The 2026/27 dinner series
I’m having six founders to dinner.
Your business is past the point where everyone knows everyone, and the culture you worked so hard to build is starting to sag. Disagreement has gone to back channels, every fix is more process, and the people you count on most are buried managing everyone else — and deciding whether it’s still worth it.
I ran someone else’s company for five years and my own for the last ten. Through some combination of desperation, stubbornness, and luck, I discovered another way to lead. It’s a much better conversation over dinner than on a sales call, and I’d love to have you at one.
What we actually talk about
You didn’t build this so it could get political.
The cracks start to show
Not everyone knows everyone anymore. People are spread out, heads down. Disagreement goes quiet, and then it goes sideways. Mostly it’s something you can’t point to on a dashboard: it doesn’t feel like the company you love anymore.
So you buy process
Reviews, mandatory one-on-ones, trainings, offsites. It is the logical move — it’s what the big companies run, and what every consultant in the room will tell you to buy. It’s also expensive, slow, and it doesn’t give you back the thing you’re actually missing.
And you lose your best people
You promote your strongest person, because who else would you promote? Nobody mentions that managing people is a different job, and nobody teaches it. A year on, the team is struggling and the best person you had is miserable — and that’s the one who leaves.
There’s an earlier, cheaper move than any of it — and it’s a conversation, not a program. That’s most of what we end up talking about.
From one of the early dinners, with everyone’s permission. Same format every time.
Coming up
Upcoming dates.
Dates are still firming up. Ask for a seat and I’ll come back to you with the specifics before anything is announced. Somewhere else? Say so in the form.
What an evening is
Six founders, one round table, plan for three hours. Companies with 50 to 500 people. No slides, no pitch. And I pick up the check.
Why a company this size
Somewhere between fifty and five hundred people is the last stretch where a culture is still soft enough to make meaningful change quickly.
Who else is there
Every seat is someone running a company of that size — no investors, no vendors, no spectators. I'd rather leave a chair empty than kill the vibe.
How it actually goes
I'll share my experience of why things get stuck and how you hold the keys to unlocking them. We'll get a chance to listen and learn from everyone.
Request a seat
A little about you, and the company.
A few questions so I can make sure everyone gets the most out of the evening.
Who’s asking
I ran someone else’s. Now I run my own.
I was CEO of EMyth for five years. For the last ten I’ve run my own companies — Refound, and now Ren. Along the way I wrote Good Authority about what it actually takes to lead people well — not the policy version, the personal one — and sat next to a lot of people running companies through exactly this.
“Good Authority is a modern classic, and it will redefine what it means to be the boss.” — Seth Godin
Before any of that I was a lawyer who left. For twenty years after, I built businesses by day and did the other kind of work at night — the meditation, the therapy, the slow unglamorous sort. I was sure they were two separate lives. They weren’t, and that turned out to be everything I have to say.
I know what it’s like when the company gets big enough that the people who used to argue with you stop, and you can’t tell whether it’s because you got it right or because you got scary. I know how much of it comes home with you. The most useful conversations I’ve had about any of it were with other people in the seat, over food, with nothing to sell each other. There’s no room where that happens on purpose. So I’m setting one.
“Yes, the numbers have gotten better, but this work does so much more than that. Jonathan has helped us become more resilient as leaders and as an organization. We’re able to work together and have the conversations that matter, even under stress. It changes everything.”
On stage
Or bring me to your people.
Keynotes and workshops on authority, hard conversations, and what happens to a culture as it grows — for conferences, leadership summits and team offsites.
TikTok, Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Okta, and Strava
I also put out videos on @agoodauthority about the conversations most of us keep avoiding.
Watch on YouTube