Three days in November. Eighty engineering leaders. No sponsors, no recordings, no slide decks for half the sessions. The ninth Stratos has been held without interruption since 2018.
Stratos exists because the conferences engineering leaders attend reward the wrong things — performance, brand, networking-as-extraction. We made a smaller room with different rules. Three days, eighty people, off-the-record by default. You'll meet six to ten peers you'll keep talking to for years.
No recording. No live-tweeting. Quote freely; attribute only with permission. We've held this line for nine years and seen the conversation deepen each year.
Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday are slide-free. Speakers prepare prompts and questions instead — the audience does half the work.
No logos on tote bags, no recruiter lounges, no "platinum partner" anything. Attendee fees cover every cup of coffee.
The largest size where every attendee can have a real conversation with every other. We have turned away returning attendees to make room for new ones.
Mornings are sessions. Afternoons are walks, swims, and small-group conversation. Evenings are dinner, then a fire on the bluff. Times are advisory.
"Of twelve sessions, six are slide-free. The room does the work."
Half are alumni speaking again. Half are first-time invitations. None are paid; all are guests of the lodge.
There is no early-bird, no industry rate, no tier system. Eighty places, one price, three meals a day, three nights of lodging, every transit shuttle, every glass of wine.
Bring a partner. They share your room, attend meals and evening sessions, and have an optional day-off track of guided walks, the village of Mendocino, and a half-day at the inn.
Six places held for underrepresented attendees at organizations under 50 people. Full cost waived (including travel). One paragraph in your application is enough — applications reviewed by alumni, never by us.
Apply for a scholarship →"In nine years of executive offsites, this is the only one where I never once thought about my phone. The lodge does half the work."
"The slide-free sessions changed how I run my own staff offsites. We now do one a quarter, twelve people, no decks."
"I left with four phone numbers and one bad sunburn. The four phone numbers have been the single most valuable network of my career."
"The cost looks high until you realize it includes silence — and silence in this industry is the rare good."
Have a question we have not? Email [email protected]. Replies within two business days.
It would. We've calculated — roughly $1,800 per attendee. The reason we don't is that the value of Stratos is the conversation, and the conversation changes when there is a sponsor in the room. We've sat through enough other summits to know. Attendees pay full freight and the program belongs to them.
No recordings — audio, video, or otherwise. Chatham House rules: you may share what was said, you may not say who said it without permission. The committee writes a short private memo to attendees afterwards, three to five pages, summarizing themes without attribution. We have never published it.
None. November on the coast is cold and wet — pack layers, a coat, sturdy shoes for the bluff walk. The dinners are not formal; many attendees come in jeans. There is no networking event, no name-tag lanyard photo, no reason to dress up.
Yes, comprehensively. The kitchen at the lodge accommodates vegan, vegetarian, kosher, halal, gluten-free, severe allergies, and any combination thereof. We confirm with you by phone two weeks ahead. In nine editions, we have never failed a restriction.
A partner, yes — $1,499 includes lodging, meals, evening sessions, and an optional day-off track (village of Mendocino, guided walks, half-day at the inn). Children we ask you keep at home; the lodge is not set up for them and the conversation runs late. Two attendees over nine years have asked for childcare; both times we've helped arrange it off-site.
Each year's committee (8 alumni) reviews ~340 names — half are returning attendees, half are first-time recommendations from alumni or the committee itself. We aim for 80 confirmed by mid-August. You can request consideration via the link below; you'll hear back either way by August 30, including a one-paragraph note on why.
Tell us who you are, what you lead, and one engineer you admire. Three sentences is plenty. We read every note ourselves.