Reading · Murray’s Newsletter

A re-introduction for readers who joined somewhere along the way

First, thank you.

Some of you have been on this list for years. You were reading back when this was a handful of events, and a good number of you have been in the room at some point, brought a friend, sat on a panel, answered a survey, or replied to something I wrote and made me think harder about it. None of what follows exists without you.

What you signed up to is not what it is now, and I have never really stopped to explain the change. So this week I want to set out what Open Future Forum has evolved into, and where it is heading. You are part of it whether you have been to an event or not.

Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley. Its network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide. It runs a year-round calendar of events for senior executives and investors, including CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, private equity leaders, founders, and AI leaders, through Forum Select, its invite-only private gatherings, and Forum Events, its open panels and gatherings. Beyond events, Open Future Forum convenes peer groups and executive boards and publishes original research built on first-party survey and qualitative data from its executive network.

It started with a handful of small off-the-record events in Silicon Valley. No boards, no research, no calendar. Just the right people in a room. It is now a set of role-specific communities, each with its own board, its own calendar and its own set of questions, alongside open events and a research programme.

Everything runs on one idea, taken from Adam Grant’s book Give and Take. Members give first and keep score never.

That sounds soft until you see what it rules out. Nobody is there to work the room. Nobody arrives with a pitch. The reason these rooms feel different from most events is not the venue or the guest list. It is the standard people hold themselves to once they are in one.

I attend most events myself, and the people who help others without being asked are the ones who end up getting the most out of the community.

Forum Events are the open gatherings. Panels, firesides, mixers and summits, usually 50 to 200 guests, in San Francisco and Palo Alto. Open application, free or low cost. This is where most of the calendar sits and where most people start.

Forum Select is the smaller private format. Off the record, no stage, built for candid conversation between a handful of people in similar seats.

Each forum is guided by a board of people who actually hold the job. They set the agenda, bring the questions and vouch for who is in the room.

AI Leaders Forum. Senior AI, infrastructure and platform leaders. I chair it. The board is Jerry Xu of Oracle, Karthik Suresh of ZoomInfo, Paulina Xu of Agentic Fabriq, Akshay Goel of Amazon and Erik Norden of Zyphra. The current focus is compute, networking and storage, and what actually changes when agents move into production.

CFO Executive Forum. Senior finance leaders. Co-chaired by me and Christina Bui of Robert Half, with Louis Lehot of Foley & Lardner and Ellie Yashiro of Silicon Valley Bank on the board. Budgets, ROI, headcount leverage and what finance is willing to sign off on.

CMO Executive Forum. Marketing and growth leaders working through agentic AI, attribution and what happens to the team when the work changes shape. I chair it, with Janice Zhang of Google Cloud, Brandon Nader of ThinkingAI and Fangfang Tan of AgentWeb on the board.

CISO Executive Forum. Security leaders, on AI governance, agent identity, shadow AI and enterprise risk in practice. I chair it, with Kashish Mittal of Salesforce, Paulina Xu of Agentic Fabriq, Pushpak Pujari of Harden and Prasen Shelar of Axari on the board. The board deliberately mixes practitioners with the founders building the security tools of the AI era.

General Counsel Executive Forum. New this autumn, for General Counsel, Chief Legal Officers and senior in-house legal leaders. I chair it, with Louis Lehot of Foley & Lardner as co-chair, and Preet Gill of Lockton and Emily Jones of Simmons & Simmons on the board. First event in September, then monthly. AI governance, agent liability, data provenance and vendor terms have all arrived faster than the frameworks have.

CEO Executive Forum. Founders and chief executives of high-growth companies, alongside the public board member track for directors carrying AI governance responsibility.

VC and investors. Venture, corporate venture and family office gatherings, including the strategic capital drinks series in Palo Alto.

YC founders. Gatherings for Y Combinator founders and the investors who back them. Not officially associated with YC.

If you sit in one of those seats, there is a room for you. If you sit across two of them, which many of you do, the crossover conversations tend to be the useful ones.

The other side of the work is research. Open Future Forum publishes reports drawn from surveys and conversations across its own events rather than from purchased panels.

The current set covers executives overall, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs and investors. The findings that keep proving durable are about ownership rather than technology. Almost every executive seat names itself as the one signing off on AI. CEOs expect payback far faster than the finance leaders and investors funding it. In a meaningful share of responses, nobody is named as the owner at all.

The reports are free at openfutureforum.com/research, and the dataset is archived publicly so it can be cited.

Sponsorship is open across the forums, the dinner series and the larger open events, and several of you are sitting on exactly the kind of business these rooms want to hear from.

Startups are very welcome here, and sponsorship is the route. The executive forums are built around the seat, so a CFO room is finance leaders and a CISO room is security leaders. A startup selling into that room is not a member of it. Sponsoring is how a company earns a place in the conversation without pretending to be something it is not.

The same philosophy applies to sponsors. Give first. That means underwriting a dinner and letting the conversation go where the room takes it, bringing a genuinely useful speaker, or opening a venue. It does not mean a pitch deck over dessert. The rooms are too valuable to sell to companies that would not survive the scrutiny of the people in them, which is the honest reason some sponsorship conversations do not go anywhere.

What sponsors get is an evening of real attention from people who hold the budget, and a reason to still be in touch with them a year later.

Founders who want a peer room rather than a customer room have one. The YC founder gatherings and the CEO Executive Forum are both built for the founder seat.

If any of that sounds like your company, reach out through LinkedIn or reply to this email.

One more thing, on where this is going.

For the first few years this was one general room. Good people, good conversation, mixed seats. What became clear over a series of events is that the conversations people valued most were the ones where everybody at the table carried the same weight of decision. A CFO talking to another CFO gets somewhere in twenty minutes that a mixed room does not reach in two hours.

So the community has specialised, and it will keep specialising. Each new forum is defined by a seat rather than a subject. Each one is guided by people who hold that seat. The research is built on what those people say rather than on a panel bought from a vendor.

Expect more of that. More forums organised around specific roles, more boards made up of practitioners, and a higher bar for who is in a room and why. That means some rooms get smaller rather than larger, which is a deliberate trade.

What will not change is the philosophy. The bar rises because the room is more useful when everyone in it can act on what they hear.

Come to an open event. The calendar is at lu.ma/OpenFutureForum and registration takes about thirty seconds.

And if you have been reading for years without ever coming to anything, treat this as the invitation rather than the nudge. The research is a record of these conversations. It is not a replacement for being in one, and there is a seat for you.

Thank you for reading, and for being part of this. See you at the next one.

Everything is at lu.ma/OpenFutureForum. Here is what is open now.

YC Founders Summer Mixer · Monday 17 August, 5:30pm to 8:00pm · Foley & Lardner, San Francisco Current YC founders and alumni, drinks and light bites, no presentations and no pitching. Sponsored by Foley & Lardner, Agentic Fabriq and Open Future Forum. Approval required, and please include your batch and company when you register.

Marketing Measurement and Attribution in the AI Era · Wednesday 19 August, 5:30pm · Palo Alto A CMO Executive Forum panel on what to measure when buyers ask an AI assistant before they ever reach your site. Speakers from 23andMe, BlueRock, NinjaOne, WeDey and AgentWeb, with me moderating. Panel, networking, peer introductions. Approval required.

CEO Private Dinner · Thursday 20 August · Los Altos Hills Ten to fifteen founders and CEOs of companies that have raised $10M or crossed $10M ARR. No panels, no agenda, one table. Joining us is Ashish Aggarwal of IronArc Ventures. Chatham House rules, by approval only.

CFOs on the Bay: A Private Yacht Excursion · Friday 21 August, boarding 10:30am, sailing 11:00am to 2:00pm · San Francisco Forty finance leaders, three hours on the water, lunch and no slides. Hosted with Janice Berthold of Heffernan as sponsor lead, alongside Silicon Valley Bank, Foley & Lardner and Robert Half | Protiviti. Invitation only, capped at 40.

AI Infrastructure Roundtable · Thursday 27 August, 5:30pm to 8:00pm · Industrious, Palo Alto The first gathering of the AI Leaders group, the week Hot Chips wraps. Compute, interconnect, memory and power, and where the real bottleneck sits now. Roundtable, food and drinks, off the record. Seats limited and every registration reviewed.

CISO Roundtable Dinner · Wednesday 26 August, 5:30pm to 8:30pm · Fremont Hills Country Club, Los Altos Hills Around twenty senior in-house security leaders. Opening remarks from Caroline Wong, Chief Strategy Officer at Axari, then an off-the-record roundtable over dinner on AI risk, agent governance and board reporting. Hosted with Agentic Fabriq, Axari and Harden. CISO, Deputy CISO, VP Security and Head of Security only.

Ready for Anything: IPOs, SPACs and Capital Market Shifts · San Francisco A CFO Executive Forum panel on liquidity when the window opens and closes in weeks. Raymond Yue of Avalara, who took Sumo Logic public and was CFO at Talkdesk, moderated by Christina Bui of Robert Half | Protiviti. Off the record, no slides, no vendor pitches.

CEO Private Dinner and CISO Roundtable Dinner · Los Altos Hills The following month’s tables, same format, open for requests now.

Microsoft executive briefings, run with Ashley Tarver of Microsoft. Practical sessions for executives rather than product demos, with time for questions. Microsoft for Startups and how to apply, including what to prepare and the credits eligible startups can access · Copilot and Finance Agents for finance leaders · Copilot and AI for private equity leaders · Listing and selling your SaaS or AI product on Microsoft Marketplace

Convening: How to Build an Executive Network That Compounds · 30 minutes, online For venture-backed founders. How these rooms actually get built, including what it takes to get a sitting CFO or CISO to accept an invitation from a stranger, and whether to build your own network or join one. (second session here)

AltaLab Fall 2026 Batch · Virtual, with AltaIR Capital