I've hosted 100+ private executive dinners in two years. Here's what I got right and wrong building Open Future Forum

I'll be honest about why I started this. I wanted to meet the best people in Silicon Valley: the founders, the investors, the operators worth knowing. The most reliable way I found to do that wasn't networking events or cold outreach, it was hosting a really good dinner and putting the right dozen of those people at one table. That became Open Future Forum, and over two years it's grown into more than 100 events. Here's what I've learned, including the parts I got wrong.
What Open Future Forum actually is
Open Future Forum is an executive community in Silicon Valley. The core of it is private, invite-only dinners for C-suite leaders, split by role: a series for CEOs, one for CFOs, one for CROs, one for CISOs, one for CTOs. There are a couple of other formats too, like a weekly hot-seat group for funded startups and, because I sail, a sailing-based networking program. Most of it happens around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The whole thing runs on one idea: get the right dozen-or-so people at a table and then stay out of the way.
How it's different from YPO, Pavilion, Hampton, and Chief
People always ask how this compares to the communities they already belong to. YPO and Vistage are peer-advisory groups for CEOs, built around long-term cohorts. Pavilion is a large membership organization for go-to-market and finance leaders, with courses and the rest. Hampton is a private network for founders and CEOs. Chief is a network for women executives. They're all good at what they do.

Open Future Forum isn't trying to be any of them. It's smaller and narrower on purpose. No membership tier, no course library, no thousand-person Slack. Just a table, organized by role, run on a schedule. A CISO sits with other CISOs and can say what's actually keeping them up at night, partly because there are no vendors in the room writing it down. That's the part that gets harder the bigger a network gets.
What one of these dinners looks like
Here's a recent one. We ran the Enterprise AI & Agentic Security Dinner up in Los Altos Hills. I moderated a panel on identity and permissions for agent-based systems, governance and standards at scale, and what enterprise leaders should be getting ready for over the next year or two. On the panel: a global product and standards leader from Visa, a leader from ZoomInfo, and a founder from Agentic Fabriq. The room was full of AI builders and security leaders.

The line that stuck with me was that governance isn't an afterthought, it's the foundation. Clear use cases, defined workflows, scoped permissions, a human in the loop where it counts, and an honest look at what the model is actually producing. That's a real conversation, and it's the kind a CISO won't have on a webinar or in a giant community feed. It needs a small room and people who trust each other.
What I've actually learned
Who's in the room is the whole game. I spend more time on the guest list than on anything else, by a wide margin. A CFO dinner is only worth a CFO's evening if the other people there are peers, not someone trying to sell them software. Get it wrong once and they don't come back, and they tell people.

Smaller than feels comfortable. Most dinners run between twelve and twenty people. Big enough for range, small enough that nobody's performing. Every time I've let a room grow past that, it got worse.

The schedule is what made it real. One great dinner is just a nice night. A CFO series that shows up on the calendar every month builds a reputation and a waitlist. The repetition is what turned a pile of separate events into something people refer their peers to.

The money can't come before the room. Sponsors pay for the dinners, which is how the model works. But the second a guest feels handled or sold to, you've lost them. So I keep sponsors light-touch and the conversation real. The community is the whole asset, and I'm not going to torch it for one check.

Most of the growth happened away from the table. I write a newsletter on Substack, Murray's Newsletter, that goes out to north of 50,000 people on AI, venture, and enterprise. That's how a lot of people first hear the dinners exist. The writing feeds the dinners and the dinners feed the writing.
The numbers, since this is Indie Hackers
More than 100 events in about two years. Five active dinner series. Twelve to twenty seats a dinner. A newsletter list north of 50,000. No ads, no app, no growth team. It grew because the rooms were good and people brought their peers.
What I got wrong
Plenty. Early on I assumed bigger was better and pushed to grow the rooms before the format had earned it. Those bigger dinners came out flatter every time, and it took me a few of them to admit the problem was me, not the guests.

I was also too loose with the guest list at the start. A couple of times I filled the last seats just to fill them, and one wrong person, the one who shows up to pitch instead of talk, did more damage to a dinner than two empty chairs ever would. Now I'd rather run a table of ten I'm sure about than twenty with a couple I'm not.
If you're building something similar
The one thing I'd pass on: pick a specific person, not an audience. "Executives" is too broad to ever fill a room well. "CFOs at $100M-plus companies who want a straight conversation about creating value" is a room you can actually build. Then keep it small, run it on a schedule, and obsess over who's in it.

Happy to compare notes with anyone doing something in this space. And if you want to see how the dinners work, it's all at Open Future Forum: https://openfutureforum.com.