I can make your event better

I can help with

Conferences, offsites, leadership retreats, fundraisers, festivals

and more

“If you need an event done, I can recommend Misha…it's obvious he has a special talent here.”

Emmett Shear,
Former interim CEO of OpenAI,
Co-Founder and Former CEO of Twitch

Events can be great.
But they can also be terrible.

Done right, events can be enormous sources of inspiration, learning and connection. Done wrong, they can be soul-crushing.

There are too many boring conferences where people learn nothing and meet no-one, offsites with cringey awkward icebreakers, and leadership retreats that result in vague decisions that wither away into nothingness.

I’ve worked on hundreds of events of all kinds, from super-corporate internal conferences to super-weird art events in bars and clubs. I’ve learned about what you can do to make your event great, and how to avoid all the common pitfalls that get in the way of success.

MANIFOLD MARKETS

"We ran a 500 person conference in Berkeley. Misha was amazing: I was in awe of how he got all of our attendees participating and sharing thoughts. I would highly recommend Misha to anyone looking to run a memorable event.”

- Austin Chen, Co-Founder

Planning an offsite or leadership retreat?

I’ll make sure the
real work gets done.

Some events are about getting work done, about bringing a group together to make strategic decisions, solve a problem, or build something new.

For these events, you need clarity and alignment on goals, a well-designed work process, and mechanisms to ensure follow-up on decisions. If you don’t have these things, the result is wasted time and frustration. I can help you design a process to make sure that your work gets done.

I’ve seen all the very human obstacles to effective communication that typically block progress. I can bring the emotional intelligence you need to ensure that the real issues get talked about and that people can hear each other.

“I run an intellectual talent agency representing people like Steven Pinker, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushie. I go to hundreds of events, have been going to TED for over 25 years. Misha has an uncanny ability to elevate a conference. He gets involved in the planning, the organization, the networking, and is the best host I’ve ever seen. He gets people connect with each other in ways they haven’t anticipated, and people leave feeling “this is the best conference I’ve been to.””

David Lavin, CEO & Founder The Lavin Agency

Planning a Conference? Fundraiser? Festival?

I’ll make it great! (Hint: It’s about people)

The most common problem I see when I help clients plan conferences is this: They say the goal of the conference is to help people connect, but all their design choices are as if the goal were to disseminate information.

If you had 200 people in a room, and wanted to *stop* them from meeting each other, a great way to do it would be to give one of them a mic, and put the other 199 in chairs. Yet organizers put tons of priority on speakers, and almost none into designing interactions between attendees. You can read my rant about this here: ”Everything You Did to Make Your Conference Better Actually Made it Worse”.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There are lots of ways to make your event great. There are a thousand little design choices along the way that make all the difference, that I’ve learned about through lots of trial and error and experience. Let me help you make your event great.