UnSummitting with Our Championship Companies at Fenway Park
I recently had the amazing opportunity to help plan and attend our firm’s annual Founder and CEO UnSummit at historic Fenway Park. Not only was it one of my first large events since joining the Flybridge team, but it was an amazing opportunity to meet the incredible group of entrepreneurs the firm has backed over the years (and who I can’t wait to work with in my new role as community manager). Over 70 current and previous CEOs and Founders came together for a day of interactive learning, fireside chats with some of today’s most valuable thought leaders, including Beth Comstock of GE and John Reid-Dodick of WeWork, and of course, we managed to have some fun!
So, why an UnSummit and how does it work? In previous events we’ve done, the feedback the team received was that our Founders and CEOs cared less about hearing from outside speakers and more about talking with and learning from one another. As we were planning this event, we reached back out to our Founders and CEO family and asked for specific topics they wanted to cover to help us create the agenda. The feedback we got was great. We found out that people want to learn about real things that help them develop their business. This helped us curate breakout sessions designed to do just that.
Our CEOs and founders came together in these small, intimate sessions to talk product development, sales and marketing, how to create a winning culture, hiring talent — you name it, we covered it! The sessions were facilitated by some of today’s most influential CEOs and founders, like Dev Ittycheria President and CEO of MongoDB, Katie Burke, VP of Culture and Experience at Hubspot, and David Politis, Founder and CEO at BetterCloud. In short, it was a jam packed day full of learning, collaboration, and networking.
Our UnSummit went on without a hitch and the feedback from our CEOs and Founders was so positive that we decided to spread the knowledge love. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of articles on the topics that garnered the most traction. First topic up — growth hacking for the modern marketer.
Until next week, I’ll leave you with some helpful tips to plan your next company UnSummit:
1. Find an interesting and casual venue that encourages participation and collaboration. Think outside the box and avoid stuffy hotels and conference rooms.
2. Reach out to your CEOs to gauge what topics and type of events spark their interest the most. Never forget that you’re asking them to take time away from their life’s work.
3. Keep it loose. Don’t worry about planning an iron-clad event with back-to-back programming. Rather, plan a flow of events that allows time for organic connections to be made. Because in the end, your CEOs will rate the success of the event on how many new people they met and were able to learn from.
