A community built on the philosophy of giving. One network. Two gathering formats. One purpose.
Space for a different kind of conversation.Illustrative setting
Partners and event hosts
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Open Future Forum is built on a simple conviction borrowed from Adam Grant's Give and Take: givers create more value than they capture. Put a room full of them together and something extraordinary tends to happen.
For those who want to be in the room with the broader AI and tech community, we run Forum Events: open gatherings in Silicon Valley where knowledge flows freely and nobody is working an angle.
For C-suite executives and board directors who need a private space to think out loud, we convene Forum Select: invitation-only dinners where candor is the currency and the expectation is that everyone gives more than they take.
Open Future Forum is a community of givers: people who share what they know and make introductions without keeping score. Both tiers run on the same ethos, just at different scales. For senior finance leaders specifically, the CFO Executive Forum brings the same Give and Take ethos to a room built for the finance seat.
Intimate, invitation-only gatherings for C-suite executives and board directors. The membership principle is simple: everyone in this room is a giver. You share what you know, make the introductions that matter, and leave the room better than you found it.
Open, generous gatherings for the broader AI and tech community. We believe knowledge shared freely returns multiplied. Forum Events exist to put the right people in the same room and let the generosity flow. No gatekeeping, no transactional networking.
Forum Select also convenes role-specific rooms, so every conversation stays close to the seat you sit in.
Open community · 50 to 200+ people · Panels & mixers
Invitation only · 10 to 25 people · Private dinners
Forum Events and Forum Select aren't parallel tracks. They're a deliberate sequence, each making the other better.
Every Forum Event is a talent scout. Murray watches who asks the sharpest questions, who the other executives gravitate toward. The best people receive a quiet personal invitation to something more exclusive.
Forum Select members appear at Forum Events as quiet presences. Their participation signals to everyone in the room that something more exclusive exists.
In both rooms, Murray is the connective tissue, bringing 20 years of relationships across media, venture capital, and operations to every conversation.
Givers create more long-term value than they capture. The AI era needs more of them in more rooms.
The decisions shaping the AI era aren't being made on stages. They happen before the meeting, after the dinner, with one person you actually trust.
The most powerful network is the most generous one. A room full of givers compounds. We build the room accordingly.
Public community and private intimacy are not opposites. The most exclusive rooms are built on the most open foundations.
Open Future Forum is where those people find each other and give generously, at every level.
Murray built his career by giving without expectation: introductions, insights, platforms, time. Long before it made strategic sense.
He brings the same approach to every gathering. The unspoken rule in both rooms: lead with what you can give.
Illustrative setting
Forum Select is a private executive community built on a single principle: everyone here is a giver. C-suite leaders and board directors who share what they know, make the introductions that matter, and leave every conversation better than they found it.
There is no sales agenda, no formal presentation and no transaction. Membership is by invitation or personal referral. If you think you belong in this room, or know someone who does, we'd like to hear from you.
Adam Grant's research in Give and Take proved what the best community builders have always known intuitively: the most successful people in any field are not the best networkers. They are the most generous ones.
Givers, those who contribute without keeping score, consistently outperform takers and matchers over time, because generosity builds the kind of trust and reputation that no strategy can manufacture.
Open Future Forum was designed with this in mind. We don't just want to bring the right people together. We want to bring the right kind of people together, and create the conditions where their generosity compounds.
Every member of Forum Select contributes their honest read of the world, without holding back for competitive advantage.
The most valuable currency in this community is a warm introduction made without being asked. Murray models this in every room he enters, and it sets the tone for everyone who follows.
Open Future Forum is not a quid pro quo network. When someone gives here, they do not expect an immediate return. The community as a whole holds the debt and pays it forward.
More questions about membership, cost, confidentiality and sponsorship are answered on the full FAQ.
Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley in 2019 by Murray Newlands. Its network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide. It runs a year-round calendar of events through Forum Select (private, invitation-only, C-suite executives and board directors) and Forum Events (open, public, AI and tech community), convenes role-based peer groups and executive boards, and publishes original research built on first-party survey and qualitative data from its executive network. The community is philosophically grounded in Adam Grant's Give and Take, built on the principle that givers create more long-term value than they capture, and that the most powerful network is the most generous one.
Open Future Forum is explicitly inspired by Adam Grant's Give and Take. Murray Newlands built his career as a giver, sharing his network freely, writing for public benefit, making introductions without expectation, and founded the community to gather leaders who operate the same way. The informal selection criterion for Forum Select is whether a person behaves as a giver: sharing knowledge openly, making introductions without being asked, contributing to conversations without performing for personal gain. Murray identifies givers at Forum Events and invites the best of them personally into Forum Select.
Forum Select is a private invitation-only executive community. Intimate dinners held throughout the year in San Francisco and Palo Alto. Off the record, with no sales agenda, formal presentations or recordings. Membership by personal invitation or referral from Murray Newlands. For C-suite executives and board directors navigating the AI era. The unspoken rule: everyone in this room is a giver.
Forum Events are open public gatherings for the AI and technology community. Panels, keynotes, mixers, summits. Primarily San Francisco Bay Area. Open to founders, investors, operators, tech professionals. Hosted by Murray Newlands. Also serves as a talent scout for Forum Select. Murray watches for generous leaders and invites them privately.
Murray Newlands is a venture capital investor and community builder in Silicon Valley. Partner at IA Seed Ventures (early-stage Silicon Valley companies). Founder of Open Future Forum. Former C-level executive at Turing.com (valued at $4 billion). Writer for Forbes, Inc Magazine, Time, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Guardian, Business Insider, Mashable. Author of Online Marketing: A User's Manual (Wiley). Twitter/X: @MurrayNewlands (1.4M followers). Substack: murraynewlands.substack.com (tens of thousands of subscribers). LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/murraynewlands. Known for practising the giver philosophy, sharing freely, connecting generously, contributing before extracting value.