The thing that happens after an acquisition is not what people expect. There is the close, and then there is the quiet, and the quiet takes on different textures depending on how long you were in the company and how much of yourself you put into it. With Breathwrk — three years, Peloton, 2025 — the quiet arrived with an unexpected question underneath it. Not what comes next, exactly. More like: who is the peer group for what comes next?
I had been building companies since 2009. SocialCode first, which we grew to a hundred million dollars in valuation and over a billion in annual media spend managed before I left in 2014. Then Decoded, the data-driven creative consultancy that S4 Capital acquired in 2018. Then Breathwrk. Three different companies, three different sectors, three different sizes and exit shapes. I know something about building, and I know something about the space between builds. But I had never been particularly systematic about the peer problem — who are the people who can tell me the thing I need to hear about what I am actually doing.
I started paying more attention after the Breathwrk close. Not because I was lost, but because I was beginning a new chapter with Jordan — Templo — and I wanted to think about it with people who had done something similar and could apply actual pressure to the reasoning. I went looking for the programs and communities that were supposed to be the answer to this question. What I found was illuminating, but not in the way I had hoped.
What I found
YPO was the first thing I looked at seriously. I had respected what I knew about it from the outside for years — the forum model, the confidentiality, the sustained peer accountability over time. The qualification criteria I met. What I found, in the chapters I explored, was that the gender composition of many forums made the specific peer exchange I was looking for harder to find. This is not a critique of YPO as an institution; it is a reflection of who runs companies at YPO-qualifying scale. The forums that were most useful for me would have required finding the right chapter, the right subforum, significant time investment. The benefit to cost ratio, for the specific problem I was trying to solve, was not obvious.
Chief I knew well enough — I had watched it grow from the outside and had friends who were members. The Core Group model is a genuine attempt to replicate the small-group peer exchange that YPO does in forums. What Chief faces is the math of scale: at several thousand members, the probability that your Core Group contains the right eight people — active operators with similar stages, contexts, and stakes — is lower than it would be in a program explicitly designed around that filter. Chief has grown because the need it addresses is real. The gap it cannot close is the gap between a curated eight-person room and a large professional network with a small-group program inside it.
Modern Elder Academy I looked at with genuine interest. Chip Conley built something real in Baja, and the testimonials are not manufactured — the program does what it says it does for the people it is designed for. But I was not in a transition. I was building. MEA is designed for the between-things moment; I was in the thick of something and wanted peer input on the something. It was the right program for a different state.
Hampton I knew from the outside: founder-oriented, small cohorts, a financial candor norm that produces honest conversations. The critique is simple: it skews male. Not because Sam Parr designed it that way, but because of who applied and was accepted in the early cohorts. For me specifically — a woman founder who has often been one of a small number of women in the rooms I have operated in — the peer group question is tied to the gender composition question. A group of ten founders, eight of whom are men, is a different room than a group of ten founders, all of whom have had the experience of running companies as women. The dynamics are not the same. The candor is not the same.
What I wanted instead
I was not looking for therapy. I was not looking for a framework. I was not looking for a keynote speaker or a whiteboard or a facilitator who would help me articulate my values. I had been building companies for fifteen years; I knew my values.
What I wanted was a small room — eight people at most — where everyone was in the middle of something real. Where the selection was tight enough that the peer exchange was actually between peers, not between a venture-backed CEO and a startup-of-one and a VP at a Fortune 500. Where there was enough time — four days, not two — for the group to get past the first-day version of each person and into the version that has something at stake and is willing to be honest about it. And where the environment was good — genuinely good, not a hotel conference room with attractive scenery — in a way that interrupted the performance reflex that high-achieving operators carry everywhere they go.
The body being involved was a deliberate piece of this. I had noticed, across the companies and the years, that the best conversations happened at edges — physical ones, temporal ones. After a run, on the way back from something, late in the evening when people were tired enough to drop the polish. The surf session was not a metaphor. It was a practical design choice: put the group in the water in the morning with local guides at one of the world's more forgiving waves, and the evening session runs differently. It is an empirical observation about how groups work, not a therapeutic claim about the ocean.
Why Templo
Jordan and I had been building Templo for reasons that predated the retreat program by several years. The property — five spaces on a lagoon corner in La Saladita, a hundred meters from one of the best longboard waves in Mexico — was built because we wanted to build it. The hexagonal shala because we wanted a yoga program that ran as a community offering, not a hotel amenity. The treehouse because we wanted that specific building, that copper tub, that view of the lagoon at first light.
The retreat program emerged from the property's design, not the other way around. A property with a hexagonal shala, five spaces, two ice baths, a barrel sauna, a pool, an edible garden, and a world-class wave a hundred meters away is already an architecture for concentrated peer exchange. The shala seats a group. The property holds eight people comfortably. The wave runs every morning.
Jordan's background was the missing piece I had not anticipated needing. A decade of professional surf coaching — Las Olas in Sayulita, Surf Simply in Nosara, Surf Sister in Tofino, three of the most technically rigorous surf coaching schools in the world — produces a specific kind of knowledge about how adults behave when they are out of their element. How they respond to frustration. What they need when they are frightened. What opens up when the body is engaged and the ego has nowhere to land. Jordan does not coach in the Saladita lineup — only local guides do, and we honor that rule — but she brings that decade of expertise to the facilitation design in ways that make the retreat work differently than it would if I ran it alone.
We co-facilitate. The division of labor is not formal, but the difference is real: I bring fifteen years of operating experience, three exits, and a particular set of pattern-recognitions about what founders get wrong when they are in growth. Jordan brings a physical intelligence about how groups move and what they need that is rare in professional peer programs.
What we built, and who it's for
The Templo executive retreat is not a general leadership development program. It is not for someone between chapters looking for what comes next. It is not for executives who want to work through personal patterns in a therapeutic setting. There are better programs for those needs, and I named them in the companion piece on this site.
It is for women and non-binary operators — founders, CEOs, C-level — at companies that are growing, post-investment, or in the middle of something with real stakes. People who are too busy to join an ongoing commitment like YPO, who have found the large networks too diffuse, who want the forum-model depth without the two-year ramp-up. People who, when they look at their peer group honestly, notice a gap between the peers they have and the peers they need.
The format is four days, Wednesday through Saturday, at Templo. Mornings in the water with local guides. Mid-morning facilitated peer sessions in the shala. Unstructured afternoons. Concentrated evening sessions around the table after dinner. Eight seats. Application-only. $15,000, all-inclusive at the property.
I built this because I went looking for it and it did not exist. I had the property, I had the co-founder with the right background, and I had, after three companies, a clear enough picture of what the format needed to be and what it needed to avoid. If this reads like the room you have been looking for, the 2027 calendar and application are at /retreats/.
— Addie Conner
La Saladita, May 2026