Introducing Brigadoon Professional

Thirteen years ago, I asked a simple question: What would happen if I put forty smart people in a room and took away everything that usually gets in the way of actual conversation?

No panels. No slides. No name tags. No agenda designed to make everyone feel comfortable and leave having learned nothing.

The answer, repeated year after year at Sundance Mountain Resort in the Utah mountains, is that something genuinely useful happens. People think out loud. Unexpected connections form. Ideas that were stuck get unstuck. The kind of conversation you'll still be turning over in your head six months later.

The problem — and it has always been the problem — is that it only lasts a weekend.

Brigadoon Professional is my attempt to solve that.

It is a twelve-month membership organized around four tiers, each designed for a different level of engagement with the Brigadoon idea:

Ranger ($500/year) is built for the intellectually curious professional who wants to stay ahead of the ideas shaping commerce and culture. It includes a biweekly newsletter — twenty-six issues a year — plus ten live expert calls with subject matter experts, each forty-five minutes and fully archived. Open enrollment. No capacity limit.

Participant ($2,500/year) is for the professional ready to show up in the room. Limited to seventy-five members. It adds two curated hardcover books delivered in June and December, a guaranteed spot at Brigadoon Utah each February, one Salon Dinner per year, and the Brigadoon vest — a signature piece that marks you as part of the community.

Explorer ($5,000/year) goes further — geographically and intellectually. Limited to ten members. It adds Brigadoon Scotland in November: five days in a rented house in the Scottish countryside, private chef, ten people. If you've been, you know. If you haven't, it's the most intense version of Brigadoon. Two Salon Dinners a year, a transferable guest pass, and the full Brigadoon kit — vest and hoodie.

Patron ($7,500/year) is for the rare professional who doesn't just attend Brigadoon — they sustain it. Limited to six members. Patrons bring a guest to Utah and all Salon Dinners, join a private Patron Dinner in December or January, and have two dedicated strategic conversations with me each year.

Each tier is built on the tier below it. The philosophy is consistent across all four: that the most valuable professional development isn't passive consumption — it's being put in proximity to people and ideas that challenge how you think.

The founding member offer is open through March 31, 2026, and your tier pricing is locked for two full years.

No price increases at renewal. No up-sells. No noise.

Just the conversation, extended.

Email me @ marc@brigadoon.live if you are interested and want to get involved.

— Marc A. Ross

The Conference Is Broken. Here's What I Did About It.

I have sat through too many conferences. You probably have too.

You know the format. A keynote speaker who wrote a book three years ago delivers insights you could have absorbed in a forty-five-minute podcast on your walk. A panel of four people who mostly agree with each other politely debate the margins. Heads tucked into screens. Networking happens in a lobby, between people who are already connected on LinkedIn, exchanging business cards that neither will look at again.

You fly home knowing roughly what you knew when you left. Maybe you have a notebook with three bullet points. Maybe you don't even have that.

I stopped going to those conferences in my late thirties. Not because I stopped being curious — but because I started valuing my curiosity more.

What I wanted was something different: a room where people actually disagree, where expertise comes from living something rather than studying it, where the format doesn't protect anyone from having to think in real time.

I built that room. I called it Brigadoon.

Since 2013, Brigadoon has gathered at Sundance Mountain Resort for three days each February — forty or so founders, investors, journalists, architects, doctors, civic leaders, and thinkers from across disciplines and geographies. No PowerPoint slides. No panels. No name tags. Chatham House Rule throughout.

The format is simple: a speaker takes the stage with an idea, a question, or a problem. Not a polished presentation — often something they're working through in real time. The room responds. Actual conversation happens. Sometimes it's uncomfortable. It's almost always useful.

What defines the quality of a Brigadoon gathering isn't the speakers' credentials. It's the willingness of everyone in the room to think out loud — to say the thing they actually think rather than the thing they're supposed to think.

That's rare. And it turns out it's replicable, if you're deliberate about who you invite and how you design the experience.

Thirteen years in, I wanted to see if the same philosophy could work year-round — not just for a weekend in the Utah mountains, but across twelve months, for a broader community of people who believe that conversation is still the most underrated tool in professional life.

Brigadoon Professional is the answer to that question.

It's a membership program that keeps the conversation going between gatherings — through biweekly analysis and essays, live expert calls on topics shaping commerce and culture, curated books, and guaranteed access to the gatherings themselves.

The four tiers range from $500 to $7,500 per year, with capacity limits at the upper levels that mirror the gathering's own design logic: the room only works if it stays small enough that everyone is accountable to each other.

Conferences have been broken for a long time. Most people keep going anyway, out of habit or obligation.

You don't have to.

— Marc A. Ross

Founder, Brigadoon

Awake But Absent

I used to think of sleep deprivation as a bill I could pay later. A rough night, a strong coffee, and you push through. Most of the people I know operate this way. It's practically a badge in the rooms where founders and global executives spend time together.

A study published in Nature Neuroscience has made me reconsider that math.

Researchers at MIT and Boston University tracked 26 healthy adults through attention tests, once after a full night of sleep and once after a supervised sleepless night. The interesting part wasn't the expected finding that tired people perform worse. It was what was happening inside the brain at the precise moment attention failed.

During sleep, waves of cerebrospinal fluid move through the brain, clearing metabolic waste. After a sleepless night, those same fluid surges started appearing while participants were still awake, and they corresponded directly with the moments attention broke down. The brain wasn't malfunctioning. It was doing maintenance it never got to do. It just happened while the person was supposed to be focused.

The researchers described it as a "sleeplike moment" inside a waking brain. The person is upright, eyes open, technically present. But for a brief interval, the brain has turned inward.

Most high performers I know have built systems for almost everything: decision frameworks, communication rituals, and recovery protocols. But sleep is often treated as a variable to be managed around rather than as a foundation to be protected.

If the brain is quietly retreating inward during the moments we most need it to engage outward, and we have no reliable way to detect when that's happening to us, what are we actually optimizing when we treat sleep as negotiable?

What would change about the way you structure your days if you accepted that your attention isn't fully yours to command?

-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 25, 2026

Why I Built This Room

I started Brigadoon in 2013 out of genuine frustration.

Not with any one conference. Not with any one industry. With all of it — the accumulated weight of too many rooms full of the same people, thinking the same way, saying the same things, and calling it professional development.

I'd spent years moving between boardrooms in New York and art exhibits in Singapore, watching how power, commerce, and culture intersect in ways most people don't see coming. And what I kept noticing was this: the most useful thinking never happened on stage. It happened in the margins. At dinner. On a walk. In the kind of conversation where someone drops their guard and says what they actually think.

That's what I wanted to build. Not another conference. A room.

Brigadoon has been that room for thirteen years now — a winter camp gathering at Sundance Mountain Resort, operating under Chatham House Rule, with no PowerPoint slides, no panels, no name tags, and no pretense. Just forty or so carefully selected founders, investors, journalists, civic leaders, designers, doctors, and thinkers who show up ready to think out loud.

The rules are minimal. The conversations are not.

What I didn't anticipate in 2013 was how much the gathering would mean to the people who kept coming back. Year after year, I'd hear the same thing: I'm still turning that conversation over in my head. The question is: how do you keep that going for twelve months, not just a weekend?

That question is what led me to Brigadoon Professional.

This is a twelve-month membership that keeps the conversation going between gatherings with biweekly essays and analysis, live expert calls, curated books, and guaranteed seats at the events that matter most.

I want to be clear about what it isn't. It isn't a content subscription. It isn't a networking platform. It isn't a community app with a Slack channel and a lot of noise.

It's a membership built on the same philosophy as the gathering itself: that the most valuable intelligence flows between people who trust each other enough to think out loud. Brigadoon Professional is an attempt to build that trust year-round — and to give members the intellectual fuel to show up sharper when they get back in the room.

Four tiers. Four levels of engagement. From a biweekly newsletter and expert call series at $500 a year, to a full-access membership — including Scotland, salon dinners, and a private Patron Dinner — at $7,500.

I've been deliberate about keeping capacity limited at the upper tiers, because the whole thing breaks down if the room gets too crowded. Exclusivity isn't a marketing device here. It's a design principle.

If you've been to Brigadoon, you know why.

If you haven't, and this sounds like your kind of room — that's probably worth paying attention to.

-Marc A. Ross

Founder @ Brigadoon