You already have the audience. Let's build the room everyone wants to be in.

Culture Summit

I built the room I wanted to be in.

In 2014, HR conferences talked about traditional topics like benefits and compensation. I wanted an event about company culture, the thing companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Airbnb were quietly getting right.

I had no list, no budget, and no connections. All I had was a vision and the determination to bring people together who wanted to make work better.

I found every Head of People and VP of Culture on LinkedIn and wrote to them one by one. They saw what I was building and bought tickets for their teams. Then they told their communities, and year one sold out.

Year one was about bringing community together. In year two, I started prioritizing sponsors in a way that integrated them into the event while adding value to attendees. At its peak, revenue was half ticket sales, half sponsorships, and sponsors came back year after year.

What I still do on every event: listen to the room. Every format change came from attendee feedback, and every year the feedback got better.

Ecom North

Built for a client: Canada's first DTC conference.

In 2023, I met Nic Co, founder of Stallion Express, one of Canada's largest shipping companies. Nic lives in Toronto. He told me the best ecommerce events were all in the US. Canada had nothing. He wanted to build the biggest and best event in Canada for ecommerce founders, but didn't know where to start. That's where I came in.

I'd never worked in ecommerce before, but I had eight months to learn the audience, the sponsors, and what makes an ecom event worth showing up for.

We used a hosted buyer model: sell some tickets, give the rest away through an application. Sponsors got a room full of the founders they wanted to meet. Most tickets were free, and the room was still packed wall to wall.

I pushed for building community before, during and after the event. Social mixers and executive dinners built buzz beforehand. Roundtable sessions at the conference let attendees lead the conversation. And a private WhatsApp group kept it going after.

The event paid for itself, and both title sponsors, Stallion Express and Walmart, walked away with real pipeline. Two years later, they brought me back to lead the US expansion.

Responsibly Human AI Summit

Built from what HR leaders were asking for.

Ten years after Culture Summit, AI was everywhere, and HR events were struggling to keep up. On LinkedIn, I kept seeing the same complaint: too many AI panels, too much surface-level talk. People wanted hands-on learning and sessions that actually connected them.

So I built Responsibly Human AI Summit around that feedback. Instead of panels, we ran hands-on workshops and interactive roundtables, so people learned by doing and from each other. It was one of the first HR AI events built that way.

I partnered with HR communities to get the word out, and that's where the real surprise came. Many of these people had talked online for years. This was the first time they met in person.

The sessions brought them in. The connections are what they talked about after. That's what I design every event around now.