This past weekend we hosted 70 incredible entrepreneurs and investors in Park City, Utah for the inaugural Outcove Valley.
This wasn’t your average “business” conference.
We got to know each other, went deep, spoke vulnerably, heard incredible stories, had fun, and built real friendships. The energy was intoxicating.
Jess Mah and I started talking about this idea 6 months ago with a “what if we could bring incredible people together in an intimate way, where everyone is top-tier, can be vulnerable without judgement, build deep & lifelong friendships and nobody is trying to sell anyone anything?”
It’s been incredibly fulfilling to see it come to life.
The connection and soft skills that emerge from Outcove are what I explore in The Human Skills That Make Us Irreplaceable.
Table of Contents
What Made It Different From Other Conferences
No panels. No keynotes. No one pitching from a stage.
Just 70 people who earned their way into the room, spending real time together. Hiking. Sitting around fires. Sharing things they wouldn’t say at a standard networking event.
The format was intentional. When you remove the transactional layer from a gathering, something changes. People stop performing and start connecting. The conversations that emerged over dinner were the kind that typically take years of a friendship to unlock.
That’s the whole premise: create the conditions where real connection can happen fast. Most events optimize for scale. We optimized for depth.
What I Took Away
A few things stayed with me after the weekend.
First: the most valuable conversations happened in the margins. Not on the scheduled hikes, but in the five minutes before dinner, or the late-night conversations that went until 2am. You can’t plan those. You can only create the space for them.
Second: vulnerability is contagious in the best way. One person goes first. Then another. Within a few hours, the entire room is operating at a level of honesty that most professional relationships never reach.
Third: the right 70 people in the right setting will do more for each other than any formal accelerator or mentorship program. Peer relationships at this level aren’t just motivating. They change the ceiling on what you think is possible.
We’re already building the next one.