Since 2023 I have been running small residential retreats for AI founders with Alexander Volz of the European Leadership Institute, and Caitlin Cockerton of Trailhaven. Six cohorts so far of carefully curated AI founders, the next one is October 8-11 2026.
The format is deliberate. Four days, a beautiful remote chalet in the Alps near Geneva, and a group small enough that everyone is in every conversation. Mornings are for the mountains: hiking, cold water, silence. The rest is structured work in two strands. Alexander and Caitlin provide the coaching side to take on the founder as a person: fear, limiting beliefs, what leadership actually costs. I take the operator side: mentoring circles where each founder puts a real problem on the table and gets worked answers from people who have been through it, on products, fundraising, hiring, enterprise sales, and AI engineering itself.
The session participants consistently rate highest is the one we now call The Board You Cannot Afford: a closing circle where the group acts as each founder's board for an hour. The feedback across cohorts says the same thing in different words: the compound of peer mentoring plus proper coaching plus altitude does something a conference cannot.
Participants have come from across Europe and the US, from seed-stage founders to people building inside the frontier labs. Cohorts are invitation-first and kept deliberately mixed by stage.
If you are an AI founder and this sounds like your kind of thing, get in touch or register interest on our site here.