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 still in the room. Four inductees this week. The full profiles live below. Here is why I picked each one.

Tim Groot — founder and CEO of Grip Dutch entrepreneur whose AI-matchmaking platform now runs underneath ShopTalk, Money20/20, and a long list of hosted-buyer marketplaces across Europe and the United States. Roughly seventy-five employees and growing. Tim has been toiling in the event-tech space for years and is one of the smartest players in it. Marco and I co-chaired the SISO Event Innovation Battlefield together for much of the 2010s, and Tim came through the competition early — even then his approach to connection was sharper than most of the room. He has only sharpened it since. The tulip farmer’s son who looked at Tinder, looked at a convention floor, and built the matching infrastructure now humming quietly underneath some of the most appointment-driven events in the world. He calls it engineering serendipity. The profile is how he got there from the bulb fields.

Femi Oke — broadcaster, journalist, and co-founder of Moderate The Panel Veteran of Al Jazeera English, the BBC, CNN, Sky, and NPR. Her London-based firm fields more than forty moderators and MCs across six continents for clients including the World Bank, the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the African Development Bank. Femi taps into something I have been arguing for years: that moderators and facilitators are the new superstars of this industry, the people trained to run the room and finally being recognized for it. She has briefed a sitting president in 90 seconds while walking her to the stage, and tells every room she enters that she is the laziest moderator they have ever met. The profile is how she got there, and why facilitation is finally a profession.

Andrew Roby — president of Andrew Roby Events Washington, DC–based event designer whose practice spans corporate programs, donor experiences, weddings, and milestone celebrations. United States Army veteran trained as a nuclear, biological, and chemical specialist. I met Andrew during the pandemic, when he put his leadership skills on the line to pioneer diversity in our business at a moment most operators were too distracted to take it on. He now studies a venue the way a soldier studies terrain. He treats belonging as architecture, not decoration, and the corporate world is finally catching up to what the social-events world has known for years.

Marco Giberti — founder of Vesuvio Ventures and co-author of The Face of Digital and Reinventing Live Miami-based investor, advisor, and teacher. Sold Mind Trainer to Reed Elsevier, runs the Business of Events Masterclass through Leaderpass, and co-architected the Events Venture Group, the only venture syndicate in the events industry. Marco is unlocking the creative energy of one of the most dynamic and least-recognized populations in the field — the event entrepreneurs who gravitated to this industry without ever realizing they had arrived in it. The founders who set out to fix a vertical, build a community, or scratch their own itch, and only later understood that what they had built was an event business with the power to change the world. Marco has spent three decades insisting that this category deserves to be taken seriously. The profile is the thinking underneath the work.

Always looking for the next inductee. If there is a practitioner whose thinking belongs in the bank, send the suggestion to david@gatheringpoint.news.

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 in weddings and social celebrations, people occasionally reduced to the phrase “party planner,” as if their work occupies a softer and less serious corner of the business.

The irony of that hierarchy is that many of the most capable event designers move constantly between those worlds. They produce corporate programs one week and family milestones the next, shifting between audiences, expectations, and emotional stakes with the ease of someone who understands that gatherings are less about categories than about people. Andrew Roby is one of those planners. His career sits squarely in the space where corporate events, cultural celebrations, and social milestones intersect, and the perspective he brings to that work suggests that the industry’s old distinctions between “serious events” and “parties” may have been misguided all along.

Roby’s clients do not usually describe him as a specialist in one type of gathering. What they talk about instead is continuity. A couple whose wedding he produced years ago calls him again for a birthday celebration. That celebration becomes a baby shower, and eventually a graduation party. Corporate clients who first hired him to produce a conference return when they need help shaping a donor experience or a cultural event tied to their brand. Over time the planner becomes something closer to a trusted collaborator, someone who understands the personalities, histories, and ambitions of the people hosting the gathering. In that sense Roby operates in the territory occupied by many of the most successful event designers in the industry, where the work is measured not in isolated productions but in the relationships that grow around them.

The instinct for that work appeared early in his life, though he did not yet have the language for it. Roby grew up in Miami in a household where dinner happened at seven o’clock every evening without exception. His mother insisted that the family sit down together, and part of the ritual involved setting the table. Roby discovered that he loved the task. While other children might have rushed through it, he lingered over the details, pairing plates with flatware, aligning glasses, and experimenting with runners or placemats whenever they were available. The table itself was never extravagant—he grew up poor—but the modest setting sharpened his attention to detail. What fascinated him was the way small adjustments could change the atmosphere of the room.

Sometimes the curiosity extended beyond the table. Roby remembers constantly rearranging furniture throughout the house, redesigning the living room layout or reshaping his bedroom simply to see how the environment shifted. At the time he thought of this behavior as curiosity rather than design. His mother had studied interior design, and an aunt who served in the military shared similar interests in how spaces functioned. Yet the connection between those early habits and a future career in events would only become clear much later.

In high school the instinct found more structured outlets. At Miami Senior High School Roby joined nearly every organizational ecosystem available, from student government and athletics clubs to culinary programs and the ROTC unit that would eventually shape his leadership style. The campus itself left a lasting impression on him. In front of the school stretched a large plaza where buses normally dropped students off each morning. During Spirit Week Roby began imagining how that space might be used differently. Instead of limiting the celebration to sports teams, he proposed organizing a parade that would involve every club and organization on campus. Students could build floats and march across the plaza, turning the campus into something more theatrical than a typical pep rally.

The school tried the idea for several years before deciding the logistics were too complicated to maintain. For Roby the experience revealed something about his own instincts. Even then he was less interested in simply attending events than in imagining how they might evolve.

Leadership followed naturally through ROTC, where he rose from volunteer to battalion commander, organizing trips, competitions, and training exercises for the unit. The discipline that shaped his professional thinking most profoundly, however, arrived when he enlisted in the United States Army and trained as a nuclear, biological, and chemical specialist.

The role involved preparing soldiers to respond to chemical or biological threats with procedural precision. Masks had to be secured in seconds. Rooms had to be cleared methodically. Every movement depended on preparation. Soldiers studied building schematics, mapped entrances and exits, and rehearsed how they would move through unfamiliar environments before ever stepping inside.

When Roby describes how he approaches event venues today, the parallel is unmistakable. He studies the room the way a soldier studies terrain. Where will guests enter? Where might the flow break down? What logistical risks could disrupt the experience? In events, as in the military, the most elegant plan still depends on flawless execution.

That operational discipline forms one half of Roby’s thinking. The other half is creative. When a client calls about a new gathering, he does not begin by calculating budgets or production schedules. Instead he imagines what the room will feel like from the perspective of the guest. Will there be a moment that sparks curiosity or surprise? Will the environment feel alive? Only once that vision exists does he begin working backward through the practical details of venue constraints, audiovisual requirements, and logistics.

The rhythm reflects what one might call a left-brain and right-brain approach to event design. Creativity appears first, but it is immediately tested against operational reality.

This focus on the attendee also explains why Roby talks so often about belonging. For him the most important moment of any gathering occurs before the program even begins. A guest walks through the doors and quickly scans the environment for signals about whether they belong there. The signals may be subtle: the faces greeting them at registration, the imagery displayed on banners, the tone of the room itself. If guests see themselves reflected in those signals, they relax and begin engaging with others. If they do not, they often withdraw without realizing it.

Roby describes the reaction as a defensive posture. People arrive ready to network, but once they feel out of place they hesitate to initiate conversations. The room becomes smaller for them.

The solution, he believes, lies in treating belonging as infrastructure rather than symbolism. The people working registration desks, the imagery used in marketing materials, the language in welcome messages, and the diversity of vendors behind the scenes all shape the emotional architecture of an event.

Even in diverse environments, however, subtler dynamics can emerge. Roby has observed how networking events quickly develop social clusters, where attendees unconsciously filter who they approach. Appearance, confidence, and perceived status influence who gets included in conversations. Researchers sometimes describe the phenomenon as lookism—the tendency to favor people who match certain social expectations. Roby sees it play out frequently. Even gatherings designed to encourage openness can reproduce invisible hierarchies.

The conversation inevitably returns to the phrase “party planner,” which Roby believes understates the scale and complexity of what planners actually do. The irony, he notes, is that the social event world often teaches lessons that corporate gatherings are now trying to rediscover. Weddings, for example, force planners to manage intimacy, identity, and long-term relationships in ways that corporate events rarely demand.

He recalls one couple, Morgan and Kwesi, whose wedding he planned several years ago. Since then he has produced birthday celebrations, baby showers, and eventually their son’s graduation party. The relationship has evolved alongside the family’s life. In many ways that continuity represents the deeper value of the work.

Design trends are evolving as well. Roby studies award shows closely and has noticed how the traditional banquet layout—large round tables facing a stage—is gradually giving way to more dynamic arrangements. Soft seating, lounge environments, and smaller tables are replacing rigid banquet formats. Editorial-style photo environments now substitute for the traditional step-and-repeat backdrops common at corporate events. Roby admits to a particular fascination with carpeting venues to cover the patterned floors typical of hotel ballrooms, a small intervention that can transform the atmosphere of a room.

Audiovisual technology is also expanding the possibilities. Instead of relying on a single LED wall behind the stage, many events now incorporate ceiling projections, side panels, and immersive visual systems that surround guests with a unified design language.

The shift reflects a broader change in how success is measured. For years the industry defined a successful event by how many people attended. Increasingly planners are asking whether the experience itself was meaningful. Smaller, curated gatherings—particularly donor events and brand experiences—are becoming more common as organizations prioritize connection over sheer scale.

Roby himself is exploring what the next chapter of his career might look like. After years working as a third-party planner for multiple organizations, he has begun considering whether he might eventually move into an in-house event leadership role within a single global company. At the same time his entrepreneurial instincts remain strong. Earlier in his career he launched a regional fashion week and hosted cocktail gatherings open to the public. If he were given significant investment capital today, he imagines building something entirely different: a content-creation facility where brands and creators could produce events and digital media simultaneously, or immersive lounges that combine dining, live entertainment, and social gathering spaces in cities across the country.

What unites all of these ideas is Roby’s enduring fascination with how people behave in rooms. Whether designing a wedding, a corporate summit, or a future entertainment venue, the question remains the same. How do you create a space where people feel comfortable enough to connect

In a gathering economy increasingly obsessed with community, the answer may lie in the part of the industry some once dismissed too easily. The planners who learned their craft designing intimate celebrations often understand something fundamental about human behavior: belonging is not decorative. It is structural. And the rooms where people truly feel welcome rarely happen by accident.

• Belonging starts before the event begins
The first emotional decision a guest makes happens at the door. Registration staff, visual cues, and tone determine whether someone leans in—or pulls back.

• If they don’t feel it, they won’t stay
Programming doesn’t fix a room that feels off. Atmosphere beats agenda every time.

• The room is a system, not a backdrop
Seating, flow, entry points, and spacing shape behavior as much as speakers and content.

• Read the room before you design it
Great planners don’t impose ideas. They observe first—then build around what the space and audience need.

• Precision enables creativity
Operational discipline isn’t the opposite of creativity—it’s what allows creative ideas to survive execution.

• Every event carries risk
Logistical breakdowns, poor flow, and unclear leadership don’t just hurt the event—they damage the experience for everyone involved.

• Social events teach what corporate events forget
Weddings and celebrations force planners to understand emotion, identity, and human dynamics—skills now essential across all events.

• Relationships outlast events
The most successful planners aren’t defined by one event, but by the clients who keep coming back across milestones and years.

• There is no fixed format for belonging
No seating chart, agenda, or design template guarantees connection. Every room requires its own language.

• Smaller can be more powerful
The shift isn’t just toward intimacy—it’s toward intentionality. Who is in the room matters more than how many.

• Design for how people feel, not just what they see
Lighting, visuals, and décor matter—but emotional experience is what people remember.

• Technology should support the room, not dominate it
Immersive AV works best when it enhances connection, not when it becomes the point of the event.

• The “party planner” label misses the point
The skills required to design meaningful gatherings—empathy, observation, and emotional intelligence—are anything but small.Bonus Personalization from

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Link here to see Andrew Roby Edible Profile from SmallBiteArchitecture.com

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 room. Protocol wouldn’t allow it. So she did what she has done for 30 years when protocol gets between her and the person she needs to talk to before they go on stage: she went around it. In 90 seconds, while walking, she laid out the arc of the session, told the president where the conversation would turn, explained that the opening question was just a warm-up, and made clear that she would need more than someone sitting politely and waiting to be asked things. The president got it. She knew Oke’s style. She knew what “more” meant.

Oke tells this story not as a flex but as an illustration of a problem she has spent her career solving: the gap between the people who plan events and the person who has to make the room work. The speakers are confirmed. The venue is booked. The napkins are folded. The sound system is tested. And then, sometimes just 48 hours before the doors open, someone thinks about the moderator. Oke, who co-founded Moderate The Panel in 2018, has made it her business to close that gap, and to argue, with increasing volume, that the person who holds the session together is not the cherry on top of the event. She is the most vital ingredient in it.

The company she built operates across six continents and fields more than 40 moderators and MCs, many of them journalists and broadcasters who learned to think on their feet in the most unforgiving classroom available: live television. The client roster reads like a directory of institutions that take convenings seriously enough to pay for them: the World Bank, the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the African Development Bank, the European Commission, Thomson Reuters. Oke herself is the lead practitioner, the company’s most requested facilitator, and the person who still sends what she calls a “moderator’s greeting note” to every panelist before every event she runs. The note is friendly and specific. It tells the speakers what she plans to do, asks them to come prepared not just with their talking points but with stories, and directs them, explicitly, to listen to each other on stage. “Your job,” she tells them, “is not only to come with what are the most important points for you, but to speak to your co-panelists.” She pauses. “Which is what I often don’t see.”

The instruction sounds almost comically simple, but Oke has learned that simplicity is the point. Good moderation, she believes, begins with giving people permission. Permission to talk to each other instead of performing for an audience. Permission to deviate from prepared remarks. Permission to react. She tells every panel she runs the same joke: “I am the laziest moderator you’ve ever met. This is the hardest I’m going to work. I don’t want to have to talk. If I’m talking, we’re in trouble.” The speakers laugh. And then, because they have been told they are in charge, they start behaving like it.

The instinct predates the career by a long stretch. Oke was seven years old when she started organizing Friday night gatherings at home, chatty and fearless in the way that oldest children sometimes are, though her version of fearless went well beyond birth-order confidence. She knocked on the windows of restaurants to wave hello to strangers eating their dinners. She walked into the middle of dance floors and started performing for no one in particular. At eight, she was collecting “news” from family members throughout the week and presenting a ten-minute broadcast she called the Oke Bulletin, delivered over steaming plates of her mother’s Jollof rice. No one in the family had a background in media. No uncle in television. No family friend at the BBC. The whole enterprise was self-generated, powered by what Oke describes, without a trace of false modesty, as enthusiasm and bounciness.

By the time she reached secondary school, the impulse had taken on an entrepreneurial shape, though the currency was never money. She rewrote the musical Grease, recruited her schoolmates to perform it, staged the production during lunchtime every day for a week, and charged two pence admission. She was on the radio at 14, one of the junior reporters on a kids’ show at LBC, Britain’s first talk radio station, writing handwritten letters to public figures and getting interviews that adult producers might not have landed, because who says no to a 14-year-old with that much nerve? By 18 or 19, she had walked into the office of the head of the BBC for a chat. Just walked in. “It didn’t occur to me that it was unusual,” she says. “It was just how I was put together.”

Oke studied English literature at Birmingham University, and the choice matters, because the way she talks about moderation borrows more from narrative theory than from communications strategy. She thinks in terms of arc, flow, story. She reads a room the way a novelist reads a draft, looking for the place where something needs to happen to keep the audience from drifting. When she was facilitating an eight-hour problem-solving session for a major foundation and the energy collapsed in the seventh hour, she didn’t call a break. She stood up and announced, “I’m going to do some brain science now. Everybody stand up.” They stood. “Your brain works better with physical activity. Sit down.” They sat. “Stand up.” They stood. “Sit down.” The room was laughing, and then the room was awake, and then the last hour of the session produced what the first six had been building toward. She had looked up the research beforehand, because she is not the kind of person who wings the science, but the instinct came first. The literature major knew the audience needed a pattern interrupt. The broadcaster knew how to deliver one.

Her path from broadcast journalism to professional moderation was not a pivot so much as a convergence. She spent a decade hosting The Stream on Al Jazeera English, a live interactive show that required her to manage multiple voices, shifting topics, and audience participation in real time, every day. She reported for the BBC, CNN, Sky, NPR. She narrated “Cursed,” a true-crime documentary series for Audible, and hosted The Negotiators podcast for Foreign Policy and Doha Debates. But the moderating kept pulling her in. Conferences would book her because she was a known broadcaster, and then something different would happen on stage, something that had less to do with her name and more to do with her ability to make a panel feel like a conversation instead of a series of interviews conducted in public.

The origin story of Moderate The Panel traces to a moment in 2006, at a forum in Brussels, where Oke watched a moderator get heckled by the audience. The moderator had lost control, and the room could feel it, and instead of course-correcting, he floundered. Oke sat in the audience and thought: this is a profession, and almost nobody treats it like one. It took another 12 years before she formalized the idea into a company, co-founding Moderate The Panel in 2018. The timing was, in retrospect, extraordinarily lucky and extraordinarily unlucky in equal measure. The company had a strong first year, was building a client base, and then in March 2020, every event on the calendar canceled within a matter of weeks.

What happened next is a testament to the logic of building a roster of broadcasters. Oke’s team knew how to look into a camera and create the illusion of proximity. They knew how to make a conversation feel real when the participants were in six different time zones staring at six different screens. While the rest of the events industry scrambled to learn virtual production, Moderate The Panel was already fluent. The company had its best two to three years during COVID, because a moderator who could run one physical event per day could suddenly run six virtual ones. The model scaled in ways that a purely in-person operation never could have.

Oke is clear-eyed about the structural problem her company exists to solve, and she does not dress it up in diplomatic language. Event organizers, she says, routinely undervalue the moderator because a good one makes the job look effortless. “It only looks hard when it’s going horribly wrong,” she says. The result is that organizations will spend on the venue, the catering, the AV, the water, and then try to get the moderation done pro bono, or hand it to the head of the association, who goes off on tangents and greets friends in the audience by name while the program drifts. Oke calls this a false economy. She is polite about it, but she is not equivocal.

The deeper argument, the one that animates her work at a level beyond business development, concerns what a skilled facilitator can do when the stakes extend beyond conference programming. She brings it up unprompted: the meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky at the White House that devolved into public recrimination on live television. “They really needed a facilitator in that room,” she says, and then she walks through, in specific tactical detail, what she would have done. She would have established a run of show. She would have spoken to both principals beforehand to read the room. She would have redirected the conversation before it reached the suit comment. “We are moving on here,” she says, in the voice she would have used. “We will save the sartorial conversation for a little bit later. Sartorial elegance is number three on our rundown.” A little laughter. Move things along. Don’t let the lull become the moment. She is not being grandiose. She is, without quite saying it, making the case that facilitation is a form of statecraft, and that the absence of it has consequences that extend well beyond a bad panel.

Her method with introverts is where the craft becomes most visible. She watches body language with the specificity of a poker player reading tells: the man with the beard stroking his chin is thinking. The minister writing a note on a pad heard something that triggered an idea she was saving for later. Oke will call it out, gently. “Minister, you seem to be writing an essay. Would you like to share it with us?” And the minister will share. And the point she shares will often be the most important thing said on stage all day, a thought that would have stayed in the margins of a notebook if no one had thought to ask for it.

She rearranges seating charts to put the least confident panelist closest to her, even when it conflicts with protocol. She arrives early enough to greet audience members by hand, not because she read a book about it but because she learned, through repetition, that the audience is the most important participant in any room. “If you’ve got three panelists, the audience is the fourth panelist,” she says. “You’ve got five panelists, they’re the sixth. They’re as important as somebody who’s on the stage.” She means it structurally, not sentimentally. The audience is where minds actually change. She can see it happen: the lean forward in a chair, the turn to a neighbor, the note scribbled after a point that landed. The panelists may continue the conversation on stage after the session ends, surrounded by people who don’t want business cards, who just want to keep talking. That, she says, is the evidence that something worked.

Oke attributes her confidence, when pressed, not to any single influence but to a national inheritance. She has Nigerian heritage, and she delivers the generalization with a wink: Nigerians are extremely confident. They feel anything is possible. Her mother told her to aim high. Education was the universal vaccine. Beyond that, the explanation she offers is almost tautological in its honesty. She was put together this way. She was an enthusiastic little girl who loved radio and loved TV and had no one in her family to show her how any of it worked. She figured it out by walking into rooms and starting to talk. She is still doing it, at the World Bank this Friday, for the State of the Africa Region launch, where she will host a conversation with one of Africa’s wealthiest men, several government ministers, and an audience full of people who know more about the continent’s future than any panel could convey in 90 minutes. Her job is to make sure the room hears what it needs to hear, including from itself.

If you are shouting the truth, Oke says, you have already lost to the person who is calmly telling lies. It is one of those lines that sounds like it belongs on a bumper sticker until you think about it for a moment longer and realize it is a theory of power, and a theory of moderation, and possibly a theory of everything that is wrong with public discourse in 2026. Oke delivers it calmly. She would.

Your job is not to ask questions. It’s to give people permission.
Before every event, Oke sends panelists a “moderator’s greeting note” telling them to listen and react to each other on stage, not just deliver prepared remarks. Once they know they have permission to deviate, they stop performing and start thinking.

Shouting the truth loses to calm lies.
In any exchange, the person who controls their emotional register controls the room’s perception of credibility. A moderator’s first move in a heated moment is to lower the temperature, not correct the record.

The audience is the panel.
Three panelists means the audience is the fourth. Oke watches who leans forward, who turns to a neighbor, who scribbles a note. Often there’s more expertise in the seats than on the stage, and a moderator who ignores that is running half the room.

The note-taker has the best point. Ask for it.
When a panelist jots something down mid-session, they’ve had a thought they were saving for later. “Minister, you seem to be writing an essay. Would you like to share it with us?” What follows is almost always the most important thing said all day.

You budgeted for napkins but not the moderator.
Organizations pay for the venue, the catering, the AV, then try to get the one person who makes it all come alive for free. Oke calls it the first false economy in events.

Seat the introvert next to you. Even if it breaks protocol.
Confident panelists perform from any chair. The nervous one needs proximity to the moderator. Oke rearranges seating charts to make this happen, overriding protocol if she has to.

Stories last a year. Lines last until coffee.
A polished talking point might earn applause, but an anecdote lodges in memory at a different depth. Oke always asks speakers for stories, not arguments.

Ask for 40 minutes to get 30.
VIPs asked to arrive 15 minutes early show up five minutes before. Build the buffer into the ask so you actually get green-room time with your speakers.

Never put someone on stage cold.
When protocol blocked Oke from the VIP room before a session with the president of Ethiopia, she briefed her in 90 seconds while walking to the stage. Even that was enough.

Facilitation is statecraft.
The Trump-Zelensky White House meeting devolved because no one was managing the room. Oke’s prescription: a run of show, a pre-read of both principals’ moods, and someone empowered to say “we’re moving on” before the lull becomes the moment.

Link here to Femi’s Edible Profile

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 supplier across the aisle, the executive who discovers a technology partner between sessions—those encounters are what justify the flights, the hotels, and the days spent away from the office. Everything else surrounding an event, from the stages and signage to the sponsor lounges and cocktail receptions, exists largely to make those meetings possible.

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For the Dutch entrepreneur Tim Groot, that reality became the foundation of a company that now operates quietly behind the scenes at many of the world’s largest conferences and exhibitions. His firm, Grip, builds the technology that helps participants identify who they should meet and then orchestrates the logistics required to make those meetings happen. The platform analyzes attendee profiles, recommends relevant connections, and increasingly schedules the meetings themselves, coordinating thousands of introductions that might otherwise depend on luck.

Listen to the Tim Groot Grip Story in Song

.Grip’s systems now operate most visibly in appointment-driven conferences and hosted-buyer marketplaces, where the central purpose of attending an event is the series of one-to-one meetings that happen across a few densely scheduled days. Retail gatherings such as ShopTalk, fintech conferences like Money20/20, and numerous industry marketplaces across Europe and the United States rely on systems capable of coordinating thousands of conversations within limited time windows. In those environments the event floor begins to resemble something closer to a marketplace than a traditional conference, and the ability to match buyers with sellers efficiently becomes the real product being delivered.

The path that led Groot into this world began far from the conference circuit. He grew up in the Netherlands as the son of a tulip farmer, surrounded by the long ribbons of color that transform the countryside each spring. To visitors the sight feels almost cinematic—rows of red, yellow, and purple stretching toward the horizon—but to the children of farmers those fields are simply where work happens. Groot began helping on the farm around the age of eleven or twelve, driving forklifts and assisting with the routines that keep an agricultural business moving. By sixteen he had already traveled internationally with his father and the company’s sales representatives, visiting customers in Eastern Europe, Japan, and South Africa who purchased Dutch bulbs for their own markets.

Listen to the Tim Groot Story in Song

The experience exposed him early to the rhythms of global commerce. Tulips are beautiful, but they are also products that must be grown, marketed, and sold in a competitive international market. His grandfather had started the family business, and discussions about varieties, supply chains, and pricing were part of daily life. Looking back, Groot often describes those years as his first education in entrepreneurship.

Even as a teenager he experimented with ideas designed to attract attention to the family’s flowers. Inspired by the story of seventeenth-century tulip mania, he once launched a website offering what he described as the most expensive tulip bulb sold in modern times. The site offered ten bulbs of a rare variety priced at one hundred euros each when most bulbs sold for pennies. The idea attracted national media coverage in the Netherlands and eventually produced a single sale, which he still remembers with amusement. Markets, he learned early, are shaped as much by curiosity and storytelling as by supply.

Those instincts surfaced elsewhere during his teenage years. In school he remembers running small side businesses selling copied software and DVDs to classmates. Despite eventually founding a technology company, he still insists that he does not think of himself primarily as a technologist. What fascinates him most is human behavior and the patterns behind it.

The idea that eventually became Grip emerged years later during an internship at a mobile-app development agency. The firm built applications for banks and corporate clients, and part of Groot’s job involved attending conferences to search for potential customers. It did not take long for him to notice how inefficient networking at events could be. Even in rooms filled with hundreds of professionals, identifying the few people who mattered for a particular conversation often felt like searching for a needle in a haystack.

At the same time he was encountering a very different model of connection in his personal life. Like many people his age he had begun experimenting with dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble, where strangers could connect almost instantly through a simple matching interface. In his own case the experience became more than theoretical; he eventually met his wife through Bumble. Watching those two worlds side by side produced the insight that launched his company. If software could efficiently match people looking for romantic partners, why couldn’t it help professionals meet each other at events?

The earliest version of Grip was essentially an experiment built around that question. Participants created profiles describing their interests and goals for attending a conference, and the system suggested people they might want to meet. Messaging tools followed so that participants could reach out to each other directly. But when hundreds or thousands of meeting requests began arriving simultaneously the scheduling quickly became chaotic. The next step was automation. Grip developed algorithms capable of coordinating meeting calendars across entire conferences, automatically filling time slots and resolving conflicts so that participants could move efficiently from one conversation to the next.

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What began as a networking experiment gradually evolved into an infrastructure system for what might be called the meeting economy of modern conferences.

One of the insights that shaped the company’s development is that technology like this only becomes essential once gatherings reach a certain scale. At small events—a dinner, a retreat, or a workshop—everyone can meet everyone else naturally. The density of relevant conversations is already high. The problem emerges when events grow large enough that participants can no longer navigate the network on their own.

At major trade shows thousands of people may attend, yet only a fraction of them are relevant to any individual participant. A founder looking for investors, a retailer seeking suppliers, or an executive exploring new technologies may discover that only ten percent of the people in the building are actually worth meeting. Grip’s technology attempts to restore the probability of those encounters by identifying relevant matches and organizing the meetings that might otherwise never occur.

During our conversation I mentioned my book Harnessing Serendipity, which explores the idea that gatherings can be designed to increase the likelihood of unexpected connections. Groot immediately reframed the idea in his own words.

“How can we engineer serendipity?” he asked.

The phrase captures the ambition behind the company’s technology. Serendipity is traditionally understood as something accidental—two people bump into each other in a hallway and discover a shared interest. But large conferences make those accidental encounters harder, not easier. When thousands of participants fill a convention center, the odds of meeting the right person randomly actually decrease. Grip’s systems attempt to solve that paradox by quietly increasing the probability that the right people find each other.

Working at the center of these networks has given Groot an unusual vantage point into how ideas move through industries. Because the platform observes what thousands of professionals are searching for and discussing at events, it sometimes reveals trends before they appear elsewhere. He remembers noticing rising interest in blockchain technology among conference attendees long before the topic became widely discussed in the broader business world. Conferences, he believes, often function as previews of the future because they gather the people who are actively exploring new ideas.

Another shift he sees emerging concerns how the events industry measures success. Traditional metrics such as attendance numbers and exhibition floor space still dominate conference reporting, but they say little about whether meaningful interactions actually occurred. Groot believes the next frontier will involve measuring the quality of meetings themselves. If technology can identify who met whom and whether those conversations lead to follow-up discussions, partnerships, or deals, organizers may finally be able to quantify the real economic value created by a gathering.

During our conversation the discussion drifted toward how the exhibition industry itself is evolving. Groot spoke with particular respect about the Belgian event company Easyfairs, which is also a customer of Grip. What he admires most is the clarity of its operating model. Easyfairs has built its portfolio around standardized event formats and strict performance metrics, creating a level of operational discipline that is unusual in a sector where many organizers produce events in dozens of different styles.

Technology may soon push events in a different direction as well. Advances in artificial intelligence could make it possible to personalize conferences at a scale that was previously unimaginable. AI systems may analyze participant interests, suggest relevant meetings, and manage logistical details automatically. Yet Groot remains cautious about allowing machines to make strategic decisions without human oversight. During a recent internal meeting, his team presented an AI-generated recommendation about which geographic market the company should pursue next. The analysis appeared convincing, and the team began executing the plan immediately. Groot stopped the conversation with a simple question: had anyone actually challenged the recommendation, or were they simply following what the machine suggested?

The moment illustrated a concern he believes will become increasingly important as automation spreads across industries. Technology can remove friction and automate repetitive tasks, but judgment still belongs to people.

His own role inside the company has changed as Grip has grown from a small startup to a team of roughly seventy-five employees. He now describes his job less as building software and more as helping the organization think clearly—ensuring the right conversations are happening internally and offering a vision of where the industry might be heading.

Near the end of our conversation he mentioned something else that had recently changed in his life. Six weeks earlier he had become a father. Holding a newborn tends to reshape how people think about the future, and in Groot’s case it reinforced a worldview he already held about humanity’s trajectory. He describes himself as a humanist who believes progress accelerates when more people participate in generating ideas and solving problems. When asked how large the global population should become by the end of the century, he offered an answer that surprised me. While the current population sits just above eight billion, he believes a world with thirty or even forty billion people could produce far greater levels of innovation and discovery.

Seen from a distance, the connection between Groot’s childhood and his company becomes easier to understand. Farmers prepare fields and plant bulbs knowing that only the right conditions will produce growth. The work of organizing successful gatherings—and increasingly the technology that supports them—requires preparing environments where conversations can begin and relationships can develop.

What Grip is ultimately building is not just software for conferences. It is infrastructure designed to increase the probability that the right people meet at the right moment.

In other words, a system for engineering serendipity.

Bonus Personalization: Tim Groot Edible Profile from Smallbitearchitecture.co

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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 losing the operating-system war on every measurable front and most of the Windows world had already stopped taking the company seriously. The room was small. A few hundred interior designers and architects, a scattering of dealers and distributors, an Apple user base in Latin America that was, in Giberti’s own accounting, a cult, and a minority cult at that. But when the doors opened he watched strangers recognize each other across the floor as if they had been waiting years for the signal. Dealers met distributors. Designers met the technologists who would build their next project. And Giberti, standing in the room, understood that the trust Apple had cultivated in its software had just been loaned, for three days, to a physical space. The cult had become a trade show. Within a year, he had quit.

What he built next matters less, in the long view, than the lesson he walked out with: that a well-sorted room, backed by a credible brand, is the most efficient marketing mechanism on earth. He has spent the thirty-two years since attempting to prove it. He went from Apple to launching Windows World in Latin America, then talked Comdex, the most important technology trade show on the planet at the time, into planting its flag south of the border. He built Mind Trainer, ran it as a long-term joint venture with Reed Exhibitions, and sold it to Reed Elsevier. He reinvented himself as Vesuvio Ventures, the Miami-based investment and advisory outfit he named after the volcanic soil that fertilizes the Gulf of Naples. He co-authored two of the most-cited strategy books the events industry has produced this decade. And in May 2024, alongside Greg Topalian of Clarion Events, Jonathan Weiner of HLTH, Monique Ruff-Bell of TED, and a handful of others, he finally lit the match on the institution he had been sketching in private for years: the Events Venture Group, a nonprofit deal-by-deal syndicate built to close the one gap in the events capital stack that the industry had, somehow, spent three decades failing to notice, and built in the only shape Giberti has ever trusted. A gathering.The House of Giberti

He was born in Buenos Aires on February 18, 1967, son of Horacio Giberti and Vanda de Michelle an Italian inmigrant to Argentina from Naples, Italy hometown of the Vesuvio which is the name of Marco’s company as a recognition to his Italian roots. His father was not a businessman. Horacio Giberti was a Doctor (pediatrician) and spend his life learning and practicing medicine and also enjoying technology gadgets (something Marco inherited from him).

This was the house Marco Giberti grew up in. When Marco eventually picked a field of his own, not his father’s medical and academic passion but the business of gathering, he brought both sets of instincts with him. He writes books, he teaches a masterclass, he drafts institutions the industry had somehow never built itself. The name of his venture firm, Vesuvio, after the volcanic soil that fertilizes the Gulf of Naples, is no accident. It is an agrarian metaphor deployed on the floors of trade shows. The soil is rich, the founders flourish, the fund is the fertilizer. Her mother Vanda would have recognized the frame immediately.

The First Ballroom

Giberti tells the Buenos Aires story the way people tell the moment they met their spouse. There is a before, and there is an after. The before was corporate Apple in the early nineties, what he calls the dream job at the perfect age. The after was Windows World, Latin America, built from nothing. “I moved to the other side of the technology,” he says of the pivot, “and it was a huge success, and I convinced Comdex to bring the show to Latin America, and that’s how my trade show career started.”

The insight he took from Apple was brand validation. In the early nineties, launching a show in the region required an outside stamp that buyers trusted. Comdex was that stamp. He worked the same logic in reverse: if the trade show was the most efficient marketing tool in the world, then the organizer, the person who signs the sponsors, books the stage, picks the speakers, and curates the guest list, was the most efficient broker of relationships in capitalism. The logic held through Mind Trainer, which he built into a regional juggernaut before Reed Elsevier bought the whole thing. It held through the second act, when he set up Vesuvio in Miami and began placing early checks into Grip, the AI-matchmaking platform he backed nearly a decade before anyone in the industry said the words “AI matchmaking” without laughing. It held through more than 50 early stage techh investments around B2B media, events and marketing.

And it held through his two books, co-written with Jay Weintraub and Denzil Rankine, which between them reframed the events business as a “community catalyst” inThe Prophecy, and Then the Pandemic

The books did real work. The Face of Digital landed in 2017, arguing that a $565 billion industry was about to be disrupted the way Airbnb disrupted hospitality and Uber disrupted transit. The thesis was dismissed, at the time, as alarmist. Three years later, in the middle of the pandemic, it read like prophecy. Reinventing Live, co-authored with Rankine in 2020, was the follow-up, and the praise lines on the back of the book read like a who’s who of industry command: Charlie McCurdy of Informa, Gary Shapiro of CTA and CES, Paul Miller of Questex, Simon Kimble of Clarion, Douglas Emslie of Tarsus. Giberti became the guy the C-suite called when they wanted to know what happens next.

He parlayed the authority into a classroom. The Business of Events Masterclass, through Leaderpass, is fifteen-plus hours of instruction across sixteen modules, with guest contributions from Monique Ruff-Bell, Carina Bauer, Lance Fensterman, Paul Miller, Aaron Levant, Hervé Sedky, Julius Solaris, and a dozen others.

The Problem He Could Not Let Go

None of this, though, answered the question that had been nagging Giberti since the early 2010s. The events industry had, by his count, two kinds of capital readily available to it. Private equity, which bought shows at scale once they were already throwing off healthy EBITDA, and the shows themselves, which funded their own growth out of operations. What it did not have, what it had never had, as far as he could tell, was strategic venture money for zero-to-one founders. “Strategic money before EVG was zero,” he says, flatly. “Money is a commodity. If you’re a good founder, you’re going to raise money sooner or later. But launching is different.”

He had watched friends try and fail. He had bet on event-tech startups himself, companies trying to crack post-event ROI measurement, that never found their legs. “I invested in some startups that were trying to fix that. Failed.” He says it without defensiveness. The failures were part of the tuition. What they taught him was that money alone does not launch an events business. Founders need the thing Apple gave him in 1993. Validation. The brand endorsement. The stamp that tells the market this founder is worth the room.

He had tried, in fact, to build that kind of stamp before. For much of the 2010s he co-chaired the Event Innovation Battlefield at SISO’s annual leadership conference, a pitch competition built in deliberate imitation of TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield and planted inside the Society of Independent Show Organizers to see whether the format would take. The theft was the point. Silicon Valley had spent fifteen years teaching the world that a panel of investors grilling founders on a stage could anoint a company overnight, and the events industry, which sells the act of anointment for a living, had somehow never thought to do it for its own. So the co-chairs imported the shape. Concierge EventBot won one year; an AI matchmaker made the cut in 2020; the Battlefield did what it was designed to do, which was to give early-stage event-tech founders a stage and borrow the authority of a format the venture world already trusted. It told the industry what was coming. What it could not do was write a check. That was the gap that kept Giberti awake.

EVG was designed to be the stamp. Structured as a nonprofit, it operates on a deal-by-deal SPV model. Applications come in through the website. Members review on a Zoom call. A single-purpose vehicle forms around each approved deal. The check clears with a board of seasoned operators attached to the cap table. The offering is not money, exactly. The offering is the network: Topalian’s playbook of launching shows at Clarion, Weiner’s scale at HLTH, Ruff-Bell’s programming mind at TED, Emslie’s operating chops from the Tarsus years, Gumas’s Questex-era instincts, and Marilú Páez running point as Managing Director. “We will not only provide capital,” Giberti told Skift when EVG launched in May 2024, “but experience, advice, and help as well.” It is the venture arm the events industry should have built in decades ago and did not.

The sneakier point, the one that gets lost in the capital-gap story, is that EVG is itself a gathering. The members do not just review decks; they argue through deals on Zoom, bring each other into companies they would never have found alone, and compound their own network in the process. Which means Giberti has done the thing he has spent thirty years telling every other event founder to do. He built the venture arm using the methodology of the room. EVG is a nonprofit legally, an angel group operationally, a salon culturally, and, most importantly, an experience for the people who join it. Founders leave the pitch with a network. Members leave the meeting with two new friends who also know what they are looking at. It is, in the terms of Giberti’s own book, a community catalyst that happens to write checks. It is the only angel group in the events industry that behaves like an event.

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What He Is Betting On Now

Recently the doors open at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas on PEAK, the Global Home of SportsTech, a three-day conference built by Chad Wilton and Matt Williams under the Profluence Capital banner, with 1,000-plus founders, investors, and sports executives walking the floor. It is exactly the kind of launch Giberti has been betting on all along: a sharply vertical tech show with the three stakeholders he says every successful technology event requires in the room. Founders. Investors and incumbents willing to be disrupted. He is in the building. Profluence and EVG’s orbits overlap; the Profluence Hub sits inside the PEAK Tech Expo. Giberti is also working with RacquetX and the Racquet 360 platform, the padel and pickleball operation that straddles the B2B and B2C boundary he argues is where the next generation of event businesses will actually live.

The thesis he is running on right now, and which he will press on any founder who asks, is the one most of the industry is not ready to hear. “I would rather invest in a 2,000-person show that is relevant than a 20,000-person show that is becoming obsolete.” The loyalty, he says, will collapse the moment a valid competitor appears. He believes the big horizontal trade shows are going to have a hard decade. He believes return, not applause, is the metric that matters.

He also believes the next generation of attendees, his own kids among them, will not skip events. They will demand better ones. More fun, more ROI, less plastic bound for the landfill. The first time one of his kids walked a show, the reaction was, “What a waste.” By the fifth show, the reaction had shifted. “I could find a job here.”

And he believes the next generation of event entrepreneurs is going to come not from the events industry at all, but from the industries events serve. The tech founder who knows everyone in the vertical, who decides a show needs to exist, and who partners with an operator who knows how to actually build it. The person on stage at the Business of Events Masterclass who Giberti is arguing should exist. The person EVG was funded to back.

His bet is that the future of the events industry looks less like Vegas and more like Buenos Aires in 1993. A smaller room. A vouched-for list. A brand the room trusts. A few hundred people who recognize each other across the floor and shake hands like they have been waiting years for the signal.

Giberti has seen this movie before. He starred in it.

The Marco Gibreti Edible Profile from SmallBiteArchitecture.com

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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 but a controlled environment where business outcomes are compressed and accelerated. And Iain Morrison has taken thirty-five years of backstage operational experience and turned it into some of the most honest thinking in the industry about leadership, burnout, and the invisible systems that determine whether a live event holds together or doesn’t.

These long-form profiles are some of my favorite work. Each one takes real time — and each one comes with two things I can’t help myself from adding: a song I pair with the subject, because every great profile has a soundtrack, and an edible profile on my new site SmallBiteArchitecture.com, where I distill the whole story into the sharpest possible mouthful. If you haven’t found that site yet, go look.

Read them. Send them to someone who needs them. And send me recommendations of who else we should include in our Gathering Economy Wisdom Bank- David@gatheringpoint.news.

[Next week: Bryan Rafanelli, Tim Groot, and Femi Oke. On deck later this month Andrew Roby, Terry O’Dwyer, and many more

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 they only hint at what is actually happening. ELX is not a conference circuit or a content platform. It is a 365-day community where the leaders behind the world’s most important corporate gatherings rely on one another for candid advice, strategic perspective, and practical support in shaping how events drive real business outcomes.

Walk into Dreamforce , SAP’s Sapphire, or Workday Rising, IBM Think, Canva Create and the difference is immediate. These are not conferences in any conventional sense. They are controlled environments where a company compresses time, attention, and decision-making into a shared moment. Customers, partners, employees, analysts, and media are all operating within the same structure, responding to the same signals, and reacting to the same narrative. In that setting, deals accelerate, alignment sharpens, and perception shifts in ways that no digital channel can replicate. For a brief period, the company is not describing its strategy. It is executing it.

The scale of this shift is beginning to show up in hard numbers. Corporate events already represent a sector measured in the hundreds of billions and are projected to move toward the $600 to $700 billion range within the next several years. This is not simply about more events. It reflects a deeper reclassification of what events are. They are no longer support functions. They are environments where business outcomes are created.

The Future of Corporate Events?

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Kastner’s authority in this space comes from having built her career from the ground up. Born in England and moved to Canada at eleven, she did not set out to become a central figure in the event industry. She wanted to travel. That instinct led her to study hospitality at Toronto Metropolitan University, where a course on incentive travel reframed her thinking. The realization was simple but powerful. Experiences could drive behavior, and behavior could drive results.

She learned the business by doing the work. Early roles in dmc’s led to agency work, where she advanced by taking on responsibilities before she was formally ready. At Maritz, she helped design and run large-scale programs for clients including Nortel Networks. That clients support team at Maritz grew from a small team into a seventy-seven-person operation managing global incentive travel at scale. The insight she developed during that period continues to define her approach. The value of an experience is not in the moment itself but in what it causes people to do afterward.

At SAP, that understanding expanded into a different category of importance. SAP’s flagship event, Sapphire, functioned as one of the largest pipeline drivers of the year, a moment when relationships advanced and decisions that might otherwise take months were compressed into days. That reality challenges the traditional way events are evaluated. They rarely generate profit through registration or sponsorship alone, but they influence the conditions under which revenue is created in a way few other channels can match.

When Kastner was asked to rethink SAP’s global event portfolio, she encountered the structural challenge that defines corporate events at scale. Multiple flagship programs existed across divisions, each tied to distinct audiences and internal ownership. The task was not to improve individual events but to align them into a coherent system. The barrier was not execution. It was governance. Events are not neutral assets. They are stages, and control of the stage determines who holds influence.

The companies that have moved beyond this fragmentation treat their flagship gatherings differently. They operate them as central platforms rather than departmental properties, aligning leadership around a shared objective. The comparison to the Super Bowl becomes meaningful in this context because it reflects how attention, timing, and execution are concentrated into a single moment that drives everything around it.

Through ELX, Kastner is now shaping how this thinking spreads. The community is intentionally structured to prioritize contribution over access. Membership is by invitation, participation is required, and conversations operate under conditions that allow leaders to share real information without attribution. She personally interviews every member before they enter, looking beyond titles to understand how they think and what they have actually changed inside their organizations. The result is a network where the quality of insight is significantly higher than what is typically shared in public forums.

Kastner runs ELX with the same discipline she applies to event strategy. Members do not pay to join, which removes transactional expectations and shifts the emphasis to contribution. Strategic partners support the model under strict conditions that prevent the environment from turning into a sales platform. Within ELX gatherings, the focus is on interaction, co-creation, and decision-making rather than passive consumption. Leaders compare how events are tied to pipeline, how success is measured, and where resources should be reallocated or eliminated.

At the center of her thinking is a distinction that reframes the entire industry. The events business focuses on logistics and execution. The business of events focuses on outcomes. It begins with defining what an event is meant to achieve and builds the experience to produce that result. Measurement is embedded from the beginning, not added afterward as justification. Kastner emphasizes return on objectives rather than relying solely on traditional ROI models, recognizing that events operate within broader systems and cannot be meaningfully isolated.

This is where her role can be understood as that of an outcome architect. She designs environments where specific business results are more likely to occur and aligns every element of the experience with that intent. The approach connects directly to the broader shift taking place across industries. As digital channels become saturated and attention fragments, events have emerged as one of the few places where a company’s narrative is experienced directly. There is no filter between message and response. The event becomes a test of credibility rather than a projection of it.

The growth of corporate events reflects this reality. Companies are not investing more because events are fashionable. They are investing more because events are one of the few environments where strategy, behavior, and outcome intersect in real time. As more organizations recognize this, these gatherings will continue to move toward the center of how business is conducted.

Nicola Kastner has built her career at that intersection, translating what was once seen as a support function into a strategic capability. Through her work at SAP and now through ELX, she has helped define a role that is becoming increasingly essential.

Not an event planner. An outcome architect.

Events are mechanisms, not moments
If nothing changes because the event happened, it was well executed but strategically irrelevant.

Execution is not the differentiator
Most organizations are good enough at logistics. Very few are clear on what their events are actually supposed to do.

Define success before you build
If measurement starts after the event is designed, you are measuring activity, not impact.

ROI is often misunderstood
Events do not live in isolation. Measure against objectives or risk proving something incomplete.

Trust is the real currency
You can feel immediately when a room is real. Without trust, nothing meaningful moves.

Collaboration is engineered, not assumed
It only works when the environment is designed for it. Otherwise, people stay in their lanes.

Most flagship events are underpowered
Not because of budget or creativity, but because no one owns them at the level required to make them matter.

Knowing what to stop is strategic
Continuing to invest in low-impact events is one of the biggest hidden costs in the industry.

The role is changing
The future is not about managing events. It is about designing outcomes and proving their value.

Bonus Edible Profile

Long before Iain Morrison was advising event organizers about operational leadership or building digital twins of stadium shows, he was a teenager crawling through the ceiling of a school theater in Australia trying to figure out how to hang more lights. The lighting rig wasn’t big enough. That was the problem. So Morrison and a few classmates climbed above the stage, located the beams that supported the roof, and cut new rigging points so they could suspend additional fixtures. They were about fifteen years old, and the goal was simple: make the school dance look bigger. “We just thought the show could be better,” he says now, recalling the moment with the kind of amused disbelief that comes from looking back across decades.

That instinct—to improve what audiences see by fixing what they don’t—would quietly shape the rest of his career.

Recently Morrison has been gaining attention in a very different venue. Over the past year his posts on LinkedIn have begun circulating widely among event professionals around the world. The posts are blunt, sometimes surprisingly personal, and they touch on subjects that the events industry has traditionally avoided discussing in public: burnout, leadership failures, and the stress of delivering high-stakes productions with shrinking timelines and understaffed teams. What might once have been private conversations between colleagues backstage are now appearing in comment threads read by thousands of practitioners who recognize the experiences immediately.

The perspective carries a geographic twist. Morrison built his career in Australia’s live entertainment industry—concert tours, festivals, and large outdoor productions where the choreography of trucks, staging crews, and technical teams is as important as the creative concept. It is a world where hundreds of technicians may work overnight to construct an environment that audiences experience for only a few hours, and where the smallest operational mistake can ripple across an entire production. “People think events are about creativity,” Morrison says. “But they’re really about systems.”

His entry into that world came early. As a teenager he began working alongside older students who had found weekend jobs pushing road cases and loading equipment trucks for touring concerts passing through Brisbane. The pay was modest—about fifty dollars and sometimes a band T-shirt—but the experience exposed him to something that most audiences never see: the enormous operational machinery required to produce live spectacle. Artists such as Pink Floyd or Billy Joel might appear on stage for a single evening, but the infrastructure supporting those performances could involve dozens of trucks, towering lighting rigs, and crews moving equipment through venues with carefully timed precision. While audiences focused on the music, Morrison found himself watching the technicians who quietly solved problems and kept the entire machine moving.

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That fascination became a career. Over the next three decades he worked across the operational core of the live events industry, helping deliver concerts, festivals, and large-scale productions where thousands of moving parts must align under intense time pressure. For audiences the experience appears effortless. The lights rise, the performers arrive, and the show unfolds as if by magic. Behind the scenes the reality is far more intricate. Equipment must arrive in the correct order, staging crews must coordinate with lighting teams, and traffic plans must accommodate dozens of trucks entering and leaving venues within narrow windows of time. Leadership in this environment is rarely about dramatic gestures. It is about quiet coordination and the ability to anticipate problems before they appear.

For years Morrison says he misunderstood what leadership actually meant in that environment. Like many people in the industry, he assumed leadership meant telling people where to be and what to do. The structure of the business reinforces that assumption. Event crews assemble quickly for individual projects and disperse just as quickly afterward, leaving little opportunity for mentorship or systematic training. Knowledge moves through the industry unevenly, often passed along through experience rather than formal frameworks. “I struggled with leadership for years,” Morrison says. “I thought leadership meant telling people where to be and what to do.”

The turning point arrived unexpectedly. A few years ago he wrote a post online titled “The Dirty Truth About Burnout in Events,” describing the exhaustion many professionals experience behind the scenes of successful productions. He expected the message to attract modest attention. Instead it spread rapidly through the event community, generating thousands of reactions and comments from practitioners who described similar experiences. “Everyone is experiencing it,” Morrison says now. “Or they have experienced it.”

The timing mattered. The pandemic had devastated the live events sector, shutting down productions around the world almost overnight. When events returned, the pace accelerated dramatically. Planning timelines shortened, staffing levels shrank, and clients grew accustomed to making decisions later in the process, leaving organizers to execute increasingly complicated productions under compressed schedules. “We do a lot of things in much shorter timelines now,” Morrison explains. “That pressure never really went away after COVID.”

Morrison is quick to point out that he is not the only voice pushing the industry to confront these issues. Advocates such as Janice Cardinale and the Event Minds Matter initiative have been working to bring mental health and psychological safety into the center of the industry’s leadership conversation. Cardinale argues that the events ecosystem must move beyond treating mental health as an HR concern and instead address the systemic pressures that create stress in the first place. Emotional intelligence and psychological awareness, she believes, are not traits people simply possess; they are skills that must be learned and practiced if organizations expect their teams to function sustainably.

During our conversation Morrison returns repeatedly to a phrase that captures what he sees as one of the industry’s most dangerous habits. “Events rely on single points of failure in the human chain,” he says. In industries such as construction or aviation, large projects are designed with redundancy. Systems assume individuals may become unavailable and ensure others can step in. Live events often operate differently. A single producer may hold the entire operational plan in their head. A technical director may be the only person who fully understands the staging sequence. A show caller might coordinate every cue during a performance. When one of those people becomes unavailable—through illness, exhaustion, or simple error—the entire structure can wobble.

The personalities drawn to the industry also play a role. The work rewards speed, improvisation, and the ability to juggle multiple problems simultaneously. Morrison acknowledges this with disarming candor. “I have ADHD,” he says casually, explaining that he tends to skim long documents rather than read them line by line. The remark lands with a kind of quiet familiarity to anyone who has spent time backstage at a large event. The industry often attracts people whose minds operate comfortably in motion—people who can pivot quickly, solve problems under pressure, and somehow feel energized rather than overwhelmed when the stakes rise. In calmer professions those traits might feel disruptive. In live production they often become an advantage.

Seeking a clearer framework for leadership, Morrison began studying models outside the events industry, eventually finding inspiration in the operational principles used by U.S. Navy SEAL teams, particularly those described in Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s book Extreme Ownership. The comparison might seem dramatic, but the underlying challenge—coordinating complex teams under pressure where mistakes are immediately visible—felt surprisingly relevant to someone responsible for large live productions. The SEAL framework emphasizes decentralized command, pushing decision-making authority down through the team so responsibility does not rest on a single individual. In practice that means technicians arrive with solutions rather than problems and departments work together rather than operating as isolated units.

Another principle Morrison often cites is “cover and move,” which encourages teams to support one another as they advance through difficult environments. In the context of live events the terrain is logistical rather than physical, but the principle translates cleanly. Lighting cannot function independently of staging, staging cannot operate without rigging, and audio systems depend on coordination across the entire technical structure. Departments that treat problems as belonging to someone else inevitably slow the entire production. When teams understand that every department shares responsibility for the success of the event, coordination becomes smoother and pressure spreads more evenly across the group.

For Morrison the attraction of these ideas lies in their simplicity. Events rarely unfold exactly as planned. Weather shifts, equipment arrives late, and small mistakes can ripple through an entire schedule. In those moments elaborate management theory offers little help. Clear systems and shared responsibility matter far more, which is why Morrison often repeats a phrase that has become shorthand for his philosophy: a schedule, he says, is leadership on paper.

Two years ago he stepped away from direct event delivery to pursue a new idea shaped by decades of backstage experience. One of the most common problems he had encountered involved imagination. Clients reviewing technical drawings or floor plans often struggled to visualize how an event would actually look once constructed. His company now builds digital twins—immersive three-dimensional models that allow producers, sponsors, and executives to walk through an event months before construction begins. Instead of interpreting technical drawings, stakeholders can stand virtually inside the environment and understand immediately how staging, sightlines, and hospitality structures will shape the experience.

Despite working with advanced visualization technology, Morrison remains skeptical that digital tools will ever replace the fundamental reason events exist. “If the metaverse was really going to take off in events,” he says, “nobody would have come back after COVID.” Live events persist for a simple reason: people still want to gather.

For those outside the profession, live events often appear glamorous. Inside the industry the stakes feel very different. When a gathering succeeds, thousands of people share a moment of excitement or connection. When something goes wrong, the failure happens in public. Yet every event begins the same way. The doors open, the audience enters, and whatever happens next unfolds in real time.

After thirty-five years behind the scenes, Morrison still believes the magic of events lies not in the spectacle audiences see but in the invisible architecture that makes the spectacle possible. When those systems function well the audience never notices them at all, which, in Morrison’s view, is precisely how it should be.

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Iian Morrison Edible Profile from SmallBiteArchitecture.com

• Most Events Are Built Blind
  Let’s be honest: too many planners are still working off PDFs and hope. If you can’t walk your event before it exists, you’re guessing—and guessing is expensive.

• 2D Thinking Is the Silent Killer
  Flat diagrams produce flat experiences. The industry’s addiction to floor plans is why so many events feel generic, disjointed, and forgettable.

• Production Shouldn’t Be a Fire Drill
  If your best ideas happen on-site at 2 a.m., something went wrong upstream. Great events are won in planning, not saved in crisis.

• You’re Not Designing Space—You’re Designing Behavior
  Where people stop, gather, hesitate, or leave is not random. If you didn’t model it, you didn’t design it.

• The Real ROI Is Fewer Surprises
  Everyone talks about “wow moments.” Morrison’s work is about eliminating “oh no moments.” That’s where the real money is.

• Technology Isn’t the Future—Avoiding It Is the Risk
  This isn’t about being cutting-edge. It’s about not being left behind. The gap between visualized events and guessed events will only widen.

• Crew Experience Is a Leading Indicator, Not an Afterthought
  If your crew is strained, your event is fragile. Sustainable production is not kindness—it’s performance strategy.

• Global Scale Demands Pre-Visualization Discipline
  As events stretch across borders and cultures, improvisation doesn’t scale. Visualization is becoming the operating system of serious global events.

• If You Can’t Show It, You Can’t Sell It
  Clients don’t buy concepts—they buy clarity. The ability to see the event is becoming the new pitch deck.

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, beauty, and life sciences, sectors that increasingly define what is now described as the experience economy, but his influence extends beyond the boundaries of his own company. Leadership in this business circulates in a relatively small orbit, passing informally between the executives who run the world’s largest exhibition platforms, and he has been part of that rotation long enough to understand both its strengths and its blind spots. More unusually, he is the only executive to have served two consecutive terms as chairman of Society of Independent Show Organizers (SISO), a distinction that reflects not just tenure but trust, the willingness of independent operators to place the same person in the role twice.

It was during that second term, within the CEO program he helped shape, that a moment occurred which has stayed with him in a way that feels disproportionate to its scale. The session itself was straightforward: three corporate buyers, IBM, Danaher, Siemens, speaking directly about how they evaluate events, how they allocate budgets, and how those expectations are shifting. It was moderated by Nicola Kastner, the CEO Event Leaders Exchange (ELX) and the former VP of Global Event Marketing Strategy at SAP. ELX is a newly formed organization representing some of the most influential corporate event leaders in the world, a group that is beginning to exert its own gravitational pull on where event dollars go. The conversation was clear, practical, and unusually candid, the demand side of the market explaining itself without translation. Miller would later call it “30 minutes of pure gold.” What stayed with him, however, was not just what was said, but what happened around it. The room was half empty. Competitors had stepped out, drifting toward more familiar conversations, the rituals of networking that feel productive even when they are not. The signals were there, unfiltered, and much of the system chose not to listen.

That moment lingers because it reveals something deeper than a missed session. It exposes a tension at the heart of the industry: the difference between presenting information and understanding how it actually moves. For much of its history, the business he grew up in—Reed, CMP, the early years of UBM was built on a model of controlled amplification. Editors decided what mattered. Publishers controlled distribution. Audiences received. Information moved in a straight line, from source to audience, measured by reach and frequency.

It was a megaphone.

Events never worked that way. They did not broadcast. They convened. Information moved laterally, not linearly, passing between people, shaped by conversation, tested through reaction, altered by context. Its value was not in how clearly it was delivered, but in how it held up when it circulated. What emerged, almost unintentionally, was a different kind of system, one in which information gained meaning not from authority but from interaction.

What changed was not just the mechanics of distribution, but the posture of the people inside the system. The media world he had been trained in carried, at times, a quiet arrogance, a belief that authority flowed from expertise and position, that the audience would receive what was presented without challenge. Events disrupted that dynamic in ways that were not immediately obvious. They forced proximity. They removed the distance that allowed ideas to be delivered without resistance.

Editors who had been comfortable behind the page or the screen found themselves in front of audiences that could respond in real time. Some adapted. Others did not. Video made that divide even more visible, exposing who could engage and who could not. The effect was not a wholesale democratization, but something more precise. Authority became contingent. It had to hold up in the room.

He did not set out to change how information moves. He was trying to run businesses inside a system that was beginning to fail. The transition from print to digital, from controlled distribution to fragmented attention, was not experienced as a theory but as a series of operational problems that refused to resolve cleanly. And yet, in navigating those problems seeing where the model held, where it broke, and where something new was beginning to take shape, he became, almost by necessity, one of the stewards of that shift. Not because he designed it, but because he learned, earlier than most, how to read it.

The instinct to read systems, to notice when something is slightly off, does not come from the environments he now operates in. It comes from a place that, on the surface, has very little to do with global exhibitions. He grew up in Lincolnshire, a farming region in England that he describes, with characteristic understatement, as “the Iowa of England.” His family were farm laborers, not landowners, people whose relationship to the land was defined by necessity. His parents did not have running water in their home in the early 1960s. What remains with him is not the hardship itself but the structure of it, the understanding that work is not optional and that systems depend on every part functioning. He remembers picking strawberries and potatoes, the pace of it, the physical demand, the absence of illusion. He remembers what happened when someone dropped a crate of fruit, how quickly the others moved to pick it up, not because they were told to, but because they understood the consequence of not doing so.

That early exposure to interdependence was reinforced in other ways. During his college years, he worked in a pet food factory alongside miners displaced during the Thatcher era, men who brought with them a sense of camaraderie forged under pressure. The work was difficult, often unpleasant, but it carried the same lesson: systems hold because people hold them, and people hold them because they understand what is at stake. He was the first in his family to go to university, navigating a transition into environments shaped by different expectations and signals, surrounded by peers from more affluent backgrounds and carrying a version of imposter syndrome that did not disappear but became something he learned to manage. What shifted that dynamic was not academic success but something less expected: his time as the singer in a punk rock band, booking venues above pubs, negotiating with skeptical landlords, assembling audiences without infrastructure. The ethos of that world that no one is inherently better than you provided a counterweight to the hierarchies he was encountering elsewhere.

His entry into the professional world was unplanned. He wanted to work in radio or sports broadcasting and instead found himself in recruitment sales at Reed Business Information, dialing for dollars, learning through repetition how to engage with customers. Reed functioned as a training ground, instilling a discipline around listening, trust, and the relationship between information and action. It was there that an early moment shaped both his trajectory and his philosophy of leadership. Late one evening, he was still in the office, working through a struggling product that had been handed to him, when the CEO happened to walk past, stopped, and asked what he was doing. The exchange was brief, but it led to a conversation the following day that placed him on the radar of senior leadership. He has returned to that moment often, not because it flatters him, but because it revealed something about how talent is recognized in practice. It is not always the person who is most visible or most vocal, but the one who is still in the room, paying attention, trying to understand a problem without being asked.

That belief has stayed with him. He looks for people the same way—through observation rather than self-promotion, by watching how they behave when they think no one is watching, by noticing who leans into the work and who waits to be directed. It is a quiet form of talent recognition, one that resists the more performative aspects of corporate life, and it shapes how he builds teams.

There is a period he returns to more than once, not because it was the most successful stretch of his career, but because it forced him to confront how quickly a model can unravel while the people inside it are still debating what it means. In the early digital era, working in semiconductor and engineering media, he was operating inside one of the most advanced technology environments in the world. They were not late to change. They were writing about artificial intelligence seriously in 2006, mapping its implications before it became mainstream.

And still, they got caught.

Not because they ignored technology, but because they misinterpreted it. Inside the organization, the conversation became inward, focused on platforms, formats, and transition strategies. Leaders either deferred to specialists or embraced new tools without sufficient skepticism. What slipped was the external signal—what customers were actually doing. “We were talking about ourselves,” he says, and the phrasing carries the weight of experience.

That lesson has not faded, and it shapes how he sees the present moment. Artificial intelligence is being adopted rapidly, discussed constantly, and understood unevenly. The risk is not simply resistance but misalignment, building systems that appear advanced but are not anchored in real customer need. For him, the requirement is not technical fluency but judgment, the ability to interpret innovation rather than outsource decisions to it.

His first encounter with events came through acquisition, when CMP became part of UBM and he found himself responsible for a portfolio that included live shows. Coming from a media background, he and his colleagues initially dismissed events as secondary. That perception shifted as the economics of media changed and events revealed something content could not: the physical manifestation of a community. From that came an insight that would shape his later work, that content and events are interconnected parts of a system, one attracting attention, the other concentrating it.

At Questex, the challenge was fragmentation, a collection of businesses operating without a shared center. His response was to simplify and align, organizing the company around sectors and a unifying principle of experience, understood as intention rather than spectacle. Every interaction became part of the product, from the moment a customer entered the space to the moment they left it, not as an afterthought but as a designed element of the system.

What defines him in practice is not how he describes the business but how he engages with it. He moves through events as an observer and participant, treating them as environments where signals can be read in real time. “A dense focus group,” he calls it, though what he is doing is closer to immersion. He sits with operations teams, listens to sales conversations, watches how leaders show up, whether they are present or removed, believing that leadership in this context requires something more than oversight. It requires hosting. It requires noticing who is standing alone and bringing them into the room, understanding that an event is only as strong as the connections it enables.

If given the freedom to invest, he would not build a single dominant event but strengthen the infrastructure around them, particularly the fragmented technologies that define the current landscape. He sees opportunity in connecting the lifecycle of participation, creating continuity where there is currently disconnection, stitching together the experience from first interaction through follow-up.

The pressures on the model are increasing. The convergence of B2B and consumer experiences is reshaping expectations without eliminating the need for clear transactional value. Corporate-owned events are redirecting attention and resources toward platforms that operate with a different kind of alignment and control, environments that function as expressions of identity as much as marketplaces.

The risk is not that events disappear. The demand for gathering, for presence, for shared experience is not going away. What is less certain is who retains the authority to convene. That authority has moved before. It moved from media to marketplaces when broadcast lost its grip on attention. It can move again.

What determines that shift is not scale or production quality, but proximity to the signal. The organizations that stay closest to their customers, that listen with enough discipline to understand not just what is being said but what is changing, are the ones that retain the right to convene. Those that drift inward, that optimize their systems without recalibrating against the outside world, risk something quieter but more consequential than decline.

They risk becoming irrelevant to the decision.

In that sense, corporate-owned events are not so much a threat as an indicator. They are what happens when organizations decide to control their own information flow, to build environments that align directly with their customers without mediation. They are not replacing the industry. They are revealing what it looks like when the center of gravity shifts.

And then, at the end, he offers a simpler explanation. His daughters, both in their twenties, question the premise of his work with a directness that cuts through the language of the industry. Why go to an event, they ask, when the same information can be accessed remotely? Why travel, why gather, why invest the time?

He answers with a question.

Why go to a Taylor Swift concert instead of watching it on television?

Because you want to be there.

Because something happens in that room that does not translate through a screen.

For all the systems he has built and the structures he has navigated, that remains the clearest articulation of what he is working toward. The challenge is not to explain it.

It is to deserve it.

The Infographic of Paul Miller’s Vision for the Experience Economy

1. Media Creates Authority. Events Test It.

What gets published isn’t what matters. What holds up in the room does.

2. The System Breaks When It Talks to Itself

You lose relevance the moment you stop listening to customers and start listening only to yourself.

3. Don’t Outsource Judgment to Technology

New tools don’t fix bad decisions. Leaders fail when they stop interpreting and start delegating thinking.

4. Stay Close to What Customers Actually Do

Behavior tells the truth. Everything else is commentary.

5. Walk the Floor

The real data isn’t in reports—it’s in how people act when no one is performing.

6. You Don’t Lose It All at Once

You lose it slowly by missing small shifts until they become big ones.

7. The Right to Convene Can Shift

If you stop listening, someone closer to the customer will take your place.

The Bonus:

Check

Personalization: Paul Miller’s Edible Profile from SmallbiteActhitecture.com

The Story in Song

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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Adrian Segar doesn’t wear a headset or walk around with a clipboard. He doesn’t run a global events agency. He doesn’t even love being on stage. But he might be the single most influential thinker in the world of participatory gatherings—and for over three decades, he’s been quietly shaping a different kind of future for conferences, one where connection isn’t an accident but a design feature.

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In an era dominated by spectacle and stagecraft, Segar offers something radical: a gathering model rooted in emotional transformation. His belief? People don’t change because of PowerPoints. They change because of emotional experience. They change when they feel seen, heard, connected—when something stirs inside them, even if they can’t rationalize it.

Throughout our interview, I kept circling back to the same question: How does that emotional spark actually become action? Segar didn’t flinch. “It’s not rational,” he said. “We act when something shifts inside. That’s what makes us choose.”

His own life proves the point. After earning a PhD in particle physics and conducting cutting-edge research at CERN, Segar veered off course—not for data, but for love. He woke up one morning in rural Vermont and simply knew he needed to live there. That gut feeling upended his trajectory—and he followed it.

Later, when life delivered emotional upheaval at home—when he and his wife were raising adopted twins and their children went through a period of deep struggle—Segar again responded with curiosity, not control. He enrolled in emotional growth workshops at the school where one of his children was placed, and eventually began staffing them. These weren’t lectures; they involved intense small-group work. “In three days, the people in our group knew each other more deeply than probably anyone else in their lives.

That experience transformed him. He saw firsthand how strangers could enter a room guarded and leave changed—if the process was right. Not because of charisma, but because of emotional architecture. The kind facilitators build.

Segar began to incorporate what he learned into his own events. He designed environments where people felt safe enough to speak. He used simple techniques like pair-share and fishbowls, but more importantly, he tuned the emotional conditions of the room. His goals wasn’t weren’t simply engagement. They were intimate connection and top-of-mind learning, leading to transformation.

The neuroscience supports this. Emotional experiences trigger the amygdala, activating the limbic system and encoding memory more deeply than rational input. When a person has an insight and feels safe and seen, the learning sticks. The behavior shifts. The action follows.

“I’m not a guru,” Segar insists. “I don’t want people looking at me. I want them looking at each other.”

His events aren’t performance. They’re immersion. And if you’ve ever sat in one—felt that moment where the air shifted, where someone across from you said exactly what you didn’t know you needed to hear—you know what he’s doing. He’s laying emotional tracks so your next move isn’t just logical. It’s human.

In Segar’s world, the facilitator is the architect of action. Not because they tell you what to do, but because they create the conditions where you decide for yourself.

And that’s why we’re telling this story. Because the people who guide our most important rooms—our moments of shift—deserve to be known.

What does it actually look like when Adrian Segar guides a room?

It doesn’t start with a panel or a podium. It starts with agreements that offer group freedoms and safety. In Segar’s hands, a room is not a blank space. It’s an emotional instrument, tuned through technique.

He continues with his ‘Three Questions’—an unassuming but potent method to elicit trust. Participants share who they are, what they would love to have happen while they’re together, and what they’ve done or know that might help others. Suddenly the room isn’t anonymous—it’s a shared resource.

From there, Segar might deploy the ‘Fishbowl’—a dynamic conversational format where a small group discusses a topic while others observe. Anyone can tap in, but no one dominates. The structure removes performance pressure while surfacing authentic voices.

When problems arise, they go to the ‘Solution Room.’ There, each person brings a challenge to a group of peers who’ve pledged to listen, reflect, and respond—without fixing. It’s a therapy session disguised as strategy. Participants often leave stunned: by how seen they felt, and how generous others could be.

Other tools—like ‘Group Spectives’ (collective reflection), ‘Body Polling’ (expressing positions physically in a room), and ‘Silent Affinity Clusters’ (mapping out common needs and offers)—might follow. But none are used for novelty. They are surgical. Chosen with care.

As one participant described it: “He made a room of 100 strangers feel like collaborators. And I didn’t realize until later: I wasn’t just attending. I was leading.”

This is the deeper truth of Segar’s method. It’s not just about interaction. It’s about restoring agency. Giving people a reason—and a structure—to speak, act, decide.

The result? Rooms that remember themselves. And people who walk out ready to do something they hadn’t even known they were there to do.

Adrian Segar: Quick Access to Books & Resources

📘 Conferences That Work — The foundational guide to participant-led event design. Buy

📗 Event Crowdsourcing — How to build an agenda from the ground up, us

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ing the crowd. Buy

📙 The Power of Participation — Deep dive into techniques like fishbowls, solution rooms, and Group Spectives.

🌐 Website & Blog — Essays, tools, updates.

🎙️ Podcasts — Leading Learning | Events Demystified

🐘 Mastodon — @ASegar |

Editor’s Note:The festival side of the live world is often underestimated. At GatheringPoint.News, we’re mapping how it all connects—festivals, conferences, fandom, culture—as the industry morphs into something new. This story is a keystone in that evolving map.

The woman at the center of this story never auditioned for the role. Laurie Kirby grew up on the New Jersey coast, summers spent in a salty blur of swimming and boogie boards, and later in Montclair’s high-school theater, where she first learned to hold a room. “My life has been like a summer camp,” she told me, “sometimes a very tough summer camp.” She had a scholarship to Northwestern’s theater school but, after her parents’ divorce, changed course: “I did pre-law and went on to law school” at Rutgers, where she captained the lacrosse team—then spent two decades as a lawyer before crossing the country and crossing the aisle into a different kind of stage: the festival world.

That résumé isn’t folklore. Kirby helped launch the Legends Tour (now The Legends of the LPGA), served as general counsel to the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, and—after a board stint turned executive post at the Newport International Film Festival—fell hard for the rhythm of programming, curation, and civic choreography. “I always loved the arts,” she said. “What I realized after running several festivals was how dysfunctional, disorganized, and isolated they were.” So in 2015, she did the obvious thing no one had done at scale: she built a convening for the conveners. FestForums wouldn’t be a trade show pretending to be a community; it would be a community with standards—panels that go deeper than boilerplate, a small but serious marketplace, and a curatorial spine that treats festivals as engines of culture and commerce.

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Santa Barbara became the house style. The flagship unfolds at the Mar Monte Hotel across from East Beach—ocean light, Spanish-Revival bones, a cadence that makes the hallways as valuable as the rooms. Kirby laughs at any suggestion that it’s a boondoggle. “Let’s make this salon-like,” she told me of her original brief. “Put it at the ocean… I humanized it. I brought in women, people of color, voices you weren’t hearing.” When she tried screening films on site, she dropped it—“people really don’t want to go sit and watch films… they’d rather go listen to live music.” That’s the FestForums mood: summer-camp energy with a grad-seminar spine, a place to exhale and then get exacting about the work.

And the crowd? It isn’t a sea of badges for optics. It’s the right five or six hundred: programmers, buyers, bookers, curators, city negotiators, technical directors—the upstream hands that actually move a lineup or a budget line. “We always get in the mid-nineties on satisfaction,” Kirby told me. “I do it for the young people… they inspire me more than I inspire them.” Coverage of the most recent edition captured the pacing and texture—570 attendees, 64 speakers, 24 exhibitors—and the sense that it’s less conference than brain trust (Grateful Web). You could feel the town in it, too: Santa Barbara Independent framed it as a beach-adjacent salon; KEYT caught the opening-night uplift from world-champ surfer Shaun Tomson.

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If you want the headline names, sure: she put actor Matthew Modine onstage and let Tomson open with purpose. But watch the flow of influence. A year out from Glastonbury, an Isle of Wight veteran swaps rain-plan notes with Summerfest’s chief; a Sundance or Tribeca programmer trades discovery stories with a Cannes buyer; the people behind ESSENCE Festival and NYC/South Beach Wine & Food compare sponsor math with Hawai‘i Food & Wine’s Denise Yamaguchi; Kevin Lyman of Warped Tour talks next-gen safety with a municipal ops chief; Digital Domain co-founder Scott Ross frames how AI will hit production. That’s the business of FestForums: not spectacle, consequence. It’s a room full of wholesalers of culture—the programmers, buyers, bookers, and curators who decide what the rest of us will call the scene six months later. FestForums is where they compare notes before the world gets the goods.

Kirby is explicit about the why. In public she’s praised the niche festivals that thrive by knowing their tribes and warned that you can’t “commoditize” the form; as she told Pollstar, smaller festivals with a point of view are often the smarter bet. In our conversation she made the stakes personal. “In the film festival market alone, 70% of all film festivals fail in the first year… you’d better have a sturdy stomach,” she said. “It’s expensive. There’s a lot of liability. You probably won’t make any money for at least the first three years.” As for the myth that the festival market is a perpetual boom: “That’s always the question—who’s in the audience?” Shared risk with artists, smart pricing, and real community—those are the levers, not wishful thinking.

If the last decade was about persuading the wider world that festivals mattered, the new act is about who gets to lead them. Kirby is frank about that, too. The 2025 program, she said, was her answer to the rolling backlash against DEI. “What’s my little superpower?” she asked. “To lift up those whose voices aren’t being heard but are doing amazing things.” She curated a Native American woman building a forward-looking arts festival, a West African founder with a global playbook, a salute to women who have been holding entire ecosystems together in plain sight. “Not everyone likes it,” she said. “If they don’t want to come, they don’t have to.”

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FestForums is not a place you attend to be seen; it’s where you go to see—to take in the full chain of custody, from a curator’s spreadsheet to a city’s police scanner to the artist who makes the night worth it. That clarity has turned a boutique convening into a quiet metronome for the business. And it’s coming back: February 11–13, 2026, again at Santa Barbara’s Mar Monte Hotel (FestForums: Attend; Humanitix listing). Expect more mentorship woven into the days, more cross-discipline collisions at night, and a closing ritual Kirby delights in describing: “We always do a champagne toast at the very end,” she said. “Before that, get everybody in the room and say, give us the one thing you’re taking home—and we’ll capture it with AI so you can see the pattern in seconds.” The certainty isn’t the gimmick; it’s the aim. Kirby will keep building a room where festivals take themselves seriously—where the wholesalers of culture meet before culture hits the shelves.

Laurie Kirby Wisdom Bank: Takeaways

• Design for consequence, not spectacle. The best festivals leave measurable ripples—policy, partnerships, bookings—not just pretty reels.

• Know your tribe or lose your plot. Niche festivals win when they program for identity over scale.

• You can’t out-market a bad audience fit. The first question is still “Who’s in the room?”—for fans, partners, and sponsors.

• Share the risk, share the reward. Sustainable deals balance artist fees, promoter margins, and audience value.

• Make the hallways count. Curate the off-stage collisions—mentoring labs, drill-downs, salons—where the real work happens.

• Elevate the wholesalers of culture. Give programmers, buyers, and city partners a room to compare notes before the world gets the goods.

• Keep the ritual. A clear close—like a collective “one big takeaway”—turns talk into intent and intent into action.

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Every time I talk to Dahlia El Gazzar, I learn something new. Not in a surface-level tech demo kind of way, but in a slow-burn, rearrange-your-brain way. One of the most enduring moments happened curbside in New York over a $25 hot dog. We were talking about relevance—who it’s for, who it slips away from, and how you hold onto it—and she dropped a single word: Perennials.

She didn’t say Gen Z. She didn’t say Millennials. She said Perennials. The endlessly curious. The people who keep blooming, year after year, no matter what trends come and go. That word hit like a thesis. It’s been echoing ever since.

I sat with it while writing this piece—trying to make sense of what ties Dahlia’s story together. She’s done the camel races. She’s run the tech gauntlet. She’s counseled the doubters, sparred with the visionaries, and outlasted half the platforms we used to call the future. And what I landed on is this:

Dahlia isn’t just a strategist. She’s not a futurist. She is the High Priestess of Curiosity and Emotional Disruption.

She doesn’t build the altar. She shakes the room, lights the fire, and makes people feel again.

Her story starts, fittingly, in Egypt. As a child, she was decoding hieroglyphics in second grade—not as part of a tourism packet, but because her teachers believed knowledge didn’t live inside textbooks. “Everything wasn’t in the pages,” she told me. “It was in people, in stories, in streets.” She was educated in a swirl of international classmates and color-coded learning tribes—her class had names like “Blue Giraffes.” She still remembers the feeling of sitting cross-legged in a circle, trying to convince the skeptics that maybe, just maybe, there could be such a thing as a blue giraffe.

That tension—the dreamer facing the naysayer—has become the stage she works from to this day.

In high school, Dahlia was elected president of her class—and her vice president? None other than Hervé Sedky, who would go on to become CEO of Emerald. Their yearbook may not have predicted it, but that pairing turned out to be prophetic: two natural organizers, future industry leaders, learning how to lead side-by-side before either of them knew the stakes. It was an early preview of her talent for leadership, facilitation, and vision. The girl who once rallied classmates around imaginary giraffes now rallied them around real ideas—and it stuck.

After college, she landed a job at a Red Sea resort. The GM gave her a single mandate: “Make people happy. And make money.” So she stole mattress pads off pool loungers, trucked them into the desert under a full moon, and charged tourists $500 a night to sleep under the stars. When diving tours were canceled on New Year’s Day, she negotiated with Bedouins to host a camel race instead. No permits. No deck. No “event bible.” Just intuition, empathy, and storytelling.

That, it turns out, was the prototype. Long before anyone used terms like “experience architect,” Dahlia was building joy out of necessity—and monetizing it through instinct.

Her journey took her from Egypt to Puma to Passkey to OnPeak, where she became the tech world’s translator-in-chief.

Her stint at Puma—landed on a dare—thrust her into the deep end of global marketing and event production. It was exciting, but exhausting. The pace didn’t match the life she wanted to build. She handed in her resignation just before the Sydney Olympics.

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At Passkey and OnPeak, Dahlia found her lane. These weren’t jobs, they were turning points. While others pushed product, Dahlia translated need. She stepped into the silences that came with clunky systems and indecipherable UX. She saw friction as a design flaw, not a client issue. And she turned tech into something human again. Her job wasn’t to pitch software. It was to protect the vision—and the people holding it.. It was to protect the vision—and the people holding it.

You can draw a straight line from the dunes to the main stage of IMEX. Her ethos never changed, only the canvas. She still walks into rooms that are stuck and asks, “Why this way?” She still builds systems around emotional logic, not mechanical efficiency. And she still treats curiosity like a full-body sport.

Ask her about her prep process for an event—of which she attends and advises on dozens a year—and she won’t start with topic or slides. She’ll start with emotional climate. “I scan the room before I scan the agenda,” she says. “Where are the blockers? What’s the real fear under the surface?” She doesn’t write speeches; she codes vibes.

She once described a college orientation at Ole Miss as a masterclass in experience design. Not because of a killer app or clever format, but because the university opened with stories. Twenty-five students sharing why they chose the school. Parents weeping in the audience. A chant, a creed, a moment of belonging.

“We start too many conferences in the dark with 5,000 people checking email,” she said. “What if we started with emotional permission to be part of something?”

It’s a question I keep thinking about.

Like all great advisors, Dahlia is also a bit of a contrarian. The tools she introduces—Heygen, Comet, Emergent, NotebookLM—are never the point. She was using Prezi before PowerPoint got nervous. She was on Gamma before most planners could pronounce it. But the moment a tool becomes a cliché, she moves on.

“People say, ‘Oh, that looks like a Gamma deck,’ and suddenly it loses its magic,” she said. “You have to personalize or be replaced.”

It’s not trend-chasing. It’s taste maintenance. Relevance is an editorial job.

She believes most “innovation” in our industry dies in the hands of passive acceptance. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s flat. If you’re not emotionally charged about what you’re delivering, why should anyone else be?

That’s Dahlia’s superpower. She’s emotionally charged. Every room she enters becomes a temperature shift. She’s the match, not the flame. The one who asks, “Why this way?” and sticks around to see what breaks when you push.

So no, she doesn’t need a badge that says strategist or innovator or consultant.

She’s something else.

Today, Dahlia leads DAHLIA+Agency, a strategy and event tech consultancy that acts as an embedded partner for event professionals, tech platforms, and organizations navigating transformation. Her work is equal parts translator, advisor, and instigator—helping clients break through indecision, decode new tools, and build emotional intelligence into everything from run-of-show to revenue modeling.

She’s the High Priestess of Curiosity and Emotional Disruption—and in a sea of AI-fueled sameness, she’s the human upgrade we didn’t know we needed.

And because Dahlia doesn’t wait for permission to rethink things—she builds the platform herself. That’s why she created the Ruckusmaker Awards: a recognition designed to spotlight the rule benders, format breakers, and friction lovers who move the event industry forward—not by following the plan, but by rewriting it.

If you know someone like that—someone who makes good trouble, turns tension into transformation, or moves your team from safe to brave—nominate them. It takes ten minutes. The deadline is September 29, 2025, and winners will be announced at #IMEX on the Tech Stage.

Thanks to the award partner Evessio, and to the judges who believe disruption is worth celebrating: Kathryn Frankson, Jay Schwedelson, Adam Parry, Liz Irving, Cecilia Lavin, Melissa Cohen—and yes, me.

If Dahlia taught us anything, it’s that true innovation doesn’t announce itself. It asks better questions.

And sometimes, it throws a little ruckus.

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The Wisdom Bank: Dahlia’s Operating Code

You can build a tech stack. Or you can build a life. Dahlia chooses the latter—and it shows. Here’s what stays with you after a conversation with her:

• Curiosity isn’t optional. It’s a discipline.

• Every no is fear. Name it and it starts to lose power.

• Templates kill magic. Personalize or be replaced.

• Belonging doesn’t come from badges. It comes from stories.

• Design the emotional arc before you design the agenda.

• Your event starts before the first keynote. And it lasts longer if you make people feel something.

• And finally: Blue giraffes are real. If you believe hard enough—and explain them well.