Event Industry Leaders You Should Know: Tim Groot, Femi Oke, Andrew Roby and Marco Giberti
the matchmaker, The room-runner, the matchmaker, the architect of belonging. and the founder of founders
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.