Wed · 16 Sep
Arrival
- 18:00Rooms open. No programming.
- 19:30Opening dinner. The only item on the agenda is meeting the room.
40.7608° N111.8910° W Salt Lake City 4,226 ft
Come up
for air.
A private colloquium of forty CTOs. Two days in the Wasatch, thinking clearly about what AI is actually doing to our companies. No stage, no vendors, no keynote theatre. Peers, in a room, with hard problems.
01 The invitation
This is
not a
conference.
You already know what a conference feels like. A sponsor's logo behind every talk. A hallway of pitches. Someone reading their slides to you. This is the opposite of that.
We wanted a room where forty of us, all carrying real responsibility for real systems, could say what we actually think about AI. What is working. What broke in production last quarter. What we are quietly unsure about. The things you can only say to peers, on the understanding that they stay in the room.
So we are taking two days in the mountains above Salt Lake City and inviting people we would want in that room. No charge. No upsell. No recording. Just the conversation we all wish we were already having.
The conveners
02 Format
A colloquium,
not a keynote.
The format does the work. Every part of it is built to get forty senior people talking honestly, and to send each of them home with something they did not arrive with.
-
i
Chatham House rule
What is said in the room is yours to use. Who said it is not. Nothing is recorded, nothing is livestreamed, nothing is posted.
-
ii
No vendors, no pitches
Everyone in the room runs engineering. No booths, no sponsors, no one in the room is selling to you. That is the whole point.
-
iii
The room sets the agenda
Sessions are proposed and led by the people attending. We build day one's schedule together, on the morning of day one.
-
iv
Small on purpose
Forty seats. Enough range to surprise you, small enough that you will actually have talked to everyone by the end.
-
v
Working, not watching
Roundtables, architecture teardowns, and open problems. Bring the thing you are stuck on. You will leave it in better shape.
-
vi
Off the clock
Long meals, a canyon, real time between sessions. The unstructured hours are where the good conversations actually happen.
03 The room
Who's in
the room.
There is no headline speaker, because everyone is one. A few people help set the tone and open sessions; the rest of the room is CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and heads of AI from companies you know and companies you are about to. Out of respect for the rule, the full roster stays with the room. A sense of the shape of it:
-
CTO
Public fintech, roughly two thousand engineers, rebuilding risk on foundation models.
-
Head of AI
Consumer app north of 300M users.
-
VP Engineering
Infrastructure company you almost certainly deploy on.
-
Co-founder / CTO
Series C, agents in production, learning in public.
-
Chief Architect
Forty-year-old enterprise, moving a mainframe estate into the model era without breaking it.
-
CTO
Healthcare, where "hallucination" is not a metaphor.
-
Distinguished Engineer
Hyperscaler, on the team you file the tickets to.
-
Founder
Open-weights lab you have running locally right now.
Introductions happen in person. The full list is shared with the room the week before, and nowhere else.
04 Salt Lake
Why Salt
Lake.
Because it is easy to get to and hard to leave early. A major hub airport, thirty minutes from a canyon. Thin, dry air at four thousand feet, mountains on three sides, and none of the gravity of the usual conference cities. You come here to think, not to be seen.
The venue
One private space, held for the room across both days. Somewhere quiet, with long tables and good light, close to the mountains and easy to reach from the airport. We will announce it, with everything else you need, once your seat is confirmed.
- Venue
- to be announced
- City
- Salt Lake City, Utah
- Details
- shared on reservation
05 Stay
Where to
stay.
Book your own room, wherever suits you. Salt Lake is compact and the downtown hotels sit a few minutes apart, so there are good options at every price without much thought.
Once the venue is set we will point you to the two or three places nearest to it. No room blocks, no codes, no booking on your behalf. You know how you like to travel.
- Booking
- Direct with the hotel, your call
- Where
- Downtown Salt Lake City
- Nights
- Wed 16 – Fri 18 Sep
- Suggestions
- once the venue is set
06 Program
Two days.
A shape, not a script. The detail is set by the room on the first morning. What holds is the rhythm: work in the mornings, air in the afternoons, long tables at night.
Thu · 17 Sep
Day one
- 08:30Coffee. We build the day's agenda together, on the board.
- 09:30First sessions. Peer-led roundtables, three at a time.
- 12:30Lunch outside, weather permitting. It usually permits.
- 14:00Architecture teardowns. Bring a system, bring a scar.
- 16:00Open air. Walk, read, or keep arguing on the deck.
- 19:00Dinner up the canyon.
Fri · 18 Sep
Day two
- 08:30Coffee. Sessions the room asked to run again, deeper.
- 11:00The hard questions. One room, no slides.
- 12:30Optional: a walk to the ridge for those who want the altitude.
- 14:00Close. Home in time for dinner with your family.
07 Reserve
Reserve one
of forty seats.
Reservation is free, and we read every one. If the room is right for you, you will hear back within a few days with logistics and the room block code. If it fills before we reach you, we will hold the next one open.
40 seats · Salt Lake City · Sep 2026