Elite Retreat 2009 Changes and Challenges

Today is the eve of the Elite Retreat 2009. I am very excited for this years event. We are mixing things up a bit for this year. In years past we always did the leaders speaker sections over 2 days with tons of q&a then at the end of the 2 days we would do our one-on-ones with the attendees. While this worked, there was certainly room for improvement. This year we will be having all the speakers/leaders talk on the first day and GaryV wrapping it up in the afternoon. Then we are all going to dinner with GaryV and he will pick out some wines for us. That should be a pretty awesome experience. Then the 2nd day is going to be purely focused on one on ones. We will have tables setup in the other room where we can meet with the attendees and really dive into what they are doing and help them get where they want to go. But while this is going on in the main room we will have a lot of networking and in the last week I added some more speakers to have more general sessions. The 3 new speakers just added in the last couple days for the 2nd day are: Michael Brito - Michael is the head of Social Media for Intel. I think its amazing what Intel is doing with all forms of social media and Michael is going to lead that discussion. Greg Hartnett - Greg is president of Best Of The Web. BOTW is a awesome internet success story of a basic service oriented business who just kept at it and improving and is now a huge powerhouse on the internet. Brian Norgard - I met Brian over 2 years ago at the inagural Techcrunch40 conference in San Francisco. Brian sold his first company before he was 25 years old to Fox/Newscorp for 8 figures and now is doing time as Vice President of Myspace Myads. Brian is a super smart entrepreneur and will bring a lot to the discussion The challenge for me every year gets a little more difficult. I want people to maintain that wow factor for all the first time attendees but also maintain it for returning Elite Retreat alumni. This year we have over 50% returning members so my challenge is that much more ;). We have an amazing lineup this year and I am sure its going to be the best one ever.