CEO Summit Yosemite — A Weekend for Founder Wellness
After more than a year of planning, our first CEO Summit is happening this February in collaboration with six venture firms who care about founder wellness.
The idea for the summit started when we saw some of our portfolio companies stumble with issues that were neglected during the startup’s early days. As Brian Garrett (Crosscut) recently wrote, “many founders don’t address self-care until their ambition or their idea is affecting their health and well-being in real, sometimes irreversible ways.” It’s easy to procrastinate when you are pushing so hard for growth and your Series A. As one attendee told us, “Professional development is something that I’ve deprioritized to get my company to where it is today.”
There are a lot of mega conferences. This is not one of them. We capped attendees to 50 startups to increase the sense of a cohort, and made sure the founders were all at a similar stage. We opted for facilitated conversations instead of panels to drive engagement. We have lots of gaps for chilling out between sessions. And we targeted the content to be relevant. The speakers are powerful and will cover Executive Team Dynamics, Leadership Under Crisis, Board Best Practices, Setting and Scaling Culture, Beating Burnout, Recruiting Talent, and much more. There will be yoga and every attendee will receive 1:1 coaching. We have some incredible workshops on issues like Media Training and Happiness.
We decided to host the event over a weekend because every founder says they are too busy during the week. But we didn’t want founders to take time away from their families and plus ones. So we decided to make it a destination event that was family friendly. Hence Yosemite. Many founders are in SF and LA and Yosemite is equally convenient to them. More accurately, it is equally inconvenient to them as well, and to the folks coming from the East Coast and Europe. There are activities for all ages, and time to check out Yosemite National Park, make new friends, grind on a customer proposal, play with your family, or whatever else gives you joy.
If you are a founder energized by what we are building with the CEO Summit, then please join us or ask your VC firm to reach out us for discounted tickets. The event details can be found here:
