11th Anniversary: The Challenges & What We Built

Our 11th anniversary: what a decade of hosting has taught us, and what we are building next

A particular quiet settles over a well-designed executive room in the first five minutes. The moderator has just posed the opening question. That moment of hesitation as your guests wonder who will speak up first. Then, the first one responds, someone chips in and agrees, another plays devil’s advocate, and the tide of discussion runs free.

We have spent eleven years working out how to produce that moment in one hundred and four countries. We have hosted tables for some of the most discerning organisations on the planet. Google, Amazon, Canva, and other household names have joined us for roundtables, masterclasses, summits, dinners, cruises, and more.

This is a short reflection on what those eleven years have taught us, and where we intend to spend the next ten.

What the Last Decade Has Been

When we founded The Ortus Club in 2015, we were solving a problem they had watched senior executives complain about, event after event. The gatherings we had seen were built for reach rather than depth. The rooms were too big, the agendas too bland, and the follow-up too generic.

The bet we made was straightforward. Curate the room obsessively. Set a genuine purpose, not just a topic, and shape the conversation. Keep the format small enough that every executive present had to be part of it. 

On our 11th anniversary, that bet has made numbers we could not have forecast from where we started. More than 3,200 completed events, over 38,000 senior leaders convened, and 2,700+ companies represented. Ongoing partnerships with Google, Canva, GitLab, and many others. Our operations cover Singapore, Manila, London, and New York, run by a team that has grown from two co-founders into a global organisation.

The Evenings That Defined Us

Some evenings leading up to our 11th anniversary have shaped how the team thinks about the work.

The KMC Group dinner in Sydney in 2015 was the beginning. Our first event with a two-person team that would eventually become a global operation.

In 2019, The Ortus Club hosted its 100th event and our first large-scale event with the Rakuten Viber Asia Summit. We started to explore scaling up our events and expanding our reach worldwide.

The pandemic pivot in 2020 was the moment we reinvented, in a matter of weeks, a business built on physical presence. The virtual roundtable format we developed carried the business through 2020 and 2021, and gave us the ideas for what would eventually become one of the most productive segments of our portfolio.

The 1000th event in New York in 2022 was when the scale of what we were doing truly began to dawn on us. We were no longer just a small team chasing and tracking events on a whiteboard. We were a great, multinational company building an executive reputation.

The Manila office opening in June 2023 turned what had been a strong operational team into a proper regional hub, and the Kosovo office earlier that same year opened a European anchor for the growing EMEA book.

The executive dinner with Twilio in Hong Kong in early 2025, held over Lunar New Year at The Chinese Library, wove cultural celebration into an executive conversation on AI-driven engagement. A lion dance, a Twilio-themed cocktail, twenty-one senior technology leaders around a curated table. The dinner became one of the reference points for how we approach cultural fluency in the markets we operate in.

The Vonage Executive Cruise in Chicago, in September 2025, took senior technology leaders from Salesforce, J.P. Morgan, U.S. Bank, Optimizely, T. Rowe Price, and others onto Lake Michigan for an evening of conversation on trust in the digital era. The cruise moved north up the Chicago River as the sun set. The evening became one of our proof points for how a well-chosen setting changes the pace of a conversation.

Our own yacht day in Manila in June 2026 was the day the senior team finally hosted a cruise we’d spent a decade designing for others. We took the boat out from Manila Yacht Club in weather that refused to cooperate. The team stood on deck in the rain anyway and celebrated our most senior team members and what we had accomplished together.

The GitLab agentic engineering series across Sydney and Melbourne in mid-2026 brought together platform and engineering leaders from Westpac, Macquarie, Commonwealth Bank, Optus, Qantas, Woolworths, and ANZ to explore governance and adoption of agentic AI. The half-day format carried four modes of content in under five hours. We tracked the pipeline generated against named account executives. The two-city format produced our first benchmark for how sentiment differs between Australian markets.

The 2026 Executive Event Attendance Playbook, our first data-led publication of this scale, drew on attendance figures from 1,928 physical roundtables to produce the industry’s most comprehensive look at what actually drives senior executives to attend. The Playbook’s finding that curated virtual events outperform standard virtual events by 17 percentage points has reshaped how our clients think about format design.

The Decade’s Challenges

Eleven years is a long time, and the work has not been without its harder chapters.

The pandemic in 2020 arrived in the middle of our fifth year and forced us to reinvent, in a matter of weeks, a business built on physical presence. In doing so, we discovered that the virtual event is not a diluted version of an in-person one. It is a different discipline entirely, with its own rules and its own definition of what “attendance” means.

We have also had to unlearn, more than once, the temptation to scale in the ways the market expected. At times, the commercially sensible move would have been to add more seats to a room or run more events per city. We chose not to, believing in our mission and the value of our small-scale methods.

Building an international agency across international hubs has required intense, cross-cultural discipline. Manila works differently from London. Singapore works differently from New York. The organisations we serve have their own regional preferences and their own definitions of what “executive” means. Our team has grown into that complexity leading up to our 11th anniversary, and the strongest thing we have built in the last decade is the group of people who now navigate it every day.

Be a Part of The Ortus Club’s Next Decade

3,200 rooms taught us a great deal. We’ve learned that the wrong guest in the right room can be worse than an empty seat. That a topic can be technically accurate and still fail to start a conversation. That a moderator’s job is mostly restraint. That the format is never the point, and that the same dinner in Manila and in London is not the same at all.

None of that was obvious in 2014. We learned it the way you learn anything in this work, by running the event, watching what happened in the room, and doing it differently the next time.

What has not changed on our 11th anniversary is what we were trying to do. Curate the room obsessively. Give the conversation a real purpose. Keep it small enough that everyone present has to be part of it. Every format we have added since, every market we have opened, every dataset we have built, exists to serve that same original idea.

The scale has changed. The methods have sharpened. The goal is still the same.