I started Brigadoon in 2013 because I was bored.
Not personally. Living and working in Washington, DC, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by interesting people doing interesting things. I was bored by the conferences, the panels, the stage-managed conversations that produced nothing you couldn't have found in a decent book, heard on a podcast, or gleaned from a magazine article.
I was bored by the posturing. I wanted something real.
So I built it.
Small gatherings. Off the record. No PowerPoint. No name tags. No one is selling anything.
Founders, investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, authors, doctors, civic leaders — people who don't normally share a room — talking honestly about the things that actually matter to them. Brigadoon has been running for thirteen years. The philosophy is intact. The format works. The community is loyal and, by any reasonable measure, remarkable.
And yet, it is at an inflection point.
Brigadoon 2026 brought 38 people to Sundance Mountain Resort for three days of some of the best conversation I have had in years. I left energized. I also left knowing that 38 is not the number. Not because the experience was diminished — it wasn't — but because the mission requires scale to survive. Forty-six attendees is break-even. Seventy-five is where Brigadoon becomes genuinely sustainable, where it can fund scholarships, expand the Scotland experience, build the salon dinner series, and launch the professional membership program now in development.
Seventy-five is where the thing I built becomes the thing I intended to build.
The gap between 38 and 75 is not a product problem. I am confident in that. The people who come to Brigadoon come back. They describe it, years later, as one of the more valuable professional experiences they have had.
The gap is a communication problem — a decade of deliberate restraint that has kept Brigadoon safe from the noise it was designed to resist, but has also kept it invisible to the people who would value it most. I have underinvested in telling this story. I have been too precious.
That is on me.
The tension I keep returning to is this: Brigadoon's value is inseparable from its restraint. The reason it works is precisely that it does not behave like everything else competing for your attention. The moment it starts performing — the moment the marketing starts to feel like marketing — something breaks. Growth cannot come at the cost of what makes growth worth pursuing.
But staying quiet at 38 attendees is its own kind of failure.
The world is getting noisier. Attention is getting cheaper. The case for a room where serious people can think seriously, without an agenda or a slide deck, is stronger now than it was in 2013. That story deserves to be told.
I just haven't figured out how to tell it without turning it into something it isn't.
So here is what I find myself sitting with: How do you build real awareness for something whose value depends on never feeling like it needs to be marketed?
-Marc
+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point. More @ www.brigadoon.live.
March 23, 2026
