One seat per company.
Nobody is outnumbered by their own supplier, and nobody arrives to find three colleagues already in the room.
About Futr Keystone
World-class rooms, assembled one seat at a time.
Thought leaders in the same room as the industry leaders and C-suite who need them — by invitation, at a scale where everybody is actually heard. The invitation is because of who you are: your role, your industry, and why the people in the room would be worth your time.
What we bring together
Outside insight, and the peers you’ll actually call.
Speakers living the change their industry is going through, alongside a peer group small enough to be a real network rather than a delegate list. The format does the introducing, so nobody has to work the room.
A different kind of room, alongside the associations and groups you already belong to.
It matters more than it used to. Most industries are changing faster than they have in years — new tools, real pressure on cost, and roles and responsibilities shifting from the top down faster than any one person can track alone. Legal, where I started, is changing as fast as any of them. Futr Keystone’s answer is two-sided: bring in the people who can actually explain what is changing, and build the kind of trusted peer network you lean on to make sense of it yourself.
Because nobody teaches you how to lead at the top. You learn it from people who have already done it, or you learn it slowly and expensively on your own. A day spent in a room of your peers is the shortest route to the first of those that I can think of.
How the room is kept honest
Three rules, published.
Not a tone of voice. Three things written down in advance, the same for everybody, that a larger organiser cannot match without selling less.
Nobody in the room is selling to anybody else in it.
Whoever paid for the day, the working part of it is not a sales floor. Everything else about how we work follows from this one.
The invitation is ours to give, and it is never for sale.
Every place is decided rather than bought, and every room is built around the people in it rather than the number of them.
Published rather than negotiated. If you are in the room, those are the three you can hold me to.
What we run
Three kinds of room.
The roundtable
Serious talk, memorable rooms.
Local rooms built around the people in them, on a subject worth the morning. Kept to time, peers only, unrecorded by default.
The contest
Competitive, not corporate.
The two sides of a working relationship on opposite teams, drawn rather than entered.
The expedition
TED Talks meets a great adventure.
A handful of the sharpest minds somewhere that has nothing to do with the office.
Why I built this
Business is simple. Networking should be too.
I believe business is simple. Most people want the same thing from a room: to walk in, feel comfortable being themselves, and talk about what’s really on their mind with people they actually want in their network.
I spent close to a decade in legal data and content, eight of those years at Mondaq, talking to businesses and the people in them about what they wanted from their data, their content and their events. Two questions came up again and again. How do we turn content and data into new relationships? And how do I get to sit next to the people I actually want to meet?
Events rarely answer the second one. The speakers are often excellent, yet the people you go to hear are the people you rarely get to meet. The best conversations happen in between: over lunch, between sessions, or once the day is done and the name tags come off (and yes, occasionally at the bar).
Two conversations turned that into a business. One of my team — sharp, driven, one of the best people I have worked with — wanted to know what people in her role were doing at other businesses, and to hear from the leaders who had built the career she wanted. She wanted peers, and conversations that were not filtered through somebody else’s interests. We had none of that to give her, and I am not certain the market had much for her either. Then a friend of mine, a senior lawyer at one of the world’s most recognised technology companies, came back from maternity leave to find that in a little over a year everything had moved. What she said next is the part that stuck.
So my idea is simple: build the room for the people in it. Invitation only, so everyone there is someone worth meeting, the speakers included. Put the questions that matter most in business right now on the table, and hear how your peers and the people leading the change see the next twelve months. Make it somewhere you’ll enjoy. The relationships follow.
Two sides of the same gap
Most rooms in business are built to reach leaders. This one is built for them.
One person was trying to develop a team and one was trying to develop herself, and both of them were reaching for the same missing thing. The reason it is missing is structural rather than anybody’s fault. A firm or supplier has a budget for hospitality and training because reaching leaders is how it wins work. Their own teams have a training line that competes with headcount and whatever landed that morning. So one side builds the room and the other side gets invited into it, and the arrangement is so old nobody argues with it.
Somewhere in working out what to do about it, I sat down with a friend who lives for travel and sport, and he made a point I have not been able to shake since: the two easiest ways to connect with a stranger are travel and sport, because both give you something to talk about before you have to talk about yourselves. It is why the vehicle for Futr Keystone is a round of golf and a walk into a mountain range, rather than another stage and another set of chairs. The format is the icebreaker, not the excuse for one.
That is why the first fixture is a contest rather than a room of peers with suppliers quietly seeded through it. Two practice lawyers against two in-house lawyers, drawn rather than entered, so nobody is up against the firm that already acts for them. The afternoon sessions are in-house only, there is no fee for the in-house seat whether you play or not, and everybody is told in writing what their place is worth and who paid for it.
“For advice, I go to my peers and the managers who came before me. And when a client needs a recommendation, it’s still my own network I trust first.”
“A room that’s solely in-house, with the outside influence removed, is where I feel comfortable enough to actually discuss things and take in what the room knows. But the rooms I keep coming back to are the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously — the ones I actually enjoy, where everyone feels comfortable.”
Quotes from the in-house community.
Sitting down with in-house lawyers to understand what a valuable room actually looks like for them — what they look for in a client, how they value their own network, and what makes them want to show up and build a new relationship — is how Futr Keystone was born.
The next step
Ask for an invitation.
A few quick fields — first name, surname, position, company. Nothing is on sale, so nothing takes payment. I reply personally from my own address within a week.
Declining costs you nothing and the invitation stands next time. You will not be added to a mailing list either way.