Julius Solaris is the most-followed independent voice the global events industry has ever produced. His newsletter lands in thirty-eight thousand inboxes, one week at a time. The LinkedIn group he founded passed four hundred thousand members and remains, by a wide margin, the largest professional community in the trade. LinkedIn named him a Top Voice and reports that approximately ten million people now read his content on the platform each year. He has keynoted in twelve countries to crowds totaling more than two hundred thousand attendees. His research reports have been downloaded more than three hundred thousand times. The United States government has certified him, in writing, as an alien of extraordinary ability. The Events Industry Council inducted him into its Hall of Leaders in 2024, the highest honor the industry confers. BizBash, the trade publication that has spent twenty-five years tracking the people who run the rooms, named him one of the most influential figures of the entire quarter century. He runs all of it from an apartment in Las Vegas with his wife as his only business partner.

He is forty-something. He is Italian. He was, until about twenty years ago, a heavy introverted boy in a small town in the heel of southern Italy who could not get the cool kids at his school to stand near him at lunch. The distance between those two sentences is the subject of this piece.

What is harder to convey on a credentials list is the way he carries the credentials. He has, by any reasonable measure, become the most recognized independent figure in his industry. He is also one of the few people at that altitude who has not, on the way up, traded the humility of the boy he used to be for the polish of the man the trade press now profiles. Asked how he had ended up with a global audience, he says, I don’t know. If you ask me, I don’t know. Asked about his early work, he looks back at it with what he calls embarrassment. Asked about the Hopin collapse he had been working inside, he refuses to blame anyone, including the executives whose decisions he had quietly warned against from the start. Asked about the audience that opens his newsletter each week, he says, I am one of them. That is why they read me. The credentials at the top of the page are real. The man receiving them is still, in some meaningful way, the introverted kid in the Apulian schoolyard who could not quite believe the cool kids had finally come inside the room.

The other thing the credentials list does not show is the cost. He arrived in London the month Lehman Brothers collapsed with no job. He sold his first business on the third try after two prior deals fell through and a family payroll waited to see whether the third would close. He took the institutional job at the unicorn and was let go in month six when the unicorn started to fall apart. He launched the company he runs now the same week the layoff arrived. He has been on the road for eighteen years, in twelve countries, filing from press rooms and hotel lobbies and the back of conference halls because the only way to write about the industry was to be in it. The thirty-eight thousand readers who open the newsletter each week do not open it because the writer is famous. They open it because the writer has been one of them, in every chapter, since he was fourteen.

The first event he ever planned was a club night for the fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old crowd in the heel of Italy, sometime in the late nineteen-nineties. He was fourteen himself, with no inheritance ahead of him, no obvious path out, and no social capital to draw on. He partnered with a friend, put his own money into a venue, brought in a DJ, and opened the doors. The kids who would not come near him in the hallway came inside the gathering because he was the one who had decided where it would be and what time it would start. He had not found a way to be admitted to the social order. He had built the thing the social order had to come to. He learned, that night, the only thing he would ever really need to know about commerce.

He is not alone in this. The people who end up running the global events industry, almost without exception, were already running it before anyone told them it was an industry. Solaris is one version of a pattern the trade press has never quite named, and the version worth telling first because his version is, in the truest sense, the American Dream told in an Italian accent. He just happens to have lived it from the wrong continent.

He left home at sixteen, ostensibly to be closer to school, actually to start the life he had been planning since he was small. He went to Milan for university and studied communication and media with a marketing major. He went to Australia in 2002 for the exchange and ran free networking cruises on Sydney Harbor, renting boats and giving away pizza to the crowd that showed up. He went back to Australia for the two-year MBA. He arrived in London in 2008, the month Lehman Brothers collapsed, with no job, no plan, and a degree the British economy had no use for.

This is the structural fact of his life. He has been moving since he was sixteen. Every move was a choice he made without a job waiting on the other end, without a plan in place, and without anyone holding the door. The independence was not a posture. It was a method of being in the world. He absorbed early what most people learn late, which is that nobody is coming to make your life for you.

He started running free networking events in London because it was the only currency he had. He built tweet-ups, BarCamps, and hundred-and-fifty-person mixers on Twitter and Meetup and a now-vanished social platform called A Small World. He convinced bars that had just opened to give him the room on a weeknight in exchange for the foot traffic. He had begun a blog from his apartment in Apulia called Event Manager Blog and he kept posting to it every week. He answered every message. He went to every show. He filed from planes. He filed from hotel rooms in Las Vegas. He filed from the developer meetups where he met Julia Hartz and Kevin Hartz before Eventbrite was Eventbrite. He gave away frameworks the established consultancies were charging six figures for. He did not skip a week. He has not skipped one since. Carmen had moved with him.

The platform did not happen by accident, but it did not happen entirely by intention either. The intentional part was a method. He has hit every social-media wave the modern media economy has produced, on time and often early, and he has done it with the same three verbs every time. Study. Explore. Execute. The blog wave in 2007. The Twitter wave in 2008. The LinkedIn group wave in the late 2000s, when most of the industry still thought of LinkedIn as a résumé site. The BarCamp and user-generated community wave that same period. The virtual-events wave when COVID arrived and most of the trade press was still figuring out how to use Zoom. The newsletter wave when Substack proved single-voice publications could carry real economics. The AI wave that is rewriting the work right now. He studies each new wave longer than most operators do, with the attention of a man who reads instead of skims. He explores it by building inside it, in public, with small experiments anyone can watch and most do not. Then he executes at scale, weekly, until the audience is too large to ignore.

The unintentional part was timing he could not have engineered. He sold Event Manager Blog to Skift in September of 2019, on his third try, after two earlier deals had fallen through. Six months later the world locked down. He had cashed in his independent media business at exactly the moment when the next twelve months would prove that the business was either going to be worth ten times more or worth nothing, depending on which way the pandemic broke. He had no way of knowing which way it would go. He sold anyway. The world broke in his direction.

The luck compounded from there. He joined Swapcard, watched the virtual-events curve start to bend, and let his non-compete expire at the exact moment Hopin called. He moved into the company at the precise inflection point where the platform was about to become, briefly, the fastest-growing European startup in history. He drew an institutional salary at a unicorn during the eighteen months when virtual events looked like the permanent future. Then the music stopped. He was let go in month six of the contraction, before the deepest cuts. He launched Boldpush the same week, two years before the Substack-led newsletter economy made the model obvious to everyone else. He began building on the Anthropic stack in 2024, three years before the rest of the events industry would understand what an MCP was.

He is candid about this. Asked how he had ended up with a global audience from a desk in southern Italy, he said I don’t know. If you ask me, I don’t know. It is the most revealing sentence he has put on the record, and the one the rest of his career depends on. He has built the most-read independent voice in the global events industry, and he is the first person to admit he cannot fully explain it. Method and luck arrived together, in proportions he did not engineer. The willingness to say so out loud is itself rare.

The frameworks are the second half of the platform. In the last three or four years, he has built a visual identity for Boldpush that is unmistakable inside the industry and increasingly outside it. The graphics are flat, color-blocked, typographically disciplined, institutional in tone, and built around tight grids that compress complex operational thinking into a single shareable image. The Post-Event Analysis Framework. The Experience Design Framework. The Sponsor Architecture grid. The Event Operator’s Playbook. Each one is a single PDF or PNG, downloadable for free, sized for LinkedIn, optimized for share. Each one has his face printed at the bottom under a small black bar that reads Julius Solaris did this for you. The signature is the marketing. He has built his name into the file itself.

He talks about the frameworks the way most operators talk about their flagship products. He builds them on the Anthropic stack. He uses Claude to structure the underlying logic, then designs the typographic and color systems himself, then ships them weekly. The Post-Event Analysis Framework he released this year includes, printed inside the framework itself, a recommendation that reads Build unified dashboard with Claude and MCPs. He is one of the first independent publishers in any industry to position himself publicly as a Claude-native operator, with the AI stack named as part of the framework rather than hidden behind it.

The visual register matters because the industry he is writing for has, for two decades, produced some of the worst editorial graphics in modern professional life. Trade-show decks are visual cemeteries. Conference programs read like phone books. The Boldpush frameworks land the way they do because they are the first time an industry that designs experiences for a living has been given communication graphics designed the way it should have been designing its own all along. He noticed the gap. He filled it. The frameworks are the reason a single-operator publication is out-publishing companies a hundred times its size during the AI rupture.

The third leg of the platform is the reviews. He goes to the show. He writes what he saw. He has been doing it for eighteen years across more than two hundred shows in twelve countries, and his arrival at a major event is now an event in itself. IMEX Frankfurt. Cannes Lions. Dreamforce. Google Cloud Next. ServiceNow Knowledge. South by Southwest. Web Summit Vancouver. He has reported from all of them, often in the same year. He files from the press room. He files from the show floor. He files from the bar at the hotel where the after-party is happening. The reviews are not summaries. They are reads. He tells the reader what the show was trying to do, whether it worked, who was running the room well, who was not, and what the larger industry should take from the moment. He is not a critic. He is a witness.

The reviews also happen to be the most-shared content he produces, which is not an accident. The events industry is, in its essence, the FOMO business. Trade shows sell tickets on the proposition that the deals are happening on the floor. Conferences sell registrations on the proposition that the room contains people you need to know. Festivals sell passes on the proposition that the moment will not come again. Every gathering in the world runs on the same engine, which is the fear of missing out on something the people who showed up will be talking about for the next year. Julius is the man who tells you what those people are talking about. The people who were there share his review to validate that they were there. The people who were not there share it to signal that they wish they had been. Either way, the post moves.

What unifies the four parts of the platform, the newsletter and the frameworks and the reviews and the research, is what they actually deliver. Event pros are the people in their organizations who have to make the registration number, defend the sponsor renewal, justify the catering line, brief the keynote, manage the run-of-show, recover from the keynote running long, and explain to leadership why any of it mattered. Julius gives them what they need to do that work better. The frameworks compress what a six-figure consultancy engagement would have produced into a single PNG they can paste into a planning deck. The reviews tell them whether to spend their budget on the show. The research gives them the benchmarks they can take into a budget meeting and use to defend the line item. The newsletter gives them the early read on every platform shift that is about to change their job, two years before the trade press catches up. He gives them tools that work the day they need them and the language to explain to leadership why the tools matter. That is why ten million people read him a year. The recognition is real. The frameworks are what get downloaded.

He could have lived anywhere. The newsletter is written from his apartment. The clients are global. The keynotes are in twelve countries. He chose Las Vegas. The choice is not incidental. Vegas is the convention capital of the United States, the only American city whose entire economy depends on the gathering, and the city more than any other in America still operating on the proposition that anyone can arrive with nothing and become someone if they are willing to hustle hard enough and stay long enough. The Italian who chose Vegas is the same boy who chose to leave home at sixteen. Both choices say the same thing. He goes where the work he wants to do is being done, and he builds his life around the work.

He has not done any of it alone. Carmen Boscolo has been with him since high school. They met as teenagers in Apulia and have been together for twenty-six years. They have built three businesses side by side, in three countries. Across all of them, the division of labor has been identical. He runs voice and brand and writing. She runs sales and operations. She made the green card happen. He has said, plainly, that he is a mess without her. He is not a process person and never has been. The operational machinery of three businesses across two continents has been her work from the first one to the third.

The independence is real. So is the partnership. Carmen is the reason the independence has not turned into isolation, and the reason the company has never had to scale into a fifty-person agency. She is also the reason he gets to be the watcher, the writer, and the keynote speaker.

The first exit was Showthemes in 2018, the WordPress event-template business he had built quietly, six thousand customers strong, a clean small sale. The second was Event Manager Blog to Skift in September 2019, on his third attempt, after two earlier deals collapsed and a family business of seven freelancers and Carmen on payroll waited to see whether the third try would close. It did. He has said publicly that the negotiation was psychologically brutal and that the lesson was know your worth. That phrase belongs in the piece because it is the operator’s vocabulary, not the analyst’s.

Then Swapcard, then Hopin. The Hopin chapter is the one he has spoken about most carefully in public until now, and the cleanest version has been this one. The company wanted to have Julius without a clear plan. The CMO at the time, Anthony Kannada, was big on building media companies inside technology companies, which gave the hire a logic. The operational structure underneath the hire was improvisational. There was a sense of growth and acceleration, of too many decision-makers in the building and not enough coordination. He does not blame the company. Some of the brightest minds in event technology were inside it. The in-person team alone included the founders of Attendify, the leadership that had come up through CrowdCompass including Matthew Donegan-Ryan, and colleagues he still references today like Kristen, who has since landed at RingCentral.

Hopin reached a $7.75 billion valuation in August 2021 at its Series D, briefly the fastest-growing European startup in history, with more than a billion in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Tiger Global, Salesforce Ventures, and the sovereign wealth funds GIC and Temasek. The company employed close to twelve hundred people across forty-seven countries. By month six of the contraction, the entire in-person team was let go because in-person was no longer a priority. No team could have countered the drop in the market that Julius had been warning the company about. He said all of that without bitterness, which is itself a kind of evidence.

He went inside the operating company. He took the institutional salary. He let someone else carry the platform. Six months later he was out and Hopin was on its way to a fifteen-million-dollar fire sale to RingCentral on a billion in capital raised. The company that had been worth, briefly, more than Manchester United and Aston Martin combined had lost ninety-nine percent of its enterprise value in under two years. He has not made the same mistake since.

Step back from the Hopin paragraph and the larger pattern becomes visible. Julius arrived in London the month Lehman Brothers fell. He sold his media business six months before COVID. He watched the virtual-events bubble collapse from inside the unicorn that briefly defined it. He is now positioning himself, three years early, at the front of the AI rupture that is rewriting the trade press, the consultancy economics, and the working life of the corporate event marketer all at once. Four once-in-a-generation economic shocks in eighteen years. Most operators in any industry would have been knocked out by one of the four. Julius has taken all of them and kept the platform alive. He is one of the very few public figures in the events economy whose career maps cleanly onto the four major dislocations of the twenty-first century, and he has been visible, publishing, and gaining audience through all of them.

In May of 2026, Boldpush and Encore released the Experience Design Report, built on 447 event professionals across corporate, agency, association, and independent planning roles. One finding has carried the report. Forty-nine percent of attendees say connection is the biggest reason they show up to an event. Eight percent of planners design programming for it. The largest single disconnect in any industry research the events economy has produced this year, surfaced by the man who has been writing about the events industry longer than almost anyone else still doing it.

The reason the finding lands the way it lands when he says it is the reason this piece has been building toward this section. He came up inside the personality type the industry has historically ignored. The 49 / 8 finding is the events industry confessing, in research form, what he has known by experience since he was fourteen. The gatherings have been built for the people who were already going to come. They have not been built for the people who needed them most. He has spent his career writing for the second group while serving the first one. The data has finally caught up to him.

Ask him to read the global market and he will say, in his own register, that Europe is too intellectual, the United States is too transactional, and the British are the sweet spot because they balance the two. He has the receipts. Every dominant operator in the global events economy, from Informa to RX to Hyve to the Tarsus-to-Informa flow, is British or British-shaped. The reason the trade press cannot see what he can see, he will note without quite saying so, is that the trade press has never stood where he has stood. He is the European who moved through three Anglo-Saxon working cultures and ended up in Las Vegas. The global map he draws is a function of the biography. Only the operator who has lived in all three registers can read it.

Method, luck, grit, independence. Underneath all four is a fifth disposition, deeper than any of them. He is, and has been since he was fourteen, a student of the situation. Every platform shift, every economic shock, every framework, every gathering he has reported from, he has approached the way a student approaches an unfamiliar text, with curiosity, with humility, with the assumption that there is something to learn before there is something to teach. He has been a student through Lehman, through COVID, through the virtual-events bubble, through the AI rupture, through two exits and one fall. He has been a student of his own field, of his own audience, of his own marriage, of his own city.

That is the platform. Method, luck, grit, independence, studentship, and a refusal to skip a week. The boy in Apulia who could not be admitted to the social order spent thirty years building the platform that admits everyone else. He has not stopped. He shows up every week. He writes what he saw. He gives the people who run the rooms what they need to run them better. That is the work he has chosen, and the work he keeps choosing.

The fourteen-year-old in Apulia who rented a club because nobody was going to invite him to one is now the man in Las Vegas who has spent eighteen years, one week at a time, writing to the people who run the rooms. The frameworks are real. The reviews are real. The research is real. The credentials at the top of the page are real. The American Dream, Italian style, turns out to have been about something larger than the dream itself. It was about the kid who decided, very young, that he was going to make his own life, in his own language, on his own terms, by serving the people who had decided the same thing. He still shows up. Week after week. He still writes the way he has always written, with a tool in one hand and a thesis in the other, for the operators who needed both.

Ten depositable lines from the Julius Solaris conversation, extracted for the GatheringPoint Wisdom Bank archive.

On origin. “If you cannot be admitted to the social order, build the thing the social order has to come to.”

The lesson he learned at fourteen, in a rented club in Apulia, when the kids who would not stand near him at school came inside the gathering because he was the one who had made it happen. The whole career descends from this single sentence.

On the audience. “I write for the people who have to deliver. The quota, the budget, the sponsor, the boss. I am one of them. That is why they read me.”

The single clearest articulation of who Boldpush serves. He is not writing for the philosophers. He is writing for the operators who have payroll due Friday.

On method. “Study. Explore. Execute. The wave changes. The method does not.”

The three verbs that have governed his approach to every platform shift since 2007. Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, BarCamp, virtual events, newsletter, AI. Ahead of all of them with the same operating system.

On luck. “If you ask me how I got here from a desk in southern Italy, I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

The most revealing sentence in a two-hour interview. The man with the largest independent platform in the global events industry is the first to admit he cannot fully explain his own arc. The willingness to say so is itself a credential.

On the partner. “I am a mess without her. She makes things work, she runs the operations, she made the green card happen. The whole thing is the two of us.”

Carmen Boscolo, twenty-six years, three businesses, two continents. The architecture of his career has always been a two-person operation.

On the Hopin lesson. “No team could have countered that fall. I was warning internally that in-person was coming back.”

The cleanest summary he has given of the Hopin chapter. The structural argument underneath it is bigger than Hopin. Any operator inside a company that is rewarding the wrong thing should hear the line and recognize the warning.

On the industry’s deepest disconnect. “Forty-nine percent of attendees say connection is why they show up. Eight percent of planners design for it.”

The Boldpush 2026 Encore research finding, distilled. The industry has been building events for the people who were already coming. The data has finally caught up to what the operators have known by experience for years.

On the global map. “Europe is too intellectual. The United States is too transactional. The British are the sweet spot. That is why Informa, RX, Hyve, and every other dominant operator is British or British-shaped.”

His single sharpest line on the geopolitics of the industry. He is the only commentator in print who has the standing to make this call, because he has lived inside all three working cultures.

On worth. “Know your worth. The first two deals collapsed because I did not.”

The lesson he draws from the third try at the Event Manager Blog sale to Skift. Operator vocabulary, not analyst vocabulary. The deposit belongs in the bank because it is the line he wishes someone had told him when he was twenty-eight, and the one he tells every founder now.

On the work itself. “I show up every week. I write what I saw. I have not skipped one in eighteen years. That is the whole job.”

The clearest articulation of the discipline that produced the platform. Not strategy, not method, not philosophy. The simple refusal to skip a week, sustained over eighteen years, in twelve countries, across two continents. The platform is the cumulative interest on that refusal.

Why the song.

Every Wisdom Bank profile on GatheringPoint comes with an original song. The song is not decoration. It is a second telling of the story, in a different register, that the reader can carry with them after they have closed the article. The events industry is, at its heart, an emotional industry. The work it does at its best is the work of producing moments that people remember. A profile that ends on the page misses something. A profile that ends on the page and continues in a song stays with the reader longer.

For Julius, the song had to be the American Dream told in an Italian accent. I worked it through several drafts. The early versions leaned Italo-soul, in the register of Paolo Conte. The version that landed is closer to American heartland, in the register of Tom Petty and John Mellencamp. The shift mattered because the story is not about the country he came from. It is about the country he chose. The hook stays Italian, la strada lunga, the long road, because that is the part of him no amount of choosing erased. The rest of the song is American, because the rest of him chose it.

The Edible Profile of Julius Solaris from Smallbitecarchitecture.com

Why the edible profile.

Every Wisdom Bank subject on GatheringPoint is rendered as a tasting menu. Four small bites, four small sips. Each one keyed to a specific moment or insight from the profile. The Julius version sits at the top of this post.

The franchise exists because the events industry is, before it is anything else, a sensory industry. The work it produces lives in the body of the attendee, not just in the mind. A profile that closes on the page reaches the reader’s intellect. A profile that closes on a focaccia square, a negroni, a terrine, and a clarified milk punch reaches the part of the reader the industry actually serves. The edible profile is the way GatheringPoint honors its own subject matter.

The pairing for Julius runs all the way through his story. The Apulian focaccia square with burrata, sun-dried tomato, and basil is the club night at fourteen in the heel of Italy, the room he built so the cool kids would have to come in. The negroni built one-to-one-to-one with a Las Vegas neon-orange twist is the American Dream told in an Italian accent, Italy’s bitter heart poured in the convention capital of America. The three-layer terrine is Study, Explore, Execute, the operating system that caught every wave. The clarified milk punch, cloudy ingredients made crystal clear, is the honest answer of a man who cannot fully explain his own success. I don’t know.

A profile is a record of the mind. The edible profile is a record of the man. Both are necessary. Neither is complete alone.

Editor’s Note. Three forces have converged on the event agency business at the same moment, and the convergence is the story of the year. Brands have discovered that their live events are their Super Bowls, and the corporate budgets have followed. Private equity has arrived at scale in the exhibition and consumer event industry. And the digital channels the rest of the marketing economy was built on are collapsing under artificial intelligence, leaving the face-to-face room itself as the only channel the algorithm cannot reach and trust is still evident. The agencies who build those rooms are the picks and shovels of the next decade of corporate growth. But the deeper story is the double meaning of the word agency. The companies are one kind of agency. The human capacity to exercise judgment, to make the call, to keep the craft from being outsourced to the model — that is the other kind, and it is more important than ever. The machine can do the sourcing. It cannot do the gathering. This Howard Givner profile is the first installment of GatheringPoint’s commitment to covering the field with the seriousness it has earned.

David Adler · Curator in Chief · GatheringPoint.news

Six years ago, on a Tuesday in May of 2020, Howard Givner received the stem cell transplant that saved his life. The event industry he had spent 25 years building was, on that same Tuesday, effectively closed for business. Ballrooms were dark. Convention centers were field hospitals. Agencies were laying off the staff they had spent a decade training. The man who had founded and sold two event companies, served as chief executive of the American arm of a third through its sale to BCD Meetings and Events, and built the closest thing the meetings business had to a graduate school was lying in a hospital bed in New York wondering whether the industry, or he himself, would still be standing on the other side of the year. Both, as it turned out, would. “Knock on wood,” Givner says now, “all my scans are clear. I’m extremely grateful for having gone through that.”

The gratitude is not rhetorical. It is the operating system of everything that has happened since. The man who came out of that hospital is not the man who went in, and the events industry he has returned to is not the one he left. He calls the anniversary his Re-birthday, the term stem cell transplant survivors use for the day of the transplant that saved their life. He observes it. Two weeks before this conversation he marked the sixth one, and four days after that he stood on the top floor of NeueHouse Madison Square in New York and convened 98 chief executives of experiential, meetings, and incentive agencies for the inaugural Event Agency C-Suite Growth Summit, produced in partnership with micebook, the British events industry publication. Seventy-two percent of the room flew in from somewhere else. He admitted no vendors except sponsors, returned a meaningful sum of money to people who tried to slip in below the C-suite line, and opened the day by telling the room what he was personally struggling with. “This only works,” he told them, invoking the Chatham House Rule, “if everybody’s going to be open and share and be vulnerable.”

The man who built that room is the same man who began, a quarter-century earlier, as a club promoter in Manhattan, and the distance between those two figures is the whole story.

A promoter, a paisley fraternity party, and a salesperson who quit

The first thing to know about Howard Givner is that he did not set out to become the consigliere of an industry. He set out to throw a party. The party in question was a corporate event at a Manhattan nightclub in the late 1990s, and the only reason it landed in his lap was that the club’s event salesperson had quit a few weeks earlier and the owner, looking around at one in the morning for somebody who knew the room, settled on the young promoter who was already standing there. A caterer at the bar had mistaken Givner for staff and asked whether the space could hold a certain number of people for a corporate function. Givner took the man’s card, passed it to the club owner at the end of the night, and walked out with a commission and a small business in waiting. “That was sort of like the first foray out of promoting and doing more corporate events,” he says. “I booked that guy’s event, and he gave me more. And then other people started calling. It just went from being a promoter to having a business that didn’t rely on my own rolodex of friends and friends of friends.”

He called the company Paint the Town Red, after a theme party he had thrown as social chairman of his fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania. The fraternity was Tau Epsilon Phi. The theme, because it was the 1980s and paisley was still a thing, had originally been Paint the Town Paisley. The origin he can trace further back than that, to his mother, who threw what he calls “these really exotic parties” in the family house. The surprise party she staged for one of his father’s milestone birthdays had every guest waiting on the lawn in gilded-age parasols and hats. “He came home and it was like he stepped into a time warp,” Givner remembers. “They were all there and like, oh, hi, surprise.” The creative aspect of designing events appealed to him in some way he cannot quite articulate. The project nature of the work appealed to him more. He is, by his own admission, a man who gets bored easily, and the rhythm of an event business, the way a new client meeting reset the clock every quarter, suited him in a way that almost no other career structure would have.

There was no event agency world to walk into in those years. Givner remembers the distinction precisely. “We didn’t call them agencies,” he says of the businesses he was building alongside in the late nineties. “Event planning businesses. Event management companies. The market kind of said, no, this is really what you are. You guys are like marketing agencies or PR agencies. I think part of the growing up of the industry in general. It just was less defined as a clear-cut sector of the economy.” The renaming was not cosmetic. It was the first signal of an industry beginning to understand itself as a financial category rather than a service trade, and Givner happened to be standing on the right side of the door when the door opened.

He sold Paint the Town Red to Global Events Group in 2008 and ran North America for the parent company through the financial crisis that followed. He took the helm of the U.S. division of Grass Roots Meetings and Events as the chief executive of the American business and led the American unit through the parent company’s sale to BCD Meetings and Events in 2018. That chapter was operating experience inside somebody else’s transaction. The two transactions where he sat in the founder’s chair were the bookends. The agency he had built in his twenties. The institute he would build in his thirties and forties.

The institute, and the discovery that nobody had built a graduate school

The Event Leadership Institute began, as Givner tells it, from a frustration as old as the industry itself. Event planners in America had nowhere to go for serious professional development. The associations offered certifications. The trade shows offered breakouts. The vendors offered self-interested webinars. Nobody had built a Netflix-style library of on-demand video classes, taught by working practitioners, structured the way a serious continuing-education curriculum is structured, priced for individual professionals rather than for enterprise procurement departments. Givner built it. He launched the Event Leadership Institute in 2011 and ran it through the decade that followed. The library expanded into certifications, summits, white papers, and live programming. The instructor roster filled out with the people the industry actually wanted to learn from, working agency principals and venue executives and creative directors who had built the careers the next generation was trying to model.

What ELI did, more than any single certification program or video class, was give the events industry the thing every grown-up profession eventually requires, which is a place to think about itself. The reason it mattered is the reason any graduate school matters. The associations served their members. The trade shows served their exhibitors. The institute served the practitioner. There was, until ELI, no neutral ground on which an event professional could simply learn the craft from the people who had figured it out, in the format the practitioner actually had time for, at a price an individual could carry. The institute became the closest thing the meetings business had ever produced to a school, and the school had a faculty, a syllabus, and, eventually, a brand.

PCMA acquired the institute in January 2023. The association needed an education engine that could move at the speed of the industry. The institute needed the institutional capital and the distribution that an established trade body could provide. Givner came in as the association’s Senior Vice President of Knowledge and Innovation. He led the integration, he sat in the management meetings, he ran the product. And then he walked.

The walk is, in some ways, the most consequential decision of his career, because it freed him to do the work he is doing now. The institute had taught a generation of practitioners how to think about the craft. The next problem in the industry was no longer a teaching problem. It was a structural one. The capital had arrived. The deals had begun. The founders the institute had spent ten years educating were now sitting across desks from private equity sponsors, trying to figure out whether to sell, when to sell, and to whom. The man who had built the school they had attended was the natural person to walk them through the next chapter, and the natural person to build the room in which the next chapter would actually be discussed.

The room he built, and the man cancer made

The Event Agency C-Suite Growth Summit was, on paper, a one-day conference at a private club on East 25th Street. In practice it was something the event agency business has never had before. “We mixed together people who would say there are incentive agencies, and others would be, well, we’re more experiential, and others are more, well, we’re more meeting management,” Givner says. “But everyone’s dealing with a lot of the same issues. Whether you’re working in pharma or finance or tech, or you’re in one region or another region, people are dealing with a lot of the same things.”

That sentence is the entire thesis of his fourth act. The agency principals of the American events business have spent their careers in segregated silos, gathered by category at the conferences that serve their narrow trades. The luxury social planners gather at Engage. The trade show organizers gather at IMEX and IBTM. The meetings management houses live inside PCMA and MPI. The destination management firms have ADMEI. The production companies have LDI and InfoComm. What no one had built, until Givner built it with micebook as his production partner, was the room for the chief executives themselves, across categories, talking to each other under Chatham House Rule and the unspoken agreement that no one was there to sell to anyone else.

The way he built it is the part the story usually misses, and it is the part where the cancer chapter comes into the frame. A man who has been on a stem cell transplant ward does not have the patience for performance. He does not have the patience for the small social capital that ordinarily lubricates an industry gathering. He does not have the patience for the people in the room who are there to take rather than give. Givner returned a meaningful sum in ticket money to people who tried to attend below the C-suite line. He capped the room at strict equivalent. He admitted vendors only as sponsors. “There were one or two people who came to the June dinner last year who just listened and took and didn’t give,” he says. “They were not invited back.” He opened the day by telling the room what he was struggling with. He had 20 agency principals do the same. He spent the breaks making introductions across geographies. “If there’s a female owner of a mid-sized business from the Bay Area here,” he says, “I connect her to a female owner of a mid-sized business from Toronto. They don’t have any real mechanism to talk to each other, and to do so in a space where they don’t have to worry. There are no clients in the room. There are no prospects in the room. It’s a place where it’s sort of okay to come together. This was like a club almost.”

The club almost. That is the right phrase. The American event agency business has, for the first time in its history, a clubhouse, and Givner is the man at the door. The man at the door knows, in a way that the men and women inside the door cannot yet quite admit, that the time everyone has left to figure this out is finite. That is the gift cancer gives a man, when it does not kill him. It clarifies the calendar.

Why him, and not somebody else

There are perhaps 20 figures in the American event agency business who have the experience, the network, and the standing to have done what Howard Givner did in May at NeueHouse Madison Square. There are perhaps three who have the temperament. The question of why Givner is the one running the room, rather than one of the other 19, is the question the field has quietly answered without anyone asking it out loud.

The answer is biographical. He has been a founder, twice. He has been a buyer, advising more than a dozen agency principals through their acquisitions and sales. He has been an operator inside the parent company that bought him and inside the global meetings firm that ran him. He has been a teacher, building the only graduate-school-shaped institution the field has ever had, and he has been a seller, walking that institution into the arms of the trade body that needed it. He has sat at the M&A table from both sides and at the educator’s lectern from in front of it. There is no chair in the event agency business he has not occupied, and the field knows it. When a founder gets the first unsolicited LOI and needs somebody to walk through it with them, there is one phone call. When a number-two finally wants to ask whether the founder is ever going to share equity, there is one phone call. When a private equity sponsor wants to understand what they are actually buying, there is one phone call. It is the same phone.

The other piece of the answer is temperamental. Givner is the rare senior figure in this field who is not running a competing agency, not selling a competing platform, not staffing up a competing trade media operation, and not trying to position himself for the next acquisition. He sold both of his companies. He walked out of the association job. He is, structurally and by choice, the one person in the room with no conflicting interest. The chief executives who fly in to NeueHouse fly in because they know the man at the head of the table is not pitching them. He is not competing with them. He is not building a portfolio company that will eventually be sold to one of them or against one of them. The Chatham House Rule works because Givner himself has no commercial reason to break it, and the field can feel that. The mayor of the event agency world is the mayor precisely because he has nothing to sell and everything to broker. The civic frame is not metaphorical. It is the actual structure of his role.

And the field, having figured this out without anyone needing to say it, has begun arriving at his door with the problems that matter most.

The inventory of problems, and why they all rhyme

The actual problems on the table at the summit are the most accurate inventory of the state of the event agency business currently in circulation, and Givner walks through them with the calm of a man who has heard every version of every one of them in a private conversation in the last 12 months. Talent, which is to say everything. Agencies, he says, are McKinsey-shaped businesses. “We don’t have venues. We don’t have gear. I mean, I guess some do, but most of them, it’s really just intellectual capital. You’re like a McKinsey. Your assets walk out the door every day, so to speak.” The pipeline question, the development question, the retention question, and the equity question all run together. The number-twos at the great agencies have been waiting 15 years for an ownership conversation that never quite happened, and they are now reading about private equity acquisitions in the trade press and asking themselves whether they should still be loyal to the founder who is about to take the check.

Artificial intelligence, and specifically how to integrate it operationally rather than theoretically. “Melissa Van Dyke from The Creative Group did a really good presentation at the summit on the approach that her company took,” Givner says. “They created a tiger team and they looked at all these different AI products and they mapped the workflow and they figured out, what’s the best way for us to integrate this and socialize it.” The houses that solve that puzzle in the next 18 months will be meaningfully more valuable than the houses that do not.

Mergers and acquisitions, which is no longer a minority concern. “Five years ago it was a minority of companies looking at it,” Givner says. “Now everybody’s thinking about it.” The smarter shops are thinking about it as buyers, looking at acquisition as a faster path to growth than the organic option will ever deliver. “They’re like, we need to basically buy EBITDA,” he says, “and it’s that simple.” The harder problem, the one that gets less airtime in the trade press, is what happens after the deal closes. The integration is where one plus one becomes three, or where it quietly becomes one and a half. Most deal announcements read like the transaction is the achievement. The achievement is the work that begins the morning after the press release runs, and the agencies that have done the diligence on the cultural integration as carefully as they have done the diligence on the financial one are the agencies whose deals actually deliver the return.

The request-for-proposal process, and the growing sense among agency principals that brands are now sending RFPs to too many shops, giving too little time, and in the worst cases lifting the ideas of one agency to hand to another for execution. None of these problems are new. What is new is the room. And what is new about the room is the man who built it, and the chair he is sitting in.

Why private equity has finally arrived

The reason the clubhouse matters is that the deal flow it is mediating is the most significant financial story in the events industry. Givner moderated a panel at the summit with the principals of three of the firms that have most aggressively entered the space. Shamrock Capital, which owns Nth Degree. EagleTree Capital, which acquired Opus Agency. H.I.G. Capital, which entered the industry this year by buying and merging the destination management firms 360 Destination Group and CSI DMC into a single national platform. The men on stage, Givner has said publicly, were genuinely bullish on the industry in a way the room found almost startling. “They wake up and they love the industry,” he says. “They can invest in a plumbing supply business if that’s going to give them a good return. And they’re really optimistic about the space. A lot of people in the room found that optimism really infectious, because they’re struggling day to day. To see investors who don’t have that event DNA, it’s like, they really love this.”

The optimism is grounded in a set of theses Givner articulates more clearly than the sponsors themselves often do. Events, he argues, have become the rare marketing channel that has withstood the disruptions currently destroying media brands. Search has been cannibalized by artificial intelligence overviews. Email open rates are collapsing under the weight of AI summaries. Brands that built their growth engines on either channel are getting killed. Live events, by contrast, are what Givner calls “truth sanctuaries” and “algorithm-proof vehicles.” You are in the room. The algorithm cannot reach you. The trust, the spontaneity, the relationship-building, the face-to-face exchange, none of it can be replicated by the technology that is dismantling the rest of the marketing stack.

Then there is the structural thesis. The event agency business is, in Givner’s reading, still fragmented in roughly the way the American accounting profession was fragmented before the consolidation that produced the Big Eight, then the Big Six, then the Big Four. “I think there’s a feeling that’s sort of part of where our industry is headed to some extent,” he says. The capital arriving in the field is arriving with that consolidation in mind. The H.I.G. play with 360 and CSI was not a one-off. It was a template.

The deal sheet underneath all of this is real and current. EagleTree acquired Opus. Nth Degree acquired the experiential firm INVNT. MC and A took an investment in Imprint Events Group. Brands at Work acquired Chorus. Apollo Global Management announced its acquisition of Emerald and Questex to create one of North America’s largest combined business events and media platforms, the first credible attempt in a generation to fuse trade media and trade events under common ownership at meaningful scale. Encore Global, the production giant, acquired the meetings agency FIRST and its embedded-services model, and has filed to go public.

The Encore-FIRST deal is the one Givner spends the most time on, and it is the one most worth understanding. FIRST is, in his telling, really two businesses. “Eighty percent of their business is this embedded model where they’ve got bodies on the ground at Goldman and Google and Bank of America. Those companies outsource their meeting management. Venue sourcing, registration, a lot of the logistics. It’s very predictable. At the beginning of the year, they know what they’re going to do.” The remaining 20 percent is the creative shop, which scaled meaningfully after FIRST acquired Jeff Kalpak’s company some years back. What Encore was buying, in Givner’s reading, was less the creative side than the embedded model itself. “Encore looks at that as a corporate campus viewpoint,” he says. “They probably could refer business to FIRST as much, if not more, than FIRST refers business to Encore.” The combined entity is now positioning itself to go public on the back of a business model that arbitrages labor inside the largest corporate accounts in the country. There are, Givner notes, not many other firms attacking that specific niche. “That’s a tough space to get into. You’re really arbitraging the labor.”

The Vogue World thesis, and what the agencies are actually selling

If the financial story is consolidation, the cultural story is the discovery, by every adjacent industry, that events are the asset class the rest of the marketing economy has been quietly subsidizing for years. Givner reaches, more than once in our conversation, for the parallel that explains the most. “You look at Vogue. Vogue’s digital traffic is down,” he says. “But they create Vogue World, and the revenue doubles every year. People Inc., the former Dot Dash Meredith, did their first upfront for events in February. They brought media and brand marketers in to showcase their event portfolio.” The Conde Nast and People Inc. moves are not curiosities. They are the leading edge of a structural reweighting of how media companies make money. The text business is being eaten by the algorithm. The event business is not. Vogue World is, in any honest accounting of the contemporary Conde Nast balance sheet, the most important new product the company has launched in a decade.

Agencies sit, in Givner’s framing, at exactly the seam where this reweighting is happening. “It’s a little bit like agencies are viewed as the picks and shovels of the space right now,” he says. The phrase is the right one. When media companies decide to launch tentpole events, when brands decide to shift budget out of search and into experience, when corporations decide that the only marketing channel they cannot afford to lose is the one where their customers are physically in the room, the people who actually build the rooms are the agencies. The picks-and-shovels logic explains both why private equity is suddenly bullish on the category and why the multiples on agency businesses have begun to move.

There is, of course, a question lurking underneath the optimism, and Givner is too experienced not to know it is there. The event agency business is, in its bones, a relationship and a sensibility. The private equity model wants a scalable financial asset. The challenge, as he framed it from the summit floor, is to turn relationship-driven companies into scalable financial assets without losing what makes them work. The agencies that solve that puzzle will emerge from the next five years larger, better capitalized, and meaningfully more valuable. The agencies that do not will be the ones whose founder walked out with a check and whose clients quietly found somebody else to plan the next user conference.

The way the smart houses are hedging against that risk, Givner says, is by deliberately building multiple touch points into every client relationship. “There’s account person risk, and there’s owner-slash-salesperson risk,” he says. “The smarter agencies navigate multiple touch points for each client. One person manages the relationship, one person’s in charge of the event. The odds of both of those people leaving are lower than obviously one person.” It is the Mad Men model, in his telling, applied to the event agency business. The accounts director who keeps the relationship and the producer who delivers the work. When a deal closes and the new ownership calls the client list, the first question every client asks is, “Well, who’s going to be running my event now?” The houses that have answers survive the integration. The houses that do not, do not.

The Cuban doctrine, and the disruption coming for the back office

What does Givner tell the old-line agencies who are wondering how to stay fresh while the capital rearranges the field around them? He reaches for Mark Cuban. “Run your business like there’s somebody in a garage hustling to eat your lunch, because there is,” he says, paraphrasing a line Cuban once delivered on Shark Tank. “Constantly operate out of a slight sense of fear that there’s a more aggressive competitor coming for you. If you have that mentality, and you don’t take your repeat clients for granted, because that’s where you kind of get soft. A lot of times the more doting service and the more creative ideas are reserved for the new clients, for winning those new clients. And then once you have them, it’s tempting to take them for granted and be like, okay, well, they know us, they’re going to rebook us. We don’t have to go crazy. And you take a client for granted for too long, and the next thing you know, your event is out for RFP, and maybe you’re invited back, maybe you’re not.”

The garage hustler is not, in Givner’s reading, hypothetical. The disruption coming for the events industry over the next 18 months will land first in the back office. The sourcing side of the business, in his analysis, is ripe for replacement by software, and the replacement has already begun. The French firm Naboo raised 70 million dollars earlier this year to attack venue sourcing and procurement from the ground up. The armies of people who today do the work of checking availability, holding space, moving group blocks from one room to another, are about to discover that a meaningful portion of that work is being done by an algorithm. “That business today is run by armies of people,” Givner says. “Whether it’s the Helms Briscoes on the outside or other companies. A lot of that is matching availability and capacity and pricing for meetings and venues. Naboo is one of a handful of companies that have basically attacked that problem from the ground up through AI, not through labor.” The hordes of people whose careers were built on that work will not all survive the transition.

The disruption will be felt unevenly. The largest IMEXes and South by Southwests of the world, in Givner’s view, will continue to thrive, because the human urge to gather at scale is not going away. But within those rooms, the real value will accrue to the people who can find their five or six right people inside the larger 8,000. “If you go to IMEX and there’s 8,000 people there,” he says, “if you meet five or six of the right people for you, the ROI is great. The challenge is how do you find those five or six people? The matchmaking apps, they’re okay. They’ll get better. But if there’s somebody who can curate that and say, listen, I’m getting together with a group of people at IMEX who are newsletter thought leaders in the space, there’s going to be eight of us, and I’m pulling all the other David Adlers together, you’d be like, I’m definitely not going to miss that.”

The example was not, in fairness, chosen at random. Givner has, in his way, been pulling versions of that room together for 20 years.

The narrow and deep doctrine, and a man counting his calendar

The reason Howard Givner is the one running this room, rather than the one paying admission to it, is that the cancer chapter rearranged his sense of what is worth doing with the time he has. He does two or three things now, by his own count. The consulting practice through Heathcote Advisory Group, which advises owners and executives at event businesses, largely agencies but increasingly also event-technology firms and event owners trying to scale. The mergers and acquisitions work through Oaklins DeSilva and Phillips, which is the largest piece of the advisory practice. And, increasingly, the building of these narrow, deep, curated communities of which the C-Suite Growth Summit is the prototype.

“I have a very strong belief that this sort of narrow and deep approach provides incredible value,” he says. “It’s more work. It’s not going to be a ten-million-dollar event. But the people that are there, if you curate it right and the content is right and the people are right, you can really create a great experience for people.”

The narrow-and-deep doctrine is the operating philosophy of the next chapter, and it is the doctrine of a man who has learned, in the most direct way available, that time is the only resource that does not refill. The summits will not scale into the largest revenue events on the calendar. The mass-market trade press will continue to cover the bigger shows. What Givner is building instead is the room where the consequential conversations actually happen, and the standing to be the man who calls those conversations into existence. “There’s that innate need,” he says, “and I think that’s not always going to drive the largest profits or revenue. But people will pay a lot more to be in a really, really curated room. When you’re at the bottom of your own funnel.”

The bottom of your own funnel. That is the phrase that will travel out of this conversation and into the next one, because every chief executive in the room at NeueHouse knew exactly what he meant. They have spent careers running the wider funnel, the trade show booth, the prospecting list, the brand awareness play. What they have not had, until now, is the room where they are themselves the prospects, where the conversation is for them rather than from them, where the man at the door has lived every chair in the room and has the standing to ask the questions nobody else can ask.

A man, a clubhouse, a generation

The American event agency business is, right now, in the middle of the most significant financial repositioning in its history. The capital is here. The deals are getting done. The founders are aging. The integrations are succeeding or failing on the strength of decisions being made in conference rooms the trade press will never see. The next five years will determine who owns this industry, and what shape it takes on the other side of the consolidation.

The man who will be in the room for every meaningful conversation is the same man who walked into a Manhattan nightclub 30 years ago because the salesperson had quit, who built a graduate school for an industry that had never had one, who founded and sold two companies of his own, the agency in his twenties and the institute in the decades that followed, and ran the American arm of a third through the parent company’s sale to one of the largest meetings firms in the world. He lay in a stem cell transplant ward at the exact moment his industry shut down and decided, when his scans came back clear, that the next chapter would be the one that mattered most. He did not plan to become the mayor of the event agency world. But somebody had to be, and Howard Givner, six years out from his Re-birthday, the club promoter from Penn who took a commission one night because the door was open, is the one who turned out to be standing there when the door opened again.

The door is wide open now. The people inside the room are the ones who run the field. And the man at the door, calendar finite and clear-eyed about it, is the one taking down their names.

Your Assets Walk Out the Door Every Day

The event agency business is a McKinsey-shaped business. You do not own venues. You do not own gear. You own intellectual capital, and intellectual capital has feet. The houses that forget this are the houses that wake up one morning and discover their best three people have started their own shop down the block.

The Garage Hustler Is Real

Run your business as if there is someone in a garage right now figuring out how to eat your lunch. Because there is. The agencies that operate out of a permanent, slight sense of competitive paranoia are the agencies that stay sharp. The agencies that get comfortable get replaced.

The Danger Is the Repeat Client

Agencies reserve their best creative and their most attentive service for the new accounts they are trying to win. The accounts they already have are where the soft spots open up. Take a repeat client for granted long enough and the next thing you see is the RFP, and maybe you are invited back and maybe you are not.

Build Two Touch Points Into Every Client

Account person risk and owner-salesperson risk are the two failure modes that quietly kill agencies. The Mad Men model is the answer. One person carries the relationship. One person carries the work. The odds of both walking out the door at the same time are meaningfully lower than the odds of either one. The first question every client asks after a deal closes is, who will be running my event now. Make sure you have two answers.

Events Are Truth Sanctuaries

Search has been cannibalized by artificial intelligence overviews. Email open rates are collapsing under AI summaries. The brands that built their growth engines on either channel are getting killed. Live events are the algorithm-proof vehicles that remain. You are in the room. The algorithm cannot reach you. That is the entire investment thesis.

Buy EBITDA When You Can

Organic growth is hard. Acquisition is faster. The smart agencies are now thinking about mergers and acquisitions as an instrument of growth, not as a one-time exit. The hard part is not the deal. The hard part is the integration, and the heavy lifting begins the morning after the press release runs.

The Heavy Lifting Comes After the Announcement

Every acquisition press release reads like the deal is the achievement. The deal is the easy part. The achievement is making one plus one equal three, and most acquired companies fail at that math because nobody ever wrote the integration plan. The agencies that win the next five years will be the agencies that take integration as seriously as they take diligence.

Curate the Room Ruthlessly

The value of a curated room is the people who are not in it as much as the people who are. Vendors out, except as sponsors. Listeners who take and do not give get one invitation. Return the money to the people who do not belong. The strict line at the door is the product. If you blur the line, you do not have a room. You have a trade show floor.

Narrow and Deep Beats Broad and Shallow

It is more work. It will never be a ten-million-dollar event. But the people you bring together inside a curated room will pay more, return more often, and tell more of their peers about it than any volume play will ever generate. You are at the bottom of your own funnel, and so are they. The bottom of the funnel is where the real money lives.

Time Clarifies the Calendar

A man on a stem cell transplant ward does not have the patience for performance. He does not have the patience for the people in the room who are there to take rather than give. The gift cancer gives you, when it does not kill you, is the clarity to spend the next chapter on the work that actually matters. Six years out from rebirth day, the calendar is finite, and the only question worth asking is which conversations are worth being in.

Why I Do Songs. Every Wisdom Bank piece comes with an original song because a song carries an argument differently than prose does. Prose persuades the reader. A song moves through them. A chorus settles into the back of the head and stays there long after the article has been closed and the laptop has been shut. The Greeks knew this. The Burgundian troubadours knew this. The civil rights movement knew this. The gathering economy needs its own canon of songs, because the field deserves to be remembered the way it actually feels — communal, in motion, sung in a room.

David Adler · Curator in Chief · GatheringPoint.news

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An Edible Profile of Howard Givner

Why Small Bite Architecture. Personalization is the most overused word in the contemporary economy and the most undelivered promise. The algorithm personalizes by guessing. The brand personalizes by inserting your name in the subject line. None of it is personal. Real personalization is the act of one human being studying another closely enough to render them as something no other person could be rendered as. A portrait. A song. A dish. Small Bite Architecture renders each subject as four bites and four sips no other subject could receive, built from the specific facts of the specific life. The machine can imitate the prose. The machine can imitate the music. The machine cannot host the dinner.

David Adler · Curator in Chief · GatheringPoint.news

Editor’s Note. Three forces have converged on the event agency business at the same moment, and the convergence is the story of the year. Brands have discovered that their live events are their Super Bowls, and the corporate budgets have followed. Private equity has arrived at scale in the exhibition and consumer event industry. And the digital channels the rest of the marketing economy was built on are collapsing under artificial intelligence, leaving the face-to-face room itself as the only channel the algorithm cannot reach and trust is still evident. The agencies who build those rooms are the picks and shovels of the next decade of corporate growth. But the deeper story is the double meaning of the word agency. The companies are one kind of agency. The human capacity to exercise judgment, to make the call, to keep the craft from being outsourced to the model — that is the other kind, and it is more important than ever. The machine can do the sourcing. It cannot do the gathering. This Howard Givner profile is the first installment of GatheringPoint’s commitment to covering the field with the seriousness it has earned.

David Adler · Curator in Chief · GatheringPoint.news

Six years ago, on a Tuesday in May of 2020, Howard Givner received the stem cell transplant that saved his life. The event industry he had spent 25 years building was, on that same Tuesday, effectively closed for business. Ballrooms were dark. Convention centers were field hospitals. Agencies were laying off the staff they had spent a decade training. The man who had founded and sold two event companies, served as chief executive of the American arm of a third through its sale to BCD Meetings and Events, and built the closest thing the meetings business had to a graduate school was lying in a hospital bed in New York wondering whether the industry, or he himself, would still be standing on the other side of the year. Both, as it turned out, would. “Knock on wood,” Givner says now, “all my scans are clear. I’m extremely grateful for having gone through that.”

The gratitude is not rhetorical. It is the operating system of everything that has happened since. The man who came out of that hospital is not the man who went in, and the events industry he has returned to is not the one he left. He calls the anniversary his Re-birthday, the term stem cell transplant survivors use for the day of the transplant that saved their life. He observes it. Two weeks before this conversation he marked the sixth one, and four days after that he stood on the top floor of NeueHouse Madison Square in New York and convened 98 chief executives of experiential, meetings, and incentive agencies for the inaugural Event Agency C-Suite Growth Summit, produced in partnership with micebook, the British events industry publication. Seventy-two percent of the room flew in from somewhere else. He admitted no vendors except sponsors, returned a meaningful sum of money to people who tried to slip in below the C-suite line, and opened the day by telling the room what he was personally struggling with. “This only works,” he told them, invoking the Chatham House Rule, “if everybody’s going to be open and share and be vulnerable.”

The man who built that room is the same man who began, a quarter-century earlier, as a club promoter in Manhattan, and the distance between those two figures is the whole story.

A promoter, a paisley fraternity party, and a salesperson who quit

The first thing to know about Howard Givner is that he did not set out to become the consigliere of an industry. He set out to throw a party. The party in question was a corporate event at a Manhattan nightclub in the late 1990s, and the only reason it landed in his lap was that the club’s event salesperson had quit a few weeks earlier and the owner, looking around at one in the morning for somebody who knew the room, settled on the young promoter who was already standing there. A caterer at the bar had mistaken Givner for staff and asked whether the space could hold a certain number of people for a corporate function. Givner took the man’s card, passed it to the club owner at the end of the night, and walked out with a commission and a small business in waiting. “That was sort of like the first foray out of promoting and doing more corporate events,” he says. “I booked that guy’s event, and he gave me more. And then other people started calling. It just went from being a promoter to having a business that didn’t rely on my own rolodex of friends and friends of friends.”

He called the company Paint the Town Red, after a theme party he had thrown as social chairman of his fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania. The fraternity was Tau Epsilon Phi. The theme, because it was the 1980s and paisley was still a thing, had originally been Paint the Town Paisley. The origin he can trace further back than that, to his mother, who threw what he calls “these really exotic parties” in the family house. The surprise party she staged for one of his father’s milestone birthdays had every guest waiting on the lawn in gilded-age parasols and hats. “He came home and it was like he stepped into a time warp,” Givner remembers. “They were all there and like, oh, hi, surprise.” The creative aspect of designing events appealed to him in some way he cannot quite articulate. The project nature of the work appealed to him more. He is, by his own admission, a man who gets bored easily, and the rhythm of an event business, the way a new client meeting reset the clock every quarter, suited him in a way that almost no other career structure would have.

There was no event agency world to walk into in those years. Givner remembers the distinction precisely. “We didn’t call them agencies,” he says of the businesses he was building alongside in the late nineties. “Event planning businesses. Event management companies. The market kind of said, no, this is really what you are. You guys are like marketing agencies or PR agencies. I think part of the growing up of the industry in general. It just was less defined as a clear-cut sector of the economy.” The renaming was not cosmetic. It was the first signal of an industry beginning to understand itself as a financial category rather than a service trade, and Givner happened to be standing on the right side of the door when the door opened.

He sold Paint the Town Red to Global Events Group in 2008 and ran North America for the parent company through the financial crisis that followed. He took the helm of the U.S. division of Grass Roots Meetings and Events as the chief executive of the American business and led the American unit through the parent company’s sale to BCD Meetings and Events in 2018. That chapter was operating experience inside somebody else’s transaction. The two transactions where he sat in the founder’s chair were the bookends. The agency he had built in his twenties. The institute he would build in his thirties and forties.

The institute, and the discovery that nobody had built a graduate school

The Event Leadership Institute began, as Givner tells it, from a frustration as old as the industry itself. Event planners in America had nowhere to go for serious professional development. The associations offered certifications. The trade shows offered breakouts. The vendors offered self-interested webinars. Nobody had built a Netflix-style library of on-demand video classes, taught by working practitioners, structured the way a serious continuing-education curriculum is structured, priced for individual professionals rather than for enterprise procurement departments. Givner built it. He launched the Event Leadership Institute in 2011 and ran it through the decade that followed. The library expanded into certifications, summits, white papers, and live programming. The instructor roster filled out with the people the industry actually wanted to learn from, working agency principals and venue executives and creative directors who had built the careers the next generation was trying to model.

What ELI did, more than any single certification program or video class, was give the events industry the thing every grown-up profession eventually requires, which is a place to think about itself. The reason it mattered is the reason any graduate school matters. The associations served their members. The trade shows served their exhibitors. The institute served the practitioner. There was, until ELI, no neutral ground on which an event professional could simply learn the craft from the people who had figured it out, in the format the practitioner actually had time for, at a price an individual could carry. The institute became the closest thing the meetings business had ever produced to a school, and the school had a faculty, a syllabus, and, eventually, a brand.

PCMA acquired the institute in January 2023. The association needed an education engine that could move at the speed of the industry. The institute needed the institutional capital and the distribution that an established trade body could provide. Givner came in as the association’s Senior Vice President of Knowledge and Innovation. He led the integration, he sat in the management meetings, he ran the product. And then he walked.

The walk is, in some ways, the most consequential decision of his career, because it freed him to do the work he is doing now. The institute had taught a generation of practitioners how to think about the craft. The next problem in the industry was no longer a teaching problem. It was a structural one. The capital had arrived. The deals had begun. The founders the institute had spent ten years educating were now sitting across desks from private equity sponsors, trying to figure out whether to sell, when to sell, and to whom. The man who had built the school they had attended was the natural person to walk them through the next chapter, and the natural person to build the room in which the next chapter would actually be discussed.

The room he built, and the man cancer made

The Event Agency C-Suite Growth Summit was, on paper, a one-day conference at a private club on East 25th Street. In practice it was something the event agency business has never had before. “We mixed together people who would say there are incentive agencies, and others would be, well, we’re more experiential, and others are more, well, we’re more meeting management,” Givner says. “But everyone’s dealing with a lot of the same issues. Whether you’re working in pharma or finance or tech, or you’re in one region or another region, people are dealing with a lot of the same things.”

That sentence is the entire thesis of his fourth act. The agency principals of the American events business have spent their careers in segregated silos, gathered by category at the conferences that serve their narrow trades. The luxury social planners gather at Engage. The trade show organizers gather at IMEX and IBTM. The meetings management houses live inside PCMA and MPI. The destination management firms have ADMEI. The production companies have LDI and InfoComm. What no one had built, until Givner built it with micebook as his production partner, was the room for the chief executives themselves, across categories, talking to each other under Chatham House Rule and the unspoken agreement that no one was there to sell to anyone else.

The way he built it is the part the story usually misses, and it is the part where the cancer chapter comes into the frame. A man who has been on a stem cell transplant ward does not have the patience for performance. He does not have the patience for the small social capital that ordinarily lubricates an industry gathering. He does not have the patience for the people in the room who are there to take rather than give. Givner returned a meaningful sum in ticket money to people who tried to attend below the C-suite line. He capped the room at strict equivalent. He admitted vendors only as sponsors. “There were one or two people who came to the June dinner last year who just listened and took and didn’t give,” he says. “They were not invited back.” He opened the day by telling the room what he was struggling with. He had 20 agency principals do the same. He spent the breaks making introductions across geographies. “If there’s a female owner of a mid-sized business from the Bay Area here,” he says, “I connect her to a female owner of a mid-sized business from Toronto. They don’t have any real mechanism to talk to each other, and to do so in a space where they don’t have to worry. There are no clients in the room. There are no prospects in the room. It’s a place where it’s sort of okay to come together. This was like a club almost.”

The club almost. That is the right phrase. The American event agency business has, for the first time in its history, a clubhouse, and Givner is the man at the door. The man at the door knows, in a way that the men and women inside the door cannot yet quite admit, that the time everyone has left to figure this out is finite. That is the gift cancer gives a man, when it does not kill him. It clarifies the calendar.

Why him, and not somebody else

There are perhaps 20 figures in the American event agency business who have the experience, the network, and the standing to have done what Howard Givner did in May at NeueHouse Madison Square. There are perhaps three who have the temperament. The question of why Givner is the one running the room, rather than one of the other 19, is the question the field has quietly answered without anyone asking it out loud.

The answer is biographical. He has been a founder, twice. He has been a buyer, advising more than a dozen agency principals through their acquisitions and sales. He has been an operator inside the parent company that bought him and inside the global meetings firm that ran him. He has been a teacher, building the only graduate-school-shaped institution the field has ever had, and he has been a seller, walking that institution into the arms of the trade body that needed it. He has sat at the M&A table from both sides and at the educator’s lectern from in front of it. There is no chair in the event agency business he has not occupied, and the field knows it. When a founder gets the first unsolicited LOI and needs somebody to walk through it with them, there is one phone call. When a number-two finally wants to ask whether the founder is ever going to share equity, there is one phone call. When a private equity sponsor wants to understand what they are actually buying, there is one phone call. It is the same phone.

The other piece of the answer is temperamental. Givner is the rare senior figure in this field who is not running a competing agency, not selling a competing platform, not staffing up a competing trade media operation, and not trying to position himself for the next acquisition. He sold both of his companies. He walked out of the association job. He is, structurally and by choice, the one person in the room with no conflicting interest. The chief executives who fly in to NeueHouse fly in because they know the man at the head of the table is not pitching them. He is not competing with them. He is not building a portfolio company that will eventually be sold to one of them or against one of them. The Chatham House Rule works because Givner himself has no commercial reason to break it, and the field can feel that. The mayor of the event agency world is the mayor precisely because he has nothing to sell and everything to broker. The civic frame is not metaphorical. It is the actual structure of his role.

And the field, having figured this out without anyone needing to say it, has begun arriving at his door with the problems that matter most.

The inventory of problems, and why they all rhyme

The actual problems on the table at the summit are the most accurate inventory of the state of the event agency business currently in circulation, and Givner walks through them with the calm of a man who has heard every version of every one of them in a private conversation in the last 12 months. Talent, which is to say everything. Agencies, he says, are McKinsey-shaped businesses. “We don’t have venues. We don’t have gear. I mean, I guess some do, but most of them, it’s really just intellectual capital. You’re like a McKinsey. Your assets walk out the door every day, so to speak.” The pipeline question, the development question, the retention question, and the equity question all run together. The number-twos at the great agencies have been waiting 15 years for an ownership conversation that never quite happened, and they are now reading about private equity acquisitions in the trade press and asking themselves whether they should still be loyal to the founder who is about to take the check.

Artificial intelligence, and specifically how to integrate it operationally rather than theoretically. “Melissa Van Dyke from The Creative Group did a really good presentation at the summit on the approach that her company took,” Givner says. “They created a tiger team and they looked at all these different AI products and they mapped the workflow and they figured out, what’s the best way for us to integrate this and socialize it.” The houses that solve that puzzle in the next 18 months will be meaningfully more valuable than the houses that do not.

Mergers and acquisitions, which is no longer a minority concern. “Five years ago it was a minority of companies looking at it,” Givner says. “Now everybody’s thinking about it.” The smarter shops are thinking about it as buyers, looking at acquisition as a faster path to growth than the organic option will ever deliver. “They’re like, we need to basically buy EBITDA,” he says, “and it’s that simple.” The harder problem, the one that gets less airtime in the trade press, is what happens after the deal closes. The integration is where one plus one becomes three, or where it quietly becomes one and a half. Most deal announcements read like the transaction is the achievement. The achievement is the work that begins the morning after the press release runs, and the agencies that have done the diligence on the cultural integration as carefully as they have done the diligence on the financial one are the agencies whose deals actually deliver the return.

The request-for-proposal process, and the growing sense among agency principals that brands are now sending RFPs to too many shops, giving too little time, and in the worst cases lifting the ideas of one agency to hand to another for execution. None of these problems are new. What is new is the room. And what is new about the room is the man who built it, and the chair he is sitting in.

Why private equity has finally arrived

The reason the clubhouse matters is that the deal flow it is mediating is the most significant financial story in the events industry. Givner moderated a panel at the summit with the principals of three of the firms that have most aggressively entered the space. Shamrock Capital, which owns Nth Degree. EagleTree Capital, which acquired Opus Agency. H.I.G. Capital, which entered the industry this year by buying and merging the destination management firms 360 Destination Group and CSI DMC into a single national platform. The men on stage, Givner has said publicly, were genuinely bullish on the industry in a way the room found almost startling. “They wake up and they love the industry,” he says. “They can invest in a plumbing supply business if that’s going to give them a good return. And they’re really optimistic about the space. A lot of people in the room found that optimism really infectious, because they’re struggling day to day. To see investors who don’t have that event DNA, it’s like, they really love this.”

The optimism is grounded in a set of theses Givner articulates more clearly than the sponsors themselves often do. Events, he argues, have become the rare marketing channel that has withstood the disruptions currently destroying media brands. Search has been cannibalized by artificial intelligence overviews. Email open rates are collapsing under the weight of AI summaries. Brands that built their growth engines on either channel are getting killed. Live events, by contrast, are what Givner calls “truth sanctuaries” and “algorithm-proof vehicles.” You are in the room. The algorithm cannot reach you. The trust, the spontaneity, the relationship-building, the face-to-face exchange, none of it can be replicated by the technology that is dismantling the rest of the marketing stack.

Then there is the structural thesis. The event agency business is, in Givner’s reading, still fragmented in roughly the way the American accounting profession was fragmented before the consolidation that produced the Big Eight, then the Big Six, then the Big Four. “I think there’s a feeling that’s sort of part of where our industry is headed to some extent,” he says. The capital arriving in the field is arriving with that consolidation in mind. The H.I.G. play with 360 and CSI was not a one-off. It was a template.

The deal sheet underneath all of this is real and current. EagleTree acquired Opus. Nth Degree acquired the experiential firm INVNT. MC and A took an investment in Imprint Events Group. Brands at Work acquired Chorus. Apollo Global Management announced its acquisition of Emerald and Questex to create one of North America’s largest combined business events and media platforms, the first credible attempt in a generation to fuse trade media and trade events under common ownership at meaningful scale. Encore Global, the production giant, acquired the meetings agency FIRST and its embedded-services model, and has filed to go public.

The Encore-FIRST deal is the one Givner spends the most time on, and it is the one most worth understanding. FIRST is, in his telling, really two businesses. “Eighty percent of their business is this embedded model where they’ve got bodies on the ground at Goldman and Google and Bank of America. Those companies outsource their meeting management. Venue sourcing, registration, a lot of the logistics. It’s very predictable. At the beginning of the year, they know what they’re going to do.” The remaining 20 percent is the creative shop, which scaled meaningfully after FIRST acquired Jeff Kalpak’s company some years back. What Encore was buying, in Givner’s reading, was less the creative side than the embedded model itself. “Encore looks at that as a corporate campus viewpoint,” he says. “They probably could refer business to FIRST as much, if not more, than FIRST refers business to Encore.” The combined entity is now positioning itself to go public on the back of a business model that arbitrages labor inside the largest corporate accounts in the country. There are, Givner notes, not many other firms attacking that specific niche. “That’s a tough space to get into. You’re really arbitraging the labor.”

The Vogue World thesis, and what the agencies are actually selling

If the financial story is consolidation, the cultural story is the discovery, by every adjacent industry, that events are the asset class the rest of the marketing economy has been quietly subsidizing for years. Givner reaches, more than once in our conversation, for the parallel that explains the most. “You look at Vogue. Vogue’s digital traffic is down,” he says. “But they create Vogue World, and the revenue doubles every year. People Inc., the former Dot Dash Meredith, did their first upfront for events in February. They brought media and brand marketers in to showcase their event portfolio.” The Conde Nast and People Inc. moves are not curiosities. They are the leading edge of a structural reweighting of how media companies make money. The text business is being eaten by the algorithm. The event business is not. Vogue World is, in any honest accounting of the contemporary Conde Nast balance sheet, the most important new product the company has launched in a decade.

Agencies sit, in Givner’s framing, at exactly the seam where this reweighting is happening. “It’s a little bit like agencies are viewed as the picks and shovels of the space right now,” he says. The phrase is the right one. When media companies decide to launch tentpole events, when brands decide to shift budget out of search and into experience, when corporations decide that the only marketing channel they cannot afford to lose is the one where their customers are physically in the room, the people who actually build the rooms are the agencies. The picks-and-shovels logic explains both why private equity is suddenly bullish on the category and why the multiples on agency businesses have begun to move.

There is, of course, a question lurking underneath the optimism, and Givner is too experienced not to know it is there. The event agency business is, in its bones, a relationship and a sensibility. The private equity model wants a scalable financial asset. The challenge, as he framed it from the summit floor, is to turn relationship-driven companies into scalable financial assets without losing what makes them work. The agencies that solve that puzzle will emerge from the next five years larger, better capitalized, and meaningfully more valuable. The agencies that do not will be the ones whose founder walked out with a check and whose clients quietly found somebody else to plan the next user conference.

The way the smart houses are hedging against that risk, Givner says, is by deliberately building multiple touch points into every client relationship. “There’s account person risk, and there’s owner-slash-salesperson risk,” he says. “The smarter agencies navigate multiple touch points for each client. One person manages the relationship, one person’s in charge of the event. The odds of both of those people leaving are lower than obviously one person.” It is the Mad Men model, in his telling, applied to the event agency business. The accounts director who keeps the relationship and the producer who delivers the work. When a deal closes and the new ownership calls the client list, the first question every client asks is, “Well, who’s going to be running my event now?” The houses that have answers survive the integration. The houses that do not, do not.

The Cuban doctrine, and the disruption coming for the back office

What does Givner tell the old-line agencies who are wondering how to stay fresh while the capital rearranges the field around them? He reaches for Mark Cuban. “Run your business like there’s somebody in a garage hustling to eat your lunch, because there is,” he says, paraphrasing a line Cuban once delivered on Shark Tank. “Constantly operate out of a slight sense of fear that there’s a more aggressive competitor coming for you. If you have that mentality, and you don’t take your repeat clients for granted, because that’s where you kind of get soft. A lot of times the more doting service and the more creative ideas are reserved for the new clients, for winning those new clients. And then once you have them, it’s tempting to take them for granted and be like, okay, well, they know us, they’re going to rebook us. We don’t have to go crazy. And you take a client for granted for too long, and the next thing you know, your event is out for RFP, and maybe you’re invited back, maybe you’re not.”

The garage hustler is not, in Givner’s reading, hypothetical. The disruption coming for the events industry over the next 18 months will land first in the back office. The sourcing side of the business, in his analysis, is ripe for replacement by software, and the replacement has already begun. The French firm Naboo raised 70 million dollars earlier this year to attack venue sourcing and procurement from the ground up. The armies of people who today do the work of checking availability, holding space, moving group blocks from one room to another, are about to discover that a meaningful portion of that work is being done by an algorithm. “That business today is run by armies of people,” Givner says. “Whether it’s the Helms Briscoes on the outside or other companies. A lot of that is matching availability and capacity and pricing for meetings and venues. Naboo is one of a handful of companies that have basically attacked that problem from the ground up through AI, not through labor.” The hordes of people whose careers were built on that work will not all survive the transition.

The disruption will be felt unevenly. The largest IMEXes and South by Southwests of the world, in Givner’s view, will continue to thrive, because the human urge to gather at scale is not going away. But within those rooms, the real value will accrue to the people who can find their five or six right people inside the larger 8,000. “If you go to IMEX and there’s 8,000 people there,” he says, “if you meet five or six of the right people for you, the ROI is great. The challenge is how do you find those five or six people? The matchmaking apps, they’re okay. They’ll get better. But if there’s somebody who can curate that and say, listen, I’m getting together with a group of people at IMEX who are newsletter thought leaders in the space, there’s going to be eight of us, and I’m pulling all the other David Adlers together, you’d be like, I’m definitely not going to miss that.”

The example was not, in fairness, chosen at random. Givner has, in his way, been pulling versions of that room together for 20 years.

The narrow and deep doctrine, and a man counting his calendar

The reason Howard Givner is the one running this room, rather than the one paying admission to it, is that the cancer chapter rearranged his sense of what is worth doing with the time he has. He does two or three things now, by his own count. The consulting practice through Heathcote Advisory Group, which advises owners and executives at event businesses, largely agencies but increasingly also event-technology firms and event owners trying to scale. The mergers and acquisitions work through Oaklins DeSilva and Phillips, which is the largest piece of the advisory practice. And, increasingly, the building of these narrow, deep, curated communities of which the C-Suite Growth Summit is the prototype.

“I have a very strong belief that this sort of narrow and deep approach provides incredible value,” he says. “It’s more work. It’s not going to be a ten-million-dollar event. But the people that are there, if you curate it right and the content is right and the people are right, you can really create a great experience for people.”

The narrow-and-deep doctrine is the operating philosophy of the next chapter, and it is the doctrine of a man who has learned, in the most direct way available, that time is the only resource that does not refill. The summits will not scale into the largest revenue events on the calendar. The mass-market trade press will continue to cover the bigger shows. What Givner is building instead is the room where the consequential conversations actually happen, and the standing to be the man who calls those conversations into existence. “There’s that innate need,” he says, “and I think that’s not always going to drive the largest profits or revenue. But people will pay a lot more to be in a really, really curated room. When you’re at the bottom of your own funnel.”

The bottom of your own funnel. That is the phrase that will travel out of this conversation and into the next one, because every chief executive in the room at NeueHouse knew exactly what he meant. They have spent careers running the wider funnel, the trade show booth, the prospecting list, the brand awareness play. What they have not had, until now, is the room where they are themselves the prospects, where the conversation is for them rather than from them, where the man at the door has lived every chair in the room and has the standing to ask the questions nobody else can ask.

A man, a clubhouse, a generation

The American event agency business is, right now, in the middle of the most significant financial repositioning in its history. The capital is here. The deals are getting done. The founders are aging. The integrations are succeeding or failing on the strength of decisions being made in conference rooms the trade press will never see. The next five years will determine who owns this industry, and what shape it takes on the other side of the consolidation.

The man who will be in the room for every meaningful conversation is the same man who walked into a Manhattan nightclub 30 years ago because the salesperson had quit, who built a graduate school for an industry that had never had one, who founded and sold two companies of his own, the agency in his twenties and the institute in the decades that followed, and ran the American arm of a third through the parent company’s sale to one of the largest meetings firms in the world. He lay in a stem cell transplant ward at the exact moment his industry shut down and decided, when his scans came back clear, that the next chapter would be the one that mattered most. He did not plan to become the mayor of the event agency world. But somebody had to be, and Howard Givner, six years out from his Re-birthday, the club promoter from Penn who took a commission one night because the door was open, is the one who turned out to be standing there when the door opened again.

The door is wide open now. The people inside the room are the ones who run the field. And the man at the door, calendar finite and clear-eyed about it, is the one taking down their names.

Your Assets Walk Out the Door Every Day

The event agency business is a McKinsey-shaped business. You do not own venues. You do not own gear. You own intellectual capital, and intellectual capital has feet. The houses that forget this are the houses that wake up one morning and discover their best three people have started their own shop down the block.

The Garage Hustler Is Real

Run your business as if there is someone in a garage right now figuring out how to eat your lunch. Because there is. The agencies that operate out of a permanent, slight sense of competitive paranoia are the agencies that stay sharp. The agencies that get comfortable get replaced.

The Danger Is the Repeat Client

Agencies reserve their best creative and their most attentive service for the new accounts they are trying to win. The accounts they already have are where the soft spots open up. Take a repeat client for granted long enough and the next thing you see is the RFP, and maybe you are invited back and maybe you are not.

Build Two Touch Points Into Every Client

Account person risk and owner-salesperson risk are the two failure modes that quietly kill agencies. The Mad Men model is the answer. One person carries the relationship. One person carries the work. The odds of both walking out the door at the same time are meaningfully lower than the odds of either one. The first question every client asks after a deal closes is, who will be running my event now. Make sure you have two answers.

Events Are Truth Sanctuaries

Search has been cannibalized by artificial intelligence overviews. Email open rates are collapsing under AI summaries. The brands that built their growth engines on either channel are getting killed. Live events are the algorithm-proof vehicles that remain. You are in the room. The algorithm cannot reach you. That is the entire investment thesis.

Buy EBITDA When You Can

Organic growth is hard. Acquisition is faster. The smart agencies are now thinking about mergers and acquisitions as an instrument of growth, not as a one-time exit. The hard part is not the deal. The hard part is the integration, and the heavy lifting begins the morning after the press release runs.

The Heavy Lifting Comes After the Announcement

Every acquisition press release reads like the deal is the achievement. The deal is the easy part. The achievement is making one plus one equal three, and most acquired companies fail at that math because nobody ever wrote the integration plan. The agencies that win the next five years will be the agencies that take integration as seriously as they take diligence.

Curate the Room Ruthlessly

The value of a curated room is the people who are not in it as much as the people who are. Vendors out, except as sponsors. Listeners who take and do not give get one invitation. Return the money to the people who do not belong. The strict line at the door is the product. If you blur the line, you do not have a room. You have a trade show floor.

Narrow and Deep Beats Broad and Shallow

It is more work. It will never be a ten-million-dollar event. But the people you bring together inside a curated room will pay more, return more often, and tell more of their peers about it than any volume play will ever generate. You are at the bottom of your own funnel, and so are they. The bottom of the funnel is where the real money lives.

Time Clarifies the Calendar

A man on a stem cell transplant ward does not have the patience for performance. He does not have the patience for the people in the room who are there to take rather than give. The gift cancer gives you, when it does not kill you, is the clarity to spend the next chapter on the work that actually matters. Six years out from rebirth day, the calendar is finite, and the only question worth asking is which conversations are worth being in.

Why I Do Songs. Every Wisdom Bank piece comes with an original song because a song carries an argument differently than prose does. Prose persuades the reader. A song moves through them. A chorus settles into the back of the head and stays there long after the article has been closed and the laptop has been shut. The Greeks knew this. The Burgundian troubadours knew this. The civil rights movement knew this. The gathering economy needs its own canon of songs, because the field deserves to be remembered the way it actually feels — communal, in motion, sung in a room.

David Adler · Curator in Chief · GatheringPoint.news

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An Edible Profile of Howard Givner

Why Small Bite Architecture. Personalization is the most overused word in the contemporary economy and the most undelivered promise. The algorithm personalizes by guessing. The brand personalizes by inserting your name in the subject line. None of it is personal. Real personalization is the act of one human being studying another closely enough to render them as something no other person could be rendered as. A portrait. A song. A dish. Small Bite Architecture renders each subject as four bites and four sips no other subject could receive, built from the specific facts of the specific life. The machine can imitate the prose. The machine can imitate the music. The machine cannot host the dinner.

David Adler · Curator in Chief · GatheringPoint.news

At a recent SISO gathering of major exhibition leaders, an executive leaned over to Mark Brewster in the back of a breakout and said the session they were sitting in was, bluntly, awful. The speaker had missed the point. The content was thin. The room was tuning out. Two minutes later, the speaker wandered over to say hello. The same CEO turned, smiled, and said, “Great job up there.”

Brewster watched the whole exchange. He has watched versions of it for fifteen years. To him, it is the cleanest illustration of why the events industry cannot trust its own ears.

“Humans are fundamentally polite,” he said over a video call last week from a hotel office in London. “You cannot trust people to be completely true with you in the moment. There’s far too much etiquette required in human communication to get the real feedback that you need to understand how you performed.”

Brewster is the founder and CEO of Explori, the London-based platform that holds the largest event-feedback dataset in the world. Over three thousand trade shows, conferences, and corporate gatherings contribute to its benchmarks. More than three million data points on attendee and exhibitor sentiment sit inside it. UFI, the global exhibition industry association, uses Explori as its official research partner. Questex signed a three-year agreement last September. This month, The Expo Group in Irving, Texas announced a partnership giving it exclusive rights to Explori’s thought leadership in the US association market.

Brewster is also the co-founder and chairman of ELX, the Event Leaders Exchange, the invitation-only community of senior corporate event executives that he helped launch in 2022 to push the entire discipline toward a more rigorous standard of measurement. Two companies, one argument. The argument is that the events industry has the feedback loop running in the wrong direction.

The Boy with the Laminated List

Mark Brewster grew up in Surrey, the son of a French mother and an English father, in a household that ran the way a small business runs. The family lived first in South London and later in the commuter belt. His father was an early entrant in British IT recruitment, and the dinner-table conversation was about strategy, pricing, and market differentiation. Brewster, in his own description, had pearls of business wisdom poured into his ears at an age when most teenagers were trying to figure out how to get out of the house.

The chore list was where the philosophy met the carpet. To earn pocket money, Brewster and his older sister had to do work around the house, and the work came with specifications. The list of jobs was, literally, laminated. It included washing the car, mowing the lawn, polishing shoes, polishing the brass ware and the cutlery. Each task came with a service-level description of what a job well done looked like. After the weekly car wash, his father would walk the perimeter of the vehicle, inspect, and point out the parts that had been missed.

“I always just wanted to get the job done in the early days,” Brewster said. “I ended up learning to take pride in doing a good job initially to get him off my back. Then I discovered I liked doing it well. I would end up spending fifteen, twenty minutes longer on it. I developed the OCD thing about how to wash cars.”

That sentence is the origin of everything in the rest of this profile. The man who would spend his career arguing that surveys must be designed properly, promoted properly, analyzed properly, and acted upon properly first learned the principle on a driveway in Surrey, working off a laminated list while his father walked the car.

He also learned about feedback there, in its harshest form. His father was, in Brewster’s words, very brutal when giving it. “Sometimes really to his detriment. There’s a skill in giving feedback so that the person receiving it can take it rather than feel attacked. That’s one of the things my dad got wrong his whole life.”

His mother was the counterweight. Brewster speaks of her in a register he does not extend to anyone else in the conversation. “I can cry talking about my mum,” he says. “Universally loved by anyone that gets to know her. The definition of warmth and kindness and decency and generosity.” If his work ethic comes from his father, his values come from her. His parents separated when he was fourteen.

By thirteen, Brewster had maxed out the chores his father was willing to pay him for. He wanted more pocket money than the laminated list could earn. His father, in a piece of parenting that was either inspired or self-interested or both, told him he had skills. He knew how to wash cars. He had a bike. He could borrow the family’s buckets and chamois leathers and the bottle of Fairy liquid. He could knock on the doors of the neighbors and sell.

He did. Some shooed him away. Others, in what Brewster now thinks must have been straightforward acts of kindness toward an enterprising thirteen-year-old, gave him a try. He ended up with twenty-five customers, busting his weekends washing cars, doing a stunning job because he did not want to have to knock on any more doors. Eventually he learned to ask his customers, after the work was done, whether they were satisfied. Most volunteered the answer without being asked, but the asking is the part that matters. At thirteen, in a Surrey driveway, Brewster ran his first survey.

The other formative wrinkle came in a piano lesson. He was bright and sporty but not what his school would have called academic. The depth of the disconnect did not surface until a piano teacher noticed him leaning forward to read sheet music and realized he could not actually parse the notes. His vision was fine. The dyslexia had not been diagnosed at Caterham School, where he was a student, because dyslexia was not yet on the syllabus. He compensated as so many bright dyslexic children do, by leaning into the spoken word. He talked. He listened. He told stories. To this day he calls people rather than emails them, sends voice notes rather than texts, picks up the phone without checking whether a meeting is on a calendar. The compensation became the career.

The Second Attempt

The career arc that followed school was less straight than the chore list. After a Business Management degree at Solent University in Southampton, Brewster joined Mash Media, the British trade publishing group run by Julian Agostini. Agostini was, to most of his employees, a dominant and even intimidating figure, the kind of charismatic alpha who could clear a room without raising his voice. Brewster was the rare one who pushed back. The two of them would sometimes fight until they were both furious with each other. They ultimately became good friends. The respect was always mutual. By the age of twenty-three, Brewster was an event director under Agostini, launching consumer shows, self-training by reading every exhibitor-theory book he could find, including the work of the British exhibitor trainer Simon Naudi.

Sales was where the marketing instinct from school met the spoken-word instinct from his piano lesson. Brewster sold advertising space at Mash, but he sold it the way his father probably sold IT recruitment. He talked to his clients about their creative, their brand, their competitive positioning, their insecurities. He customized everything. He did not just sell the space.

Two of those advertising clients would later become Explori investors. Arran Coole, an event tech entrepreneur then at ASP, would become his co-founder. Bart Van Bijnen, who co-ran the registration company N200, would put money in. Richard Armitage, who ran the UK distribution for the German exhibition systems firm Octanorm, would become the first outside angel investor in 2014, with roughly two hundred thousand pounds of seed capital that he still holds shares against today. Each of them had bought advertising from Brewster at Mash. Each of them had been treated, as he put it, like the value of their return on investment mattered from the moment the conversation started. Each of them was, eventually, willing to put cash behind the person rather than the deck.

Between Mash and Explori there was a first attempt that did not work. In 2006 Brewster broke off to start a small research business called Aesthetic Research Limited. ARL was, in its bones, exactly what Explori would later become: a survey platform that delivered performance benchmarking, only aimed at cosmetic surgeons and aestheticians rather than the events industry. The concept was sound. The execution was not. Brewster had chosen the wrong business partner to help him build the platform, and after two years of trying, the team still did not have a launch product ready. He had warmed up the market without anything to sell to it. Credibility was leaking. So was the money. He returned to Mash, for a short stint as publishing director, watching the industry from the editorial desk and sharpening the thesis. He never gave up on the idea. Benchmarking feedback, he believed, could work in many industries. Events was one of them. By the time he founded Explori with Arran Coole in October 2011, he had spent nearly a decade learning exactly where the data gaps were and exactly which partner to build with.

Arran was the contrast in leadership style, not in values. Brewster and Coole share, by Brewster’s account, very similar morals: the “do the right thing” line that runs through Explori’s company values belongs to both, and to the rest of the leadership team that has lived and breathed it for fifteen years. The difference between them is temperament. Brewster is impatient and combative. Arran, working closely with him in the early years before stepping into a non-executive role, taught him a different way of leading: kindness and togetherness rather than charisma and the carrot and stick. Where Julian Agostini moved a room with force of personality, Arran moved it by making everyone in it feel held. Brewster learned patience from him. He also learned that the founder who built the first attempt alone needed someone next to him on the second.

The second attempt was not easy. The initial platform required a two-year rebuild that Brewster has called unbelievably painful. The institutional breakthrough came in a meeting with Kai Hattendorf, then CEO of UFI, the global association for the exhibition industry. Hattendorf saw in Brewster’s benchmarks something the world’s exhibition industry had never had: a single instrument that could measure customer health across thousands of shows at once. UFI made Explori its official research partner. The credibility followed. The first major international organizer to adopt the platform was ITE, the British company now known as Hyve. The customer logos compounded from there.

The Fog of War on the Trade Show Floor

Walk any large exhibition and ask ten attendees how it is going. You will get ten answers that may or may not have much to do with the event itself.

“Events are a gossip fest,” Brewster said. “It’s a superhighway of opinions about content, about the event itself, about the organizing team. An exhibitor can be trying to form their own opinion about the quality of the meetings and the kind of value they feel they’re getting. And they go and speak to the company on the booth next to them. They might go and see a couple of other companies. One says, I think this is all right, it feels okay. Another says, no, they really missed the level this year, we’re not seeing any of the right kind of ICPs. Then a key buyer says, yeah, I’m not getting a lot of value from the content this year. Another person says it’s been brilliant for us.”

Perception, in other words, is built by consensus, and consensus is built by whoever the exhibitor or attendee happened to talk to at the coffee station that morning. The number of meetings booked, the badge scans, the app engagement, the exit-polled smiles. Those are proxies. Some of them are useful. None of them tells you what the attendee thinks once they have left the building and sat down on the plane home.

Organizers know this and work around it. They often rely on observational judgment. They trust their operations lead. They ask a few friends. They read the room. Brewster does not dismiss any of that. At ELX, Nicola Kastner runs a wash-up session with her team within an hour of every event closing, before anyone has a chance to decompress over a glass of wine. Brewster thinks the exercise is critical. He also thinks it is not enough.

“Sometimes your personal observational judgment can be sugar-coated,” he said. “Other times you can be hypercritical of your own work and the survey corrects your judgment. You’re like jeez, people really valued that session. That’s interesting.”

The survey, in Brewster’s framing, is the instant replay. The referee on the field, moving at full speed, calls it the way it looked. The booth reviews the tape. The game gets decided by the tape. Events are episodic. They happen once. They cannot be re-run. The feedback loop is the only way any of it gets better next year, but many treat it like an afterthought.

The Afterthought

The numbers are damning. Very often, a trade show can expect an attendee survey response rate between eight and twelve percent. Most organizers accept this as the natural ceiling. Brewster thinks it is a symptom of neglect.

“They could be getting thirty to forty percent,” he said. “They can get a massive sample that is so much more robust. But they don’t, because they’re busy chasing the rebook on site. And the survey is an afterthought. The first thing people hear about it is it landing in their inbox.”

By the time that email arrives, the attendee has already been thrashed by pre-event promotion, mid-event app nudges, and follow-up drip campaigns from every exhibitor who scanned their badge. The survey enters the inbox as one more ask from an organizer, they are already tired of hearing from. Then the industry reads the anemic response rate and concludes that attendees are survey fatigued.

Brewster heard someone say this on stage at a London industry conference last year. The speaker asked the room: hands up if you like completing surveys. Nobody raised their hand. The speaker nodded, satisfied.

“To me it was ridiculous,” Brewster said. “If you ask the same question differently. Hands up if you like completing registration forms, hands up if you like jet lag, hands up if you like downloading the event app, hands up if you like booking your travel. Nobody likes the points of friction. But if you flip the question and say, how many of you like having your voice heard? Every hand would go up. Everyone wants their voice heard and to be understood and to have the opportunity to provide feedback.”

The problem is not that people are tired of surveys. The problem is that the industry is tired of being told things it would rather not hear. When the NPS drops and the verbatim comments say the content missed, a common response is not to fix the content. It is to question the validity of the research.

The Kastner Protocol

RELATED ARTICLE FROM PREVIOUS GATHERINGPOINT.News FEATURE

At The Event Leaders Exchange (ELX), Nicola Kastner sits at the center of a network that quietly shapes one of the most powerful forces in business. More than three hundred senior leaders participate in the community, collectively influencing over 160,000 events each year and nearly $12 billion in spend. Those numbers are large enough to move markets, but the shift she represents is bigger than the spend.

Read the full piece →

The counterexample sits inside the community Brewster helped launch. Nicola Kastner, the CEO at ELX, runs the ELX Annual Congress, the organization’s flagship event. Kastner’s surveys do not perform the way many industry surveys perform. Her lowest response rate on record is seventy-four percent. Her highest, just shy of ninety. She has never spent a dollar on incentives.

What she does, according to Brewster, is refuse to treat the survey as a postscript. It is woven into the event from the first minute onstage. At the opening of ELX’s events, Kastner often walks through the specific changes the team made since the last event, each one credited to member feedback. She references the survey again partway through the program. Her master of ceremonies, Chloe, references it a third time. Attendees know the survey is coming. They know when it will arrive. They know exactly which features of the event they are sitting in exist because someone like them filled one out a year earlier.

“Everyone knows the event design is oriented from their feedback,” Brewster said. “It’s a truly customer centric model. The survey is a critical part of it. It’s a small minority of people that won’t complete.”

There is a corollary story Brewster tells about a hotel in Greece called Sani. He stayed there with his family. Over the course of the week, three different members of staff, a waitress, a front-desk clerk, and the deputy general manager, stopped him to say, by the way, you will get our survey, and it really matters to us. Would you fill it out?

The survey itself, when it arrived, was bad. Fifteen minutes long. Badly designed grid questions. Brewster, by his own admission one of the most survey-fatigued people alive, filled it out anyway.

“That’s a three-hundred-sixty-five-day business model,” he said. “It has feedback continuously. It can iterate what it does day to day. An event exists momentarily. You have one opportunity to really get the intelligence you need for such an episodic product. When you don’t promote the survey, when you don’t give it the love that it needs, when you’ve got such a limited window of opportunity to get the feedback, it is such a missed opportunity.”

The Kastner case is not about clever survey design. It is about culture. Response rate is a function of whether the respondent believes the organizer is listening. Everything else is decoration.

The Inversion

Here is where the conversation turned, midway through a Friday morning call that had already run an hour.

The question on the table was how a general manager should build an event strategy. Brewster was desc loyalty looks like when there is no relationship underneath it.

ribing the ELX approach to strategic design: define the objectives, make them measurable, put a hard number on each one, then design the event backwards from the metric.

“If one of the outcomes, is we want people to see our brand as the leading innovator in its space, that’s easy,” he said. “You design a survey question that says, by comparison to the other companies in the market, how would you describe the level of innovation you see from us? You give them a balanced five-point scale with a midpoint. The objective might then be, we want at least fifty percent of people to see us as the leading innovator. That would be the success metric. You make that decision in strategic event design. That’s the metric we want at the end of it. Then you go, right, how do we communicate that? What are the communication points that need to land throughout the event to shift perception so that at least half of people will see us as the leading innovator? The metric comes first. Then you design the event to achieve the metric.”

In public relations, there is a visionary tool that works the same way. You write the press release before the event. You draft the lead the way you want it to read on the morning after. You decide what the story is going to be. Then you go back and design the event to produce that story. The press release becomes the blueprint.

Brewster had never heard the analogy before. He liked it.

“I actually think that is another compelling way to represent the tone of the market you would want, what you’d want people to be saying,” he said. “It’s pretty close to what I’m suggesting. The difference is that the survey is the hard measurement. It tells you the truth about exactly what you’ve achieved in moving hearts and minds. You can be that precise. Like, that year around, we want fifty percent of people to believe we’re the leading innovator. That is so incredibly flexible around exactly what you want to achieve. That’s why it’s such a dream come true measurement tool, and why it’s such a crime that sometimes it gets discredited, bad-mouthed, treated as a tactical afterthought.”

This is the inversion. Feedback is not the receipt. Feedback is the blueprint.

When Brewster and his team launched the first ELX Congress in Chicago, they had forty-five members and needed critical mass. They were bringing in sponsor partners for the first time. The event had to do specific things: build the foundation for growth, prove the value to both members and partners, establish a reason to come back. So Brewster wrote the survey before the event was designed. He sent it to his leadership team. They designed the event from the survey outcomes they were trying to establish.

The survey has been the north star of ELX events ever since. Not because Brewster wants to be right, but because the survey is the only instrument in the event organizer’s toolkit that can force the honesty that the rest of the industry spends its energy avoiding.

The Industry Gets Better When It Stops Discrediting the Mirror

The push against surveys, in Brewster’s reading, is not really a push against surveys. It is a push against bad news.

“Surveys are the harshest feedback you can get,” he said. “People are conditioned by their response to failure and rejection. Where you might go, okay, so the number of meetings was down this year versus last year, you don’t take that personally as an event organizer. But when somebody says the content sucks, and you can see that your NPS is down, your satisfaction is down, loyalty is down, and the event has become less important, and a lot of the verbatim comments talk about the areas for improvement, that can hurt. Sometimes the measurement’s too hard to take. Like sometimes people don’t want to see their bank balance. Or the weight they put on on the scales. I shouldn’t have had that cheesecake last night. Sometimes people don’t want the truth. It’s the nature of the species that we are. And so you’ve got a whole load of nonsense human behavior going on to discredit surveys, where surveys are actually the nearest thing to the truth that we can get.”

What would it take to move the industry off this position? Brewster’s answer was not about survey technology. It was about culture.

Operationalize the survey into every team, he said. Put it at the front of every event design, not the back. Decide before the event what metrics will define success. Write the questions then. Promote the survey intentionally the way Kastner does. Close the loop after the event so that next year’s attendees understand that this year’s event exists because someone like them advised the team what to change.

Then accept what the results say, take the analysis seriously, and use the findings in your strategy.

“The industry will improve immeasurably when people actually start to use their surveys properly,” he said. “People don’t consider completing a survey to be a chore or a point of friction when the survey is well designed and they know it really matters.”

The Veracity Premium

There is a reason the valuations of face-to-face businesses have gone vertical in the last twelve months, and Brewster names it the way an economist names an asset class. Trust has become the scarcest commodity in marketing. People do not trust what they see on a screen. They do not trust influencer feeds or AI-generated content or paid placements. They do trust what they walk through, shake hands with, and watch happen in a room. In-person wins as a channel because in-person is the channel where the buyer can still verify what is real. That is the veracity premium, and it is what every major holding company in the events space is paying multiples against right now.

Brewster thinks the premium is at risk for a reason most of the industry has not yet named, and his framing of it is more nuanced than the easy slogan suggests. There is a right way and a wrong way to sell content opportunities to sponsors. The wrong way is when the program tips and the sales pitches start to dominate the substance, when the stage time someone bought drowns out the industry insight someone earned. The wrong way is rare in the events he benchmarks. Most conferences and shows, in his reading, know they have to get the balance right, and most do. The ones that lose the balance get punished in the data. The veracity premium holds for the ones that hold the line, and the room can tell the difference long before the survey does.

The other pressure is operational. Inflation has settled back down across most categories. Energy costs are about to spike again on the back of conflict in the Middle East. Venue costs and hotel costs and organizer costs all rise together, and the bill, as Brewster put it, ends up at the door of the exhibitor and the sponsor. At the same time, every market segment is launching more events. More B2B festivals. More proprietary corporate event programs. The supply curve is going up. The cost curve is going up. The customer is going to have more choices and less budget.

In a market like that, Brewster’s view of the single biggest lever the industry can pull is not what most operators expect. It is not the technology. It is not the AI layer. It is not the venue strategy. It is the sales playbook.

“Exhibitor and sponsor loyalty,” he said. “A massive driver of that is, who’s selling this to me? Do they know our business? Are they selling me the right thing? Or is this, whether the event’s good or not, a transactional relationship?”

The model he reaches for is the Jon Weiner playbook. Weiner is an independent entrepreneur, not an executive on anyone’s payroll, and his track record in the B2B festivals category is the one that defines the category. He launched Money2020, sold it to Ascential, which Informa later acquired and folded into what is now its festivals division. He launched Shoptalk and sold it to Hyve. He launched HLTH and sold it to Hyve. His latest launch, HumanX, is the newest example of the format. Brewster also points to Jay Weintraub. The shared trait between the two of them is that neither sells space. They sell the buyer’s outcome. They customize the package to the customer’s actual goal. They go into the dirt with their teams, and they stay in the dirt long after the launch is done. The opposite model, the one Brewster sees most often, is the exhibition salesperson who books the booth, takes the commission, and moves on. In a market with too much supply and too much cost pressure, that salesperson is about to find out whatThe winners in the next cycle, in Brewster’s reading, will be operators who do three things at once. They will hold the veracity line, which is to say they will refuse to sell what is supposed to be earned. They will retool the sales motion from transactional to consultative, the way Weiner and Weintraub already have. And they will measure what is actually happening in the room with the kind of rigor that survives the boardroom and the bank covenant. The events that do all three will see their valuations hold. The events that do none of them will be the ones the consolidators eventually buy at a discount and either revive or wind down.

It is the same argument he has been making for fifteen years, dressed for the cycle that is about to start.

This is the tune Brewster has been playing his whole career. It is easy to hear him as an evangelist for his own platform. He is one, obviously. But the platform is just the instrument. The argument he keeps making, at industry conferences and in back-room breakouts and on Friday morning calls with writers who happen to be on cruise ships headed for Barcelona, is that the events industry already has the tool it needs to get better. It just keeps putting the tool in the wrong place in the process.

Toward the end of a separate conversation, asked what he wanted from the work, Brewster did not say market dominance, or a unicorn valuation, or a quick exit. He said something stranger.

“I want to be loved,” he said. “I want to be respected. I want to leave a legacy. I’m really not interested in a quick sale of a business for cash, not if that business isn’t sustainable and loved for the impact it has.”

It is an old-fashioned answer. It is also why he keeps making the argument.

Write the survey first.

Design the event backwards from it.

Then, when the feedback comes in, use it.

Ten deposits from the founder and CEO of Explori on feedback, culture, and the discipline of telling the truth.

• On the inversion. “The metric comes first. Then you design the event to achieve the metric.”

• On polite lies. “Humans are fundamentally polite. You cannot trust people to be completely true with you in the moment. There’s far too much etiquette required in human communication to get the real feedback you need to understand how you performed.”

• On the gossip economy. “Events are a gossip fest. It’s a superhighway of opinions about content, about the event itself, about the organizing team. Perception is built by consensus, and consensus is built by whoever the exhibitor happened to talk to at the coffee station.”

• On the reframe. “Hands up if you like completing surveys. Nobody raises their hand. But if you flip the question and say, how many of you like having your voice heard? Every head would go up.”

• On the episodic product. “An event exists momentarily. You have one opportunity to really get the intelligence you need for such an episodic product. When you don’t give the survey the love it needs, it is a total crime.”

• On measurability. “If an objective is important to you, it should be measurable. It can’t be fluffy and ethereal and just a concept.”

• On hard truth. “Sometimes the measurement is too hard to take. People don’t want to see their bank balance, or the weight they put on. Sometimes people don’t want the truth. It’s the nature of the primitive little species that we are.”

• On culture over cleverness. “You don’t need to be clever. You just need to care. It’s more about culture and values than it is about strategic genius.”

• On the discipline of feedback. “If you can’t take feedback, if you don’t have the emotional resilience to embrace it, learn from it, and get better, then you don’t have the necessary growth mindset to optimize and refine at each step of the way.”

• On the nearest thing to truth. “Surveys are the harshest feedback you can get. They are also the nearest thing to the truth we can get.”

CLICK TO SEE Mark Brewter’s Edible Profile

.Tell Me What You Really Think

Few people in American life have spent as much time thinking about the architecture of a gathering as Bryan Rafanelli. Fewer still have done it across as wide a range of rooms. For nearly three decades, through his firm Rafanelli Events, he has built a body of work that has made him the operator other operators watch. What he brings to the work is rare in any single combination: taste, style, strategic instincts, and a command of how human beings actually behave inside a room. None of it can be copied from a deck or trained out of a junior planner. It comes from time inside the work, and the work is the discipline of gathering people for purpose.

That discipline expresses itself across more contexts than any single operator typically navigates. He is, by any serious measure, one of the most effective political fundraisers in the country, a figure whose events have helped generate significant support for Democratic candidates and causes over the past two decades. He is also, less visibly but no less seriously, among the most accomplished fundraisers operating in American philanthropy, where his clients sit far outside any partisan frame. Presidents, candidates, and party leadership rely on him not simply to organize gatherings, but to create the conditions under which people show up, engage, and give. That alone would be enough to define a career. It does not come close to capturing his.

Because the same person responsible for shaping high-stakes political environments is also the one quietly responsible for raising extraordinary sums for philanthropic causes across sectors, applying the same thinking to charities, institutions, and foundations. The difference is not the audience. It is the ecosystem. He does not separate fundraising from environment, or environment from behavior. He designs for all of it at once.

His client list reads less like a portfolio than a cross-section of American institutional life: UNICEF, amfAR, Mass General Hospital, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Boston College, Project Healthy Minds. Sports has its own register, running through the NBA and MLB, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, the College Football Hall of Fame, the National Football Foundation, and the United States Ski and Snowboard Foundation. Hospitality runs alongside through Auberge Resorts. And then there is the political and personal work for which he is best known publicly, the part of his career that draws the most press: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris on one side; on the other, celebrations like Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and the wedding of actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson. It is, in practice, only one slice of a much larger operation.

What connects these worlds is not status, and it is not visibility. It is function.

What he is creating, across all of these settings, might best be understood as a form of statement event. Not in the sense of spectacle, but in the sense of intent. A wedding, a White House dinner, a hospital gala, a political fundraiser, a sports league dinner, each operates as an expression of something larger than itself. It signals how people see one another, how they relate, what matters in that moment. The design is not neutral. It frames the experience, and in doing so, shapes what happens inside it.

At Rafanelli’s level, event design is not confined to a single category. It applies wherever people gather with intention. The same thinking that shapes a political fundraiser can be seen, in different form, in a corporate summit, a cultural festival, a large-scale exhibition, or even the choreography of a major sporting event. The context changes. The audience shifts. The stakes evolve. The underlying challenge remains consistent: how do you bring people together in a way that feels coherent, meaningful, and worth their time?

Some of his most closely watched work has taken place in environments where that question carries additional weight. At the White House, where history is not abstract but physical, every decision exists in relation to what has come before. During the final years of the Obama administration, under Social Secretary Deesha Dyer, the tone of events began to shift in ways that are now widely recognized. The environment became more culturally engaged, less distant, more reflective of the broader world outside its gates.

Rafanelli’s work intersected with that shift, but it was also shaped by the people operating alongside it. Figures like Chief of Protocol Capricia Marshall and White House Social Secretary Jeremy Bernard were redefining how state events functioned, treating them not simply as formal obligations but as instruments of soft power. Under their influence, the role of design expanded. These were not just gatherings. They were signals. Who was included, how they were positioned, and what the environment suggested about openness and intent carried meaning far beyond the room itself.

By the time of the Biden administration, that instinct had become more precise. For a gratitude dinner honoring President Biden, Rafanelli turned to the South Lawn, one of the most recognizable outdoor spaces in American public life and, at the same time, one of the most difficult to activate in a way that feels immediate. Rather than treating it as backdrop, he built into it, constructing a tented environment around the fountain that drew guests inward rather than leaving them at the perimeter.

The effect was not simply visual. It altered how the space was felt. Guests who had been there many times found themselves reoriented, moving through a setting they thought they knew but were experiencing differently.

He is not trying to compete with a place like the White House. He is trying to prevent it from becoming invisible.

At the Clinton Presidential Center, where political legacy is both preserved and performed, the challenge shifts again. There, the work is not about activating a present moment, but about keeping a past one from becoming static. The environment must feel respectful without becoming frozen, contemporary without disconnecting from its history.

The role is not to overwrite meaning, but to keep it active, to allow people to feel its relevance rather than simply observe it.

Across all of these settings, the constraint is similar. You are working inside something that already matters. The task is to make people feel it again.

Over time, Rafanelli’s role has expanded well beyond that of a traditional event designer. He becomes part of the family. His clients do not behave like clients in the conventional sense. They return, and they keep returning. Often the relationship continues across generations. The wedding he designed for a family’s daughter becomes the wedding he designs for her own daughter; the foundation gala he produced for a principal in middle age becomes the milestone birthday he produces for that same principal decades on.

The relationship usually begins with a single occasion, often a wedding or a milestone birthday or a foundation launch, and then it stays. The same operator who designed the daughter’s wedding gets the call when the senator decides to run for higher office. The guest-list architecture from a fortieth becomes the muscle memory for the foundation gala five years later. The rehearsal dinner produced for the principal’s son becomes the unspoken precedent for the gratitude dinner thrown for the principal himself a decade on.

The categories the rest of the industry holds as separate collapse into one another in his hands: social, corporate, philanthropic, political. They are not separate verticals to him because they are not separate to the families he serves.

The Clintons are the example. The relationship began in 2000, when Rafanelli produced a Boston fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s first Senate run, and from there it never stopped. He produced events around the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He worked on multiple Clinton Foundation gatherings as the foundation grew into a global philanthropic platform. In 2010 he produced Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to Marc Mezvinsky, and the same year he produced the wedding of Huma Abedin, Hillary’s longtime aide. The 2008 and 2016 presidential cycles brought him back. Events have continued at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock. A relationship that began with a single Senate fundraiser has, more than a quarter century later, never stopped expanding. It has crossed every category the events industry pretends are separate: weddings, foundation galas, presidential campaigns, milestone moments, state-related dinners. The Clintons are the Clintons across all of those settings, and the call is the same call.

Naomi Biden’s wedding and her grandfather’s South Lawn dinner are not unrelated assignments separated by genre either. They are two moments in a single ongoing relationship between Rafanelli and the Biden family that already crosses two generations and shows no sign of ending.

Over nearly thirty years of practice, this produces a client base that does not behave like a client base. It behaves like an extended network of families and institutions that have brought Rafanelli inside the room and have not asked him to leave. The work moves with the family across decades, across generations, across life stages, across spheres. A wedding leads to a fundraiser. A fundraiser leads to a foundation initiative. A public moment is followed by a private one. The list of who calls Bryan Rafanelli is not a list of accounts. It is a list of relationships.

The traditional event-industry frame undersells him by a wide margin. He is not building events. He is building trust that gets handed down.

At that point, the relationship changes. Decisions are not dictated. They are entrusted.

A Rafanelli event rarely calls attention to its own construction. It unfolds with a kind of ease that suggests inevitability. Behind it sits a system that depends as much on discipline as it does on imagination.

Rafanelli operates with a duality that is often talked about but rarely held in balance. He is as comfortable in systems as he is in feeling, moving between operational precision and creative instinct without separating the two. An idea that cannot be executed is irrelevant. An execution without an idea is forgettable.

That control is not only visible in the work. It is visible in him. In environments where the margin for error is thin and the stakes are public, he maintains a level of composure that clients notice immediately. Problems are addressed, adjustments are made, but the temperature of the room does not rise with them. It is not performative calm. It is functional. The system holds because he does.

He has described himself as someone who grew up insecure, driven to lead but not always convinced he belonged. “Junior high Brian,” as he calls it, never disappears. It becomes something he manages. That tension runs quietly beneath everything. It also informs one of his core beliefs: no one is more important than anyone else.

In environments structured around hierarchy, that idea becomes operational. Rafanelli resists the instinct to segregate importance. The principal is not hidden. The experience does not build toward access. It begins with it.

When that distance collapses, behavior changes. People participate instead of observe. Generosity follows.

At a recent event for Pete Buttigieg, that thinking took a simple form. “Pizza with Pete” replaced a traditional fundraiser. The structure opened into an extended, unscripted conversation. The environment held. The audience engaged. The giving followed. This is not accidental. It is designed.

There is a way of thinking behind it, one he does not always name directly. He is drawn to what others overlook, to the space between what is expected and what is possible. Robert Kennedy once described it as the difference between seeing things as they are and asking why, and imagining what they might be and asking why not.

Rafanelli works in that space as a discipline. It is part of what draws him back, several times a year, to Engage, where designers from around the world gather not to transact, but to experiment. There, he is not directing the experience. He is inside it, observing, absorbing, recalibrating. The influence accumulates. And it shows up later.

The instincts that guide him began early. A child studying tables at church fairs, learning to choose. A student running campaigns and losing, learning that connection matters more than effort alone. A professional building systems that allow risk.

Repetition creates control. Control creates a baseline. From that baseline, you can change everything.

There is a tendency to describe what he does as creating moments, but they function more like statements, each one shaping how people understand where they are, and what follows.

The work is not the moment itself. It is everything that allows the moment to land, often invisibly, often before anyone arrives. Who feels included without having to ask. Who understands what is happening without needing it explained. Where attention gathers naturally, and where it quietly falls away.

Those are not decorative decisions. They are structural. And they determine whether something passes through people or stays with them.

That distinction runs through everything he builds. Whether the setting is a wedding, a fundraiser, a White House dinner, or something less visible, the underlying question does not change. The experience either meets people where they are, or it doesn’t.

What Rafanelli has spent a career refining is the ability to shift that equation before anyone names it. To create environments where people find themselves more present than they expected to be, more engaged than they planned, more connected than the setting suggested.

It is not dramatic when it happens. It reveals itself afterward.

In conversations that last longer than they should. In questions asked without hesitation. In the quiet realization that the distance people assumed would exist simply did not.

That is the work. The feeling that something, for a time, held together, and that you were inside it when it did.

Bryan Rafanelli: The Story in Song

Design for feeling, not form.

People don’t remember what something looked like. They remember how quickly they understood it—and how it made them feel once they did.

Collapse distance early.

Don’t make people wait to belong. The faster someone feels included, the faster everything else works.

Access is not a perk. It is a design decision.

Who is visible, who is reachable, and when that happens shapes behavior more than any program or speech.

Generosity is not extracted. It is enabled.

People give when they feel connected to something real, not when they are asked at the right moment.

Familiarity is the fastest way to lose attention.

Once something feels predictable, people stop noticing. The work is to make them experience what they thought they knew in a new way.

The reveal is rarely a single moment.

It happens in layers. Small shifts accumulate until perception changes, often before people can name when it happened.

Structure is what allows spontaneity.

The more disciplined the system underneath, the more natural and unscripted the experience can feel on the surface.

Tell the truth, especially to power.

Respect is not protecting someone from what won’t work. It is guiding them toward what will.

You are not designing an event. You are shaping behavior.

Where people move, how they interact, and what they carry forward are the real outcomes.

Belonging is more powerful than status.

People don’t want proximity to importance. They want to feel part of something that includes them.

Control what you can so you can let go of the rest.

The goal is not perfection, but stability—so something authentic has room to happen.

Make it worth showing up.

In a world where people don’t have to gather, the experience has to give them a reason to.

Bryan Rafanelli: The Edible Profile from SmallBiteArchitecture.co

Across two days at the Times Center in October 2025, several of the most senior operators in American media voluntarily took a seat in a chair they knew would be a little uncomfortable. They were not paid to be there. They had not negotiated topics in advance. The man on the riser opposite them ran a five-person company out of New York and was younger than most of their direct reports. He was going to read their prior interviews back to them, name the math they had been deflecting, and ask the question their own boards had not. Their teams had cleared the calendar so they could fly in and submit to it. The waitlist for the audience seats had closed weeks before. This is the AMO Summit. The man on the riser is Jacob Cohen Donnelly. He has built the only room in American media that the people running American media now consider essential to be inside, and the reason is the room itself.

Events and media are cousins from the same family, and for as long as both have existed they have been each other’s quiet supplement. The newspaper ran a conference division. The magazine ran a festival. The trade publication ran a banquet. Events were where the masthead came to life for a night, the marketing arm of the editorial product, a margin layer the publisher did not depend on but was glad to have. Media was the older cousin, the better-paid one, the one with the byline. Events were the cousin who showed up and worked the room.

That hierarchy is in the process of being inverted. The media business that was supposed to anchor the family is the one bleeding margin and watching its distribution rails go dark. The events business that was supposed to be the supplement is the one carrying the brand forward, generating the disproportionate share of revenue, and producing the only kind of audience relationship that does not depend on a platform’s permission. The conference is no longer the marketing layer for the masthead. In a growing number of media businesses, the conference is the masthead, and the editorial product is the marketing layer for the conference.

Donnelly is the operator who saw the inversion early and built his entire architecture around it. He runs a media company that is also an events company, in roughly equal proportion, and the proportion is on purpose. The newsletter builds the audience. The podcast deepens the relationships. The annual Summit at the Times Center is the day each fall when the audience pays him to be in the room with the people they have been reading about. He is thirty-seven years old. He runs a five-person business out of New York that did about a million dollars in revenue last year. He has built one of the only media operations in the country whose audience would still show up if every algorithm went dark tomorrow.

What surrounds that chair, on Donnelly’s stage, is the rest of the answer. The Summit is single-track. Two hundred and fifty senior operators sit in one auditorium for a day and a half, watching the same conversations unfold in sequence, with no breakout rooms, no parallel tracks, and no AI-personalized agenda telling them where to be next. The audience is kept to peers, chief executives and founders and presidents and heads of revenue, which means the person sitting next to you is more likely to be a contemporary than a prospect. Donnelly moderates most of the interviews himself, and the interviews are conducted in the register of a magazine profile rather than a stage Q&A. He humanizes the guest at exactly one point per session, usually at the end, often with a question that has nothing to do with media. He has a metric for whether the room is alive, and the metric is auditory: he is listening for the laugh. Most industry conferences treat the stage as a marketing surface, where sponsors negotiate keynote slots and the moderator’s job is to keep things friendly. Donnelly’s Summit treats the stage as the editorial product, the conversation as the deliverable, and the deliverable as the thing that makes the next year of the newsletter possible, because every on-stage exchange becomes a reference point that runs through twelve months of coverage afterward.

The proof is the conference he sells out every October at the Times Center, the 378-seat Renzo Piano auditorium inside the New York Times Building on West 41st Street, operated by the publisher of record. Donnelly puts his event in that room on purpose. By his own published accounting, the venue is roughly forty percent of his total event cost, the single largest line item on the budget, and he keeps writing the check because the room itself does work no marketing campaign could replicate. The senior leadership of Hearst, The Atlantic, Axios, Vox, People Inc., Mansueto and Questex walks into a space whose institutional weight the New York Times spent a generation building. Donnelly is borrowing that weight for a day and a half each fall. They sit in his room while a man with a team of five reads back their prior interviews and asks them, on stage, how much money they make. Most of them came last year too. The waitlist closes weeks before doors.

The argument his industry has not yet figured out how to write down is the one Donnelly has been quietly proving for six years. In an economy where information is infinite and gatherings are scarce, the only defensible media business is one whose audience pays to be in a room with the people they have been reading about. Everything else is a tenant relationship. The Summit is the receipt that he has built the first kind.

Donnelly grew up large and was, by his own description, aggressively bullied through it. He says this matter-of-factly, at the standard pace of someone who has talked it through in therapy and has decided not to be defined by it. He was not on the inside in school. His friend group was small. A girl in high school once called him overzealous, a word he had to look up, and which he did not like the meaning of. He found out later that she was flirting with him. He had not picked up on the cue. He still does not entirely trust himself to pick up on cues like that, which is, he says, why it is any wonder that he has a long-term partner at all.

He is now thirty-seven, recently engaged to Victoria, who handles the photography for his event. He is in therapy. He prefers not to dwell on the bullying. “I refuse to have a victim mentality,” is how he puts it. “I’m 37 years old. That was more than half my life ago.” The line he keeps coming back to about the relationship between the bullied kid and the operator he became is brief and almost dismissive. “I think that’s why I’m a founder. I overcompensated for my shyness.”

He spent the back half of the 2010s running digital revenue and marketing at CoinDesk, then became Publisher at Morning Brew, where most of the industry first learned his name. He started A Media Operator in August 2019 on Substack, posting on weekends about the work he was doing on weekdays: figuring out how digital media companies actually make money. The early posts were unglamorous. Controlled circulation. First-party data capture. Lead-gen economics. Why Pacific Standard collapsed when its single benefactor walked away. He was not cheerleading the industry. He was showing his math.

By 2024, the project was a publication. Donnelly left Morning Brew, hired Christiana Sciaudone as a full-time reporter, brought on freelancers, and in January 2025 rebuilt the site from a newsletter homepage into something resembling an actual media company, which he labelled AMO 2.0. The twice-weekly cadence held. The reader base, which skews ruthlessly senior inside B2B media, held. The annual Summit, launched in October 2023 with 130 people, doubled by year three. The numbers underneath are still small. AMO will do roughly a million dollars in revenue this year, double the half-million it was doing the year before. Subscriptions are 15 to 18 percent of that. The team is five people, including him. His ambition is to grow the business to five million in revenue, which means he needs to convert the Summit’s relationships into enterprise subscriptions, launch additional verticals, and stop personally touching every line item, which he has not yet figured out how to do.

He is, in short, the operator he writes about, on the scale he writes about, working through the same questions in public that his readers are working through in private.

The most useful thing about Donnelly as a moderator is that he has named the thing he is doing on stage, and the name sounds worse than it plays. He calls the relationship between him and his guest “mildly antagonistic.” On the page it reads like an ambush. In the room the texture is different. The bite is real, but it sits inside an obvious affection for the person across the chair, and the homework he does in advance is meant to make the executive sound smarter, not smaller. That asymmetry is what buys him the bookings. The guests come back, put him on their own stages, send him their friends. If the guest is not a little uncomfortable, the audience is being cheated. Every chief executive has been media-trained. Every chief executive has a script. The job of the person with the second microphone is to break the script without breaking the room.

The style is not entirely his own invention. Donnelly is also the events-industry edition of a wider mid-thirties pattern in American journalism, criticism, and venture capital, in which a generation that watched the institutions of its twenties fail in slow motion has decided to treat the polite non-answer as a form of professional malpractice rather than professional courtesy. The room rewards him for it because the room, on some level, has been waiting for him.

The signature move is what he calls the revenue receipts. Before each session, he reads back through every interview the guest has given. If a CEO mentioned in a 2023 podcast that subscriptions were 50 percent of revenue, and in a 2024 panel said subscription revenue was twenty-five million, Donnelly walks on stage knowing the company does fifty million in total revenue. When he asks for the number and the executive deflects, he names the math out loud. I know you do twenty-five million in subscription, which is about half. Tell me about the other twenty-five. The executive has nowhere to go. The audience, which has been on the receiving end of polite revenue dodges at every conference for a decade, lights up.

The second move is the laugh on opening. He does this on purpose. At a sponsor event earlier this year he interviewed Prescott Shibles, the chief executive of Farm Journal, and the first question he asked was whether Shibles had taken the Farm Journal job for the work or just because it was a three-letter title. The whole room laughed. The session loosened. Loose rooms tell the truth.

He has a metric for this and the metric is auditory. Because he can barely see past the second row, he is listening for the laughs. He wants several of them per day. Not because he is an entertainer, but because he believes that an audience that is laughing is an audience that is awake, and an audience that is awake is one he can actually deliver something to. “It’s just, it’s my job to make them have a nice time,” he says, and the disclaimer in the middle of the sentence is the giveaway. He knows the line sounds soft. He says it anyway because he means it.

The third move is to humanize the guest at exactly one point per session, usually at the end. At the inaugural AMO Summit he closed his interview with Neil Vogel, then the chief executive of Dotdash Meredith and now of People Inc., by asking whether the Sixers were ever going to win a championship. Donnelly is a Knicks fan. Vogel is a Sixers diehard. The question had nothing to do with media. It humanized everything that came before it.

Twenty-five minutes with the chief executive of The Atlantic, twenty-five minutes with Katie Couric: Donnelly treats every booking as the chance to get something interesting from a person who would otherwise charge him a lot of money for the conversation. The reputation that gets him those bookings is the simplest version of his job description. He is not afraid to ask anybody anything.

Donnelly’s running argument with the rest of media, the one he has been making in different forms for six years, is that operators are running the wrong math on diversification. A scaled single revenue line across twenty-five industries, he has written, is operationally healthier than a company running advertising and subscriptions and events as three sub-scale lines inside a single narrow vertical. The number of revenue lines is not the question. The scale of each one is. He has admitted his own company is currently the second kind, three monetization schemes none of them yet at scale, and he is working through it. He uses the same lens to puncture other industry orthodoxies. A newsletter ad business, he has written, is just a banner ad business with some text, dressed up as a new model and headed for the same ceiling its 2005 ancestors hit.

He does not let his own theses off the hook either. He endorsed the content-to-commerce thesis for years. When Food52 fell into Chapter 11, he went back through his own archive and wrote the post-mortem on his own arguments, naming the place where the model broke: aggression on the commerce side starves the content that brought the audience in the first place. The line he keeps returning to, when watching his industry mistake activity for strategy, is that what happens when you take an operator and a financial analysis is that the two do not always align. The operators who held assets at the bottom of the cycle do fine. The financial buyers who overcorrect later pay the spread.

The asymmetry between Donnelly and the chief executives who pay to sit in his audience is not generational in the obvious way. He is not smarter than they are. They have run more revenue through more cycles than he has. The asymmetry is structural. Almost every executive in the AMO Summit room runs a business whose underlying P&L architecture was set during the algorithm decade, the years between roughly 2014 and 2022, when the operating assumption of digital media was that the platforms would move audiences to you in volume if you optimized for them well enough. Search referrals. Social distribution. Programmatic ad inventory. Paid acquisition funnels. Newsletter scale as a substitute for relationship.

That decade ended. The era of free traffic is over, Donnelly told the Alliance for Audited Media’s board of directors in August 2025, and his working assumption is that it is not coming back. The platforms have absorbed the audience. The search engines have started answering the questions themselves. The social referrals that used to carry traffic to publishers are now carrying it to AI summaries. The newsletter ad market, which he has called a banner ad business with some text, is heading for the same ceiling its 2005 ancestor hit. Most of the businesses sitting in his audience were built to run on plumbing that is being shut off.

The chief executives in the room are not unaware of this. Several of them are reorganizing around it in real time. Vox is betting on podcasts and creators. People Inc. is betting on first-party data. The Atlantic is betting on the relationship between brand and reader. Mansueto Ventures is betting on connection: at the 2025 Summit, COO Anne Marie O’Keefe described rebuilding the parent of Fast Company and Inc. around the principle that people don’t think, I’m an Innovation Festival attendee, not a website reader. They think about Fast Company as one brand experience. Each of those bets is correct in direction. The cost is that each of those bets requires unwinding an organizational architecture, a headcount structure, a margin model, and in most cases an investor expectation that all assumed the algorithm decade would continue. Donnelly inherited none of that. He started in 2019 with a Substack on weekends and built around the relationship from the first post forward. He never had a peak audience number on a search engine to defend. He never had a programmatic ad CPM to protect. He never built the layer of associate directors and vice presidents that would have to be dismantled. The advantage he has over every CEO in his room is that he did not have to undo anything to get to the place he is.

This is also the version of the gathering economy thesis that operators his audience’s age have not yet fully absorbed. The room is not a marketing channel. It is the production studio for the only kind of audience relationship that survives the next decade. Every senior executive who paid to sit in Donnelly’s room in October 2025 was, on some level, getting a look at their own future. The waitlist closes early because the people who run American media now know they need to see what the people who will run American media next are already doing.

Donnelly’s clearest framing of the next decade is also the bluntest. A media business should look like a barbell. Content team on one side, sales team on the other. Everything in between should be as thin as it can be. Audience development as a function of fifteen people is a category error. Audience development is a repeatable process. Repeatable processes can be run by an agent. If the agent runs it, you do not need fifteen people. You need one person to check the agent’s work.

This is, he says, going to be brutal for the white-collar middle class. Not because AI replaces the job, but because AI replaces the layer. The associate director, the director, the senior director, the associate vice president, the senior vice president, the line of titles whose primary function inside large media companies is the management of other titles. He is convinced that layer goes away. What he expects instead is the rise of the small business. He runs a media company with five people. He believes that within the decade, somebody else will run a similar company covering only trade shows, or only the creator economy, or only B2B information services, with three people and an agent stack, and that those companies will compound where the legacy holdings will not. He calls the trend an aggressive niche-ification of the industry. He thinks it is already underway.

He calls this the death of the large corporation, not the death of the job. He is also honest enough to admit that he is part of the same gravitational problem he is describing. When he arrived at Morning Brew, his team was four people. When he left, it was sixty-five. Some of that was real scale. Some of it was the human reflex to build empires when you are not the one signing the checks. He knows the difference. He thinks most managers do not.

He has lived inside the layer he is now arguing against, and that is the asymmetry that matters. The chief executives who pay to sit in his audience defend the layer because their org charts depend on it. Donnelly does not have to defend it. He chose, on his own company, not to build it in the first place.

He is also eating his own dog food. He recently spent a night using Claude to build a personalized cold-outreach system aimed at every senior executive in his industry, the kind of project that would have taken him weeks of agency time eighteen months ago. It is going to take him an hour. The math he is forecasting for the rest of the industry is the math he is running on himself first.

The reason this matters for the gathering economy is that everything Donnelly believes about AI funnels back to a single conclusion. In a world where information is infinite and cheap, the scarcity shifts. It shifts to trust, to relationships, and to the specific kind of knowledge transfer that only happens face to face. Information is a commodity now. The room is not.

When the question comes back around to whether the AMO Summit is the moat of his business, Donnelly does not declare it. He works it out in real time. Yes, he agrees that the room is the moat. But the reason it is the moat, he says, is friction. The Summit attendee has done two things that prove brand love. They have given him money, which is a small friction. They have also given him time, which is the larger one. Time is the only resource you cannot make more of.

The distinction he draws, when pressed, is between an audience and an algorithm. He has been asking the question in public for over a year: are you doing well because the algorithm is rewarding you, or because people love you? The metric he prefers, in the same vein, is lifetime value over reach. We need to become more focused on the LTV of every incremental person, rather than trying to reach as many people as possible, he told the AAM board in the same August speech. Plenty of media companies look successful because the algorithm is rewarding them. The question is whether their numbers would survive the algorithm being taken away. A love brand survives. A tenant of the algorithm does not. The AMO Summit is the proof he runs on his own business once a year that he has built the first kind, not the second.

This is the cleaner version of the argument he made in a January 2026 essay about Skift founder Rafat Ali’s 2026 prediction that information would be commoditized by AI and human-to-human connection would become exponentially more valuable. Donnelly elevated Ali’s quote and added the sharper version in his own voice. While others would talk about ad market volatility and revenue diversification, his focus was on the structural shift. How do you build a media business where the human infrastructure becomes the moat? That, he wrote, was the bet. Everything else was tactics.

He pairs this with a framework borrowed from Industry Dive co-founder Sean Griffey, who has been posting on LinkedIn about what he calls the connection economy. Audiences move through a four-rung ladder. Aware. Reader. Subscriber. Connected. Most media companies measure the first three rungs. The prize is the fourth. The fourth is not earned through content. It is earned through proximity, through recognition, through being in a room where someone knew your name.

There is a second tell in the way Donnelly thinks about his own room, and it is the line that pulls the entire gathering economy thesis into focus. He says that the better he does his job, the less relevant he becomes. The Summit succeeds when it stops being about Jacob and starts being about the community. Conferences that fail to make that handoff stay personality-driven and ceiling out. Conferences that make it become institutions. Paul Miller, the chief executive of Questex, who has been in the events business for thirty years and whom Donnelly recently hosted on the AMO Show, has been making versions of this argument for his entire career. Miller’s line is that pure-play events is a customer-unfriendly business model, because customers come to a media brand for a relationship, and events are one expression of the relationship rather than the product itself. Donnelly is the younger operator reading his own thesis back from a thirty-year veteran with thirty-five events. He has been listening.

There are tensions in Donnelly’s position that he has not closed. He admits, when asked, that he does not think he does a good enough job connecting attendees to each other inside the Summit. The format is single-track on purpose, because he refuses the AI-personalized-journey premise that some event technologists are pitching. He wants everybody on the same journey with him, not on twelve different ones. But the cost of single-track is that the connecting work has to happen in the gaps between sessions, and he knows the gaps need more design than he has yet given them. He is working on it.

He also has not resolved the original diversification critique that he himself raised in 2023. Three lines of business in a five-person shop is a lot of surface area. The margin on the newsletter is better than the margin on the Summit, because the newsletter runs on a calendar and the Summit runs on him for three weeks every fall. The bet he is making is that the lines reinforce each other in ways the focused-company math does not capture. The newsletter builds the audience. The podcast deepens the relationships. The Slack keeps them warm. The Summit compounds it all into a single billable day. The loop is the business. The loop has a name. He calls it the human infrastructure. The events industry has been calling it the convening economy for a generation. They are talking about the same thing.

At the end of the second day of the 2025 Summit, after the last panel and before the closing reception, Donnelly walked off stage and did what he does at the end of every event he produces, which is leave. The introvert who has spent thirty years compensating for being the introvert needs the room to himself for a stretch after the room has been working him. The main newsletter goes out Tuesday and Friday. The Events Operator edition runs Wednesday. The podcast publishes Tuesday. The Slack fills up by the end of the week with the threads that started at the bar. By the following October the same people, plus a few more, will come back.

The reason they come back is the line buried in the headline. Donnelly is mildly antagonizing American media not because he has a louder voice or a bigger platform but because he is running an operating model that does not have to undo anything to face the next decade. The senior executives who pay to sit in his audience are running businesses they have to remodel in flight. He is running a business he built on the architecture they are remodeling toward. Most of them have figured out what the room is for. A few have not. By the time all of them have, the next 37-year-old will already be selling a different room, in a different city, to a different audience. That is the actual lesson the Summit is teaching.

The room is the moat because in an economy where information is commoditized and content is infinite and the algorithm replaces the editor, the only thing left that cannot be automated is the decision to show up. They show up. He does the work to make the showing up worthwhile. And then, the better the work is, the less the room is about him at all.

He has been writing down the convening economy in operator’s prose for six years. Most of his industry has not started.

The next AMO Summit runs October 20 and 21, 2026, at the Times Center in New York. Two hundred and fifty senior leaders from the media and events industries are expected for a day and a half of single-track sessions and topical roundtables.

1. The mildly antagonistic stage.
If the chief executive on stage with you is not a little uncomfortable, you are not doing your job. Every executive has been media-trained. Every executive has talking points. The reason the audience came was to get past those.

2. Bring the revenue receipts.
Before any interview, read back through every prior interview the guest has given. If they said in 2023 that subscription was half their business, and in 2024 that subscription revenue was twenty-five million, you walk on stage knowing the company does fifty million. When they deflect, you name the math.

3. The laugh is the brief.
Open with a question that lands a laugh. Loose rooms tell the truth. The job of the moderator is, before anything else, to give the audience a nice time. Anyone embarrassed by saying that out loud has not run a hard room at the end of a long day.

4. Listen, do not watch.
The lights destroy your eyes. The audience is past the second row. Listen for the laugh, the pause, the inhale, the silence. The room is auditory before it is visual.

5. One track, not twelve.
Single-track conferences make the audience a community. Multi-track conferences with personalized AI journeys make the audience a thousand isolated journeys. Resist the technologist who wants to optimize you out of the shared experience.

6. The moat is friction.
The audience that gives you money has shown small friction. The audience that gives you time has shown the larger friction, because time is the only resource that cannot be replaced. Money plus time is brand love. You cannot manufacture it. You can only earn it.

7. AI kills the middle, not the job.
The death of the large corporation, not the death of work. Associate directors, directors, senior directors, vice presidents whose primary function is managing other titles: that layer goes away. The barbell stays. Content on one side, sales on the other, thinness in between.

8. Empire-building is gravity.
At Morning Brew his team went from four to sixty-five. Some of it was real scale. Some of it was what happens when the person hiring is not the person paying. Most managers do not know the difference. The good ones learn it the hard way and then write about it.

9. Become irrelevant on purpose.
The conference succeeds when it stops being about you. The community is the asset. The host is the catalyst. If the room only works because you are in it, you have not built a business. You have built a personality.

10. There is no harm in being optimistic.
He used to be a pessimist. He is not any more. The line he has settled on, and which has the structure of a Cohen Donnelly aphorism, is that there is no harm in being optimistic, because it will not change the outcome anyway. You might as well show up to the outcome in a useful state.

Jacob Cohen Donnely Edible Profile

Suno Link to A Media Operator’s Anthem

The lesson Ryan Simonetti carries from his father has nothing to do with real estate or hospitality or the $230 million his company just secured from Ares Management and TPG Credit Solutions. It is simpler and older than any of that. His father ran a bread delivery route in central New Jersey — Martin’s Famous Potato Rolls, the predawn shift, every morning for decades. The competitors would drop the product and leave. His father would pack out the shelves. Full shelves move product. Empty shelves lose money. Do the thing your competition is not willing to do. Show up on the days they don’t. The rest, Simonetti will tell you, is detail.

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He is now President and CEO of Convene Hospitality Group, the parent company uniting Convene, etc.venues, NeueHouse, and a growing portfolio of special event venues that collectively make CHG the largest owner and operator of dedicated meeting and event space in the United States and the United Kingdom. By the end of this year, the company will control nearly three million square feet across nine cities. The plan over the next five to six years is to double the footprint from roughly 40 to something closer to 70 or 80 locations, through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions. The $230 million, backed by Ares and Brookfield, is the accelerant. But the foundation was laid in a bread truck outside Hillsborough, New Jersey, before Simonetti was old enough to drive.

He was eight years old when his father bought the delivery business. He does not describe it as a hardship, exactly, though the picture is clear enough: summers and weekends in the truck before dawn, stocking shelves while other kids slept. What he took from it was not resentment but a framework. “We control very few things in life,” he said recently. “We control our outlook. We control our attitude. And we control our effort. My dad was big on all three.” When he talks about his father treating every person the same — the store manager, the receiver, the person stocking the shelves, the owner — he is not reciting a management principle. He is describing the first business education he ever received, delivered at 2:30 in the morning in a New Jersey parking lot.

Simonetti was the first in his family to attend college. He went to Villanova on grants and student loans, working to help cover costs while enrolled, and he met his future co-founder Christopher Kelly during freshman orientation. The two of them were, by Kelly’s own accounting, among the very few students on campus without their parents’ credit cards. What they built in response was, in retrospect, the earliest version of what would become Convene. They ran buses. Hundreds of kids — at the peak, somewhere around 700 or 800 — loaded onto yellow school buses in the west lot, headed for ticketed parties at clubs in Philadelphia. The math was clean: $25 per bracelet, $5 to the bus, $10 to the club, $10 to Simonetti and Kelly. Villanova is a Catholic university. It did not want students drinking on campus. They solved the problem by moving the party off campus and charging for the solution. He has been in the gathering business, one way or another, since he was nineteen years old.

After Villanova he went to Lehman Brothers, then to Gramercy Capital, where at 26 he was running a $3 billion portfolio weighted toward office buildings and hotels. When the financial crisis arrived in 2008, the calls started coming in: tenants giving back space, buildings losing value, conference rooms sitting empty. The question he kept turning over was not how to survive the collapse but what a better model might look like on the other side of it. Why were office buildings not being run like hotels? What would it mean to layer hospitality onto a real estate asset that had been managed purely as square footage? Convene was incorporated in October 2009, and I encountered Simonetti and Kelly shortly after, at one of the massive startup meetups that defined New York City in those years. These were not small gatherings. Hundreds of people would turn up to hear founders pitch ideas that ranged from the obviously doomed to the quietly world-changing. I remember hearing a presentation at one of them about a small transportation solution called Uber. The platform economy was crystallizing in real time, and the thesis that a service layer on top of someone else’s asset could be worth more than the asset itself was the animating logic of that entire scene. Simonetti and Kelly fit perfectly inside it: two founders with a real estate and hospitality play, making the argument that the conference room was an underutilized asset waiting for exactly that kind of service layer. They had the math and they had the logic, and they had clearly done what few founders bother to do — studied how new economic models actually work before trying to build inside one.

The design sensibility came from an unlikely source. As a child he was dragged by his mother through furniture stores and antique shops in New Jersey, visits he found somewhere between tedious and torturous at the time. "My mom used to torture me and drag me around with her," he told CoStar News. "She was really into design. I think there's something about that I kind of picked up as a kid. I developed a good eye for quality. I never went to school for architecture, design or anything, but I picked up a really good natural sense for space and dimension." His team, he says, would describe him as an architect and designer trapped in a finance guy's body... "Nobody had put the two together," he told CoStar. In the early-to-mid 2000s, he could see that lifestyle and experience were going to bleed across every asset class and every industry and nobody had brought it to the office yet. Convene was the first to try.

Before getting into what Convene became, it is worth being precise about what made it different from everything that existed before it, because the distinction is not obvious from the outside and it is the whole game. A hotel meeting room is sold as a room. The price is the room. Everything else — the AV technician, the catering, the Wi-Fi that actually works, the coffee that arrives when it is supposed to — is negotiated separately, invoiced separately, and frequently surprises the event planner at the end. A Convene booking works the opposite way: one price per person, all-inclusive, with the AV, catering, technology, and staffing bundled in from the start. No hidden line items. No vendor coordination. No moment where the bill arrives and the math no longer resembles the original quote. Convene’s own research found that competitors’ hidden or delayed pricing can inflate the cost of an event by up to ten times the original figure. The per-person model did not just simplify the transaction. It signaled a fundamentally different philosophy about who the product was being built for: the planner who needed to know on day one what the event would cost, not find out on day thirty.

The company that emerged over the next sixteen years was defined less by a grand hospitality vision than by an operator’s obsession with getting the details right. The decision to embed inside Class A office buildings rather than compete with hotels directly was structural genius: Simonetti didn’t need to own the real estate, only to run it better than anyone else had bothered to try. The culinary team was built in-house. The design sensibility — which he traces, without embarrassment, to his mother dragging him through showrooms he found tedious as a child — became a signature. Each location has a lead chef. The rooms are genuinely beautiful. He once described Convene’s market position as the JW Marriott or Ritz-Carlton of meeting space, while the WeWorks of the world were Hilton Garden Inns. The comparison is not modest. He does not appear to think it is inaccurate.

The pandemic came for all of this with a ferocity that is easy to forget now that the numbers are pointing in the other direction. A hospitality company built entirely around in-person gathering watched its entire reason for existing evaporate in a matter of weeks. Simonetti has said publicly that he tells entrepreneurs you have to survive long enough to be right. The pandemic was the stress test for that conviction. CHG survived, in part through capital infusions and in part through decisions made under the kind of duress that, he says, is not entirely different from being in a losing position in a live sparring match. He has practiced mixed martial arts for 25 years. He spent the last two and a half years training in jiujitsu and recently won a competition. The discipline he describes — getting comfortable being uncomfortable, controlling your emotional response when the outcome is uncertain — is not a metaphor he reaches for lightly. He spent several years living it in the most literal business sense.

The recovery has been extraordinary. Convene recorded a 22 percent increase in demand for events year-over-year in 2024. For 2025, the company was already pacing 123 percent ahead of where it had been at the same point the prior year and have hosted 630,000 guests. The 2023 acquisition of etc.venues brought 16 UK locations and established the tiered brand logic that CHG now operates: Convene for large-format, customized events and premium workplace experiences; etc.venues for turnkey small-to-medium meetings; NeueHouse for a membership model anchored in creative culture and programming. The acquisition of NeueHouse was the move that signaled something beyond an events company scaling its core product. NeueHouse was built around a community of writers, directors, architects, and entrepreneurs who needed a room that felt like something, not just a room that functioned. Adding it to a portfolio that had been built on corporate conferencing is either a contradiction or an expansion of the thesis, depending on how you read the strategy.

Simonetti reads it as an expansion, and he makes a compelling case. What used to be a meeting is now a brand experience. What used to be a conference is now a brand activation. The spend is shifting from procurement budgets to marketing budgets, and the clients showing up are thinking about outcomes, not square footage. He has started reframing the industry’s traditional ROI as “return on experience” — what impact did this event actually have on the people in the room, not just on the organization’s quarterly numbers. In this framing, the NeueHouse acquisition is not a detour. It is the company betting that the future of gathering is not the efficient delivery of content but the intentional design of transformation, and that there is a client base willing to pay for that distinction.

The gathering grants concept he is developing inside CHG is, in some ways, the most revealing thing about where he thinks the company is going. The idea is straightforward: CHG provides not just donated space but actual funding to organizations and conference producers that need seed capital to host gatherings that matter. A foundation model, applied to the gathering economy. He also talks about using NeueHouse specifically as a platform for the most important conversations happening in culture, politics, science, and technology. Not just the venue for those conversations, but the host of them. He cites a partnership with Michael Farber’s Breakout as an early expression of this. Farber has spent more than a decade building something that resists easy categorization: since 2014, Breakout has operated across more than 20 cities, assembling a national network of over 2,000 leaders, founders, funders, organizers, artists, and civic builders who Farber describes as people who keep showing up for each other. The organization claims $25 million in economic impact and is now expanding into two distinct formats — SEE, which brings local leaders together across the dividing lines that ordinarily keep them apart, launching in New York and moving toward Los Angeles; and Breakout Builders, national sector gatherings focused on technology for public good and the future of cities. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of organization that needs a room worthy of what it is trying to do. The partnership with CHG is a test of whether a commercial hospitality platform and a civic gathering organization can find shared purpose without one instrumentalizing the other. It is an ambitious self-conception for a company that started by asking whether office buildings could be run like hotels. The answer, apparently, is yes, and also more than that.

The impact he wants to have can be had from a platform that is growing large enough to matter: nearly 3 million square feet, nine cities today, double that within five years. The people who work for him, the taxes the company pays, the conversations it hosts, the grants it funds. He ends every email with two words. Don’t stop.

The last time we spoke, he was running between parent-teacher conferences, texting about a business matter at the same time, apologizing for the chaos without quite pausing it. His kids now go to sleep-away camp, which was not a thing in his household growing up. He notices this. The phases of a life, he said, have to be maximized on their own terms, and the phase he is in now is the one where success means raising healthy and independent and kind children and not letting the professional ambition crowd that out. He is genuinely convinced of this. He is also, demonstrably, running a company he intends to double in size. He is a first-generation college graduate who built the largest gathering company in America on a thesis he was pitching to small rooms before anyone believed it, and who closes every email with a reminder to himself that the work is not finished. His father would recognize the posture immediately. Full shelves. Show up on the days they don’t. The rest is detail.

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1. Do what your competition won’t. Full shelves move product. Empty shelves lose money. The edge is rarely a breakthrough idea — it is the willingness to show up on the days everyone else goes home.

2. Control only what is yours to control. Outlook. Attitude. Effort. Simonetti learned this riding in his father’s truck before sunrise and has repeated it to his own children. Everything else is noise.

3. Treat everyone exactly the same. From the store owner to the person stocking the shelves. His father modeled it without naming it. Simonetti has carried it into every room he has ever run.

4. Necessity is a better teacher than ambition. Two broke kids at Villanova without their parents’ credit cards built a bus party business that became, in retrospect, a rehearsal for everything that followed. The hustle preceded the vision.

5. Study how new models actually work before building inside one. Simonetti spent time at those early NYC startup meetups understanding platform economics before applying them to real estate. He knew what he was building and why.

6. The service layer is worth more than the asset. You do not need to own the building. You need to run it better than anyone else thought to try.

7. You have to survive long enough to be right. The pandemic tested every conviction Convene was built on. Survival was not incidental — it was the strategy.

8. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Jiujitsu taught him to control his emotional response when the outcome is uncertain. He considers it as relevant to running a company as any business school curriculum.

9. Reframe ROI as return on experience. The question is not what the event cost. It is what it changed — in the people in the room, in the culture of the organization, in the relationships that did not exist before the gathering.

10. Don’t stop. He closes every email with it. Not as a slogan. As a reminder to himself.

Ryan Simonetti Edible Profile from SmallBiteArchitecture.com

Four for the Wisdom Bank from the Convening Class: Femi Oke the Facilitator, Marco Giberti the Entrepreneur, Tim Groot the Technologist, Andrew Roby the Designer

I am trying to build a modern wisdom bank for the gathering economy — a living archive of the practitioners whose thinking the industry will want to draw on for decades, captured while they are …

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The events industry has always carried a quiet hierarchy, even if few people say it out loud. At the top sit the producers of massive trade shows, global conferences, and sports spectacles, the sectors that speak the language of square footage, registration numbers, and sponsor activations. Further down, in the minds of some, sit the planners who work i…

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There is a photograph Femi Oke wants you to see. In it, she is walking stride-for-stride with the president of Ethiopia, heads tilted toward each other at matching angles, moving through a corridor toward a stage where five thousand people at Kigali Stadium are waiting. The briefing is happening in transit because Oke could not get into the VIP holding …

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The modern conference industry runs on a strange contradiction. Tens of thousands of professionals may gather under one roof, filling exhibition halls the size of aircraft hangars, yet the real value of those gatherings usually comes down to only a handful of conversations. The founder who meets an investor at the right moment, the retailer who finds a …

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Editor’s note: The author and Marco Giberti co-chaired the SISO Event Innovation Battlefield together for much of the 2010s. This is a profile, not a memoir, but the admiration is disclosed.

The Apple Show in Buenos Aires, early nineties. Marco Giberti was in his mid-twenties, hired to run marketing for Apple Latin America at a moment when Apple was losi…

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Three people. Three very different corners of the gathering economy. Paul Miller has built Questex into one of the most data-driven event companies in the country while quietly leading the independent show organizer community through SISO. Nicola Kastner has spent her career making the case — with receipts — that the corporate event is not a cost center…

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At The Event Leaders Exchange (ELX), Nicola Kastner sits at the center of a network that quietly shapes one of the most powerful forces in business. More than three hundred senior leaders participate in the community, collectively influencing over 160,000 events each year and nearly $12 billion in spend. Those numbers are large enough to move markets, b…

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Authority in the events industry rarely announces itself. It accumulates over time, in the decisions that don’t make headlines and the rooms where people speak more freely because they assume no one outside is paying attention. Paul Miller occupies that kind of authority. As CEO of Questex, he runs a portfolio that stretches across hospitality, wellness…

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In a world full of noise, Hervé Sedky has made a career out of listening.

Born in France, raised in Cairo, and now leading a company whose events reach more than half a million professionals each year, Sedky has spent decades building his reputation not just as a strategist, but as a connector. His global outlook was shaped early—his father was a surgeon…

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Editor’s Note:This story isn’t just about a career. It’s about a moment. Greg Topalian’s path—from building New York Comic Con inside one of the world’s largest exhibition companies, to stepping away from day-to-day leadership and quietly backing the next generation of builders—mirrors a deeper shift in the gathering economy itself. As live events becam…

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Editor’s Note: Nicole Peck is not a stranger to this newsroom. Before her rise at Clarion Events and her stewardship of ITC Vegas and MAU Vegas, she spent formative years with me at BizBash as our Executive Vice President—an essential partner in reimagining our shows, reshaping our brand, and guiding the company through its sale to Tarsus just two month…

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Before she wrote the playbook, she lived inside the room.

Not a boardroom. Not a ballroom. A purple seventies living room in northern England, anchored by a Saarinen x Knoll Tulip table and a mother who filled it with musicians, neighbours, and strong opinions over weak tea. Her family believed in service without spectacle—organizing meals, coordinating …

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