Open Future Forum has been convening senior leaders in Silicon Valley since 2019. The work is consistent and slow. The rooms are small. The compound effect across six years is large.
Forum Select runs five recurring private dinner series, each built around a senior function or audience. All are off the record. All are by invitation. None charge a membership fee. Each room has its own co-hosts, themes and rhythm.
Private dinners for sitting CFOs and senior finance leaders. Topics include AI ROI measurement, the new reporting cadence, and how to communicate AI investment to public-company boards. Held in San Francisco and Palo Alto.
Forum Select for CFOs →Private dinners for public-company board directors. Co-hosted with a senior board director and convened at Fremont Hills Country Club in Los Altos Hills. First session theme: quantum computing for the boardroom. Future themes include AI governance, cybersecurity liability and climate disclosure.
AI and board governance →Private dinners for Chief Information Security Officers and senior security leaders. Recurring themes include AI security threats, agentic AI risk, identity and authorisation for systems that act on behalf of users, and what to brief boards on. San Francisco Bay Area.
Forum Select for CISOs →Private dinners for CEOs of companies at scale, generally $100M+ in revenue or significantly venture-backed. Convened by Murray Newlands with a rotating senior co-host. Past co-hosts include Catalyst Solutions and eChai Ventures. Sponsorship from a single non-competing partner per dinner.
Silicon Valley CEO dinners →A cross-suite dinner for CISOs, CIOs and CTOs working on enterprise AI deployment and agentic system security. Convened at Fremont Hills Country Club with industry partners on identity, authorisation and agent governance.
Forum Select for CISOs →Open Future Forum has hosted speakers from the front of AI research and operations across the Forum Events tier. Forum Select dinners themselves are off the record, with no stage and no agenda. The following speakers and panelists, among many others, have featured at Forum Events.
VP of AI Experience at Airbnb. Co-founder of Siri, Viv Labs, Sentient and Gameplanner.ai. Founding member of Change.org. Has spoken on AI products at Forum Events.
Education Fellow at Stanford. Former Director of Research and Search Quality at Google. Former Head of Computational Sciences at NASA. Co-author of the standard AI textbook used in over 1,500 universities.
CEO of Medeloop.ai. Adjunct Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Has spoken on AI agents for clinical research at Forum Events.
General Counsel at Midjourney. Owner of Open Advisory Services. Has spoken on the legal architecture of buying and selling AI, including model licensing and IP.
President and COO of Native Voice. Former VP at Shazam. Has spoken on voice AI and signal-to-noise in agentic systems.
CEO and Co-founder of WaveAI. Professor at Santa Clara University. Has spoken on AI for creativity and the future of human-AI co-creation.
Vice President and Head of Engineering for the SAP Business Network Core Platform at SAP. Has spoken on enterprise generative AI deployment at scale.
Speak About AI. Frequent moderator and host at Open Future Forum keynote events, guiding the conversation across speakers and panels.
Open Future Forum partners with technology platforms, venture firms, banks, law firms and other senior-leader communities to convene the right rooms. Partners co-host dinners, sponsor events, contribute speakers, host events at their campuses, and help with guest selection.
Has partnered with Open Future Forum across venue, sponsorship and AI programming. Microsoft research, engineering and product leaders have participated in Forum Events.
Has partnered with Open Future Forum on AI programming. Google research and engineering leaders have spoken at and attended Forum Events.
Has partnered with Open Future Forum on AI programming. Meta engineering and product leaders have participated in Forum Events focused on applied AI.
Host of Open Future Forum events at its Silicon Valley campus and sponsor across AI keynote programming. SAP engineering and product leaders have spoken on enterprise generative AI deployment at scale.
Silicon Valley venture firm. Sponsor of Open Future Forum AI keynote programming and partner across founder and operator events.
Murray Newlands is Partner at IASV Seed Ventures, an early-stage Silicon Valley investor in AI and technology. Open Future Forum draws on the IASV network for themes, speakers and senior attendees.
The bank serving the technology and venture community. Partner on Open Future Forum events for CFOs, CEOs and senior finance leaders across the Bay Area.
Major North American bank. Partner on Open Future Forum CFO and CEO dinner programming, contributing venue and sponsorship support.
Private banking partner. Has worked with Open Future Forum on CFO and CEO dinner programming, board director gatherings, and senior wealth and finance themes.
Global founder community running Startup Touchdown dinners in San Francisco, Dubai, Singapore and London. Co-hosted the CEO Private Dinner at ROOH Palo Alto in April 2026.
National law firm whose Silicon Valley partners sponsor and contribute themes for the CFO Dinner Series and CEO Private Dinner.
Executive advisory firm whose senior partners co-host the CEO Private Dinner Series and contribute on themes relevant to chief executives at scale.
A Silicon Valley security community that has co-hosted CISO dinners with Forum Select, drawing on its existing network of senior security leaders.
Forum Select dinners are off the record so individual attendees are never named publicly. The employer affiliations of past attendees across both tiers are not a secret. The following brands are represented in the rooms.
Meta, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, SAP, Twilio, VMware, Airbnb.
JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Visa.
Accenture, Fujitsu, Deloitte, Roche, Lowes, Deutsche Telekom.
Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, SoftBank, 500 Global, Plug and Play, Race Capital, Yes VC, Propel VC, 7Percent Ventures, LG Ventures.
Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Yale, Columbia, Brown, UC Davis, NASA, Santa Clara University.
The list above is representative, not exhaustive. Attendance is by individual seat, not by company seat. The room is selected for seniority and generosity of the individual, not for the badge on their employer.
The venue is part of the format. Forum Select dinners take place in private rooms that signal seriousness without performance. Forum Events host larger gatherings at platform partner campuses. The venues below cover both.
Los Altos Hills, California. Recurring venue for the Public Board Member Dinner Series and the Enterprise AI and Agentic Security Dinner. Private dining room, classic format, no foot traffic.
Palo Alto, California. Used for the CEO Private Dinner Series. Upscale Indian restaurant with a private dining room suitable for 10 to 20 guests around a single table.
Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus has hosted Open Future Forum events including the AI Keynotes at Microsoft evening with 363 attendees.
SAP's Silicon Valley campus has hosted Open Future Forum events on enterprise AI deployment, generative AI in business applications, and the platform shifts coming for finance and supply chain.
Site of the AI Symposium and earlier Open Future Forum gatherings. Used selectively for events where a more open, café-style format fits the audience and theme.
Forum Select dinners rotate among a small number of distinctive private venues in San Francisco and Palo Alto. Specific venues are shared with invited guests.
Across the past two years, the rooms have drawn recurring attendees from the following functions and sectors.
By function:
By sector:
The common thread is not industry. It is seniority and generosity. Members are expected to give first and keep score never.
A selection of events from the past several months gives a sense of the rhythm and range.
An open Forum Event hosted at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. 363 attendees. Nine keynotes across two hours. Speakers included Adam Cheyer (Airbnb, co-founder of Siri), Peter Norvig (Stanford, formerly Google and NASA), Rene Caissie (Medeloop.ai, Stanford School of Medicine), Max Sills (Midjourney), Katie McMahon (Native Voice, former VP at Shazam), Maya Ackerman (WaveAI, Santa Clara University) and Anubhav Bhatia (SAP). Murray Newlands hosted the evening. Sponsors included Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, SAP, Speak About AI, Beyond Imagination, The Agentic, Smart Meetings and ACG.
First session of the Public Board Member Dinner Series. Theme: quantum computing for the boardroom. Venue: Fremont Hills Country Club. Format: private off-the-record briefing followed by open conversation among public-company directors.
Cross-suite dinner for CISOs, CIOs and CTOs on enterprise AI deployment and agentic security. Venue: Fremont Hills Country Club.
An event during Fintech Week SF for engineering leaders building agentic systems in fintech, focused on identity, authorisation and operational risk in agentic workflows.
A CEO Private Dinner at ROOH Palo Alto for CEOs of companies that have raised significant venture capital. Co-hosted with eChai Ventures, the global founder community.
Three Open Future Forum events convened around NVIDIA GTC week: the Frontier Room, the Secure AI Factory and the GTC Mixer. Drew investors, CISOs, CTOs and GTM leaders from across the AI stack.
Open Future Forum was founded in 2019 but the convening work goes back further. Earlier projects that informed how the community operates today include:
These earlier projects taught what worked and what did not. Open Future Forum's current format, two tiers built on the Give and Take philosophy, is the distilled version.
The recurring rooms, the partner organisations and the venues above are the substrate of Open Future Forum. The membership method is the same as it has been since 2019: invitation, referral, or attend a Forum Event and behave generously.