room, with people who’ve earned it.
The events we’re proudest of feel less like conferences and more like a standing group of people who keep showing up for each other. The metric we actually care about is whether the same faces are still in the room a year later.
Where We Land
We don’t think this shift is a loss for the industry — we think it’s clarifying. The floor still matters: it’s where the industry gathers, where the volume of connections happens, where a good open panel can still teach you something you didn’t expect. But the deals, the partnerships, the real relationships — those are increasingly built off it, in a curated room of 30 to 180 people, or in an experience that gives people something to actually go through together.
Keep the flagship for reach. Build the curated room, the cocktail evening, the recurring gathering, the shared experience — for the relationships that matter.
That’s the business we’re building.