Inside the Exclusive World of Capital Events Management (CEM)
An Invitation to the Experience I Valued Most
Over several years at billcara.com, I introduced readers to Capital Events Management (CEM) through the lens of their research and Partner’s Fund. Today, I want to pull back the curtain on the remarkable experience that truly defines CEM for its members.
Forget sterile webinars or crowded conference halls. CEM operates on a different plane. Their core event is an 18-company, single-day marathon of meetings for each member that attends. Picture this: from sunrise to sunset, you sit, one-on-one, across from the CEOs of capital-raise companies—early-phase, ambitious, sometimes revolutionary—each for a focused, intensive session.
The venues are as extraordinary as the access: Phoenix to the Bahamas, Whistler to Bermuda. It’s not about the luxury of these venues (though it’s present); it’s about removing all distraction to focus entirely on the people and the opportunity.
I was introduced to CEM late in my career, but for a few years, I participated in four of these conferences annually. They became the intellectual and fun highlight of my calendar. The quality was staggering. In those rooms, I met founders whose companies later achieved 20x growth. But I have to be blunt: investing at this stage is a high-stakes gamble—some of these ventures — as promising as they are — inevitably collapse. But the chance to look a visionary in the eye and assess their mettle is an unparalleled due diligence tool.
The eventful day culminates in a ritual that perfectly encapsulates CEM’s collaborative, high-IQ culture. All 48-64 attendees—a mix of high-net-worth individuals and seasoned investment advisers—reconvene. Each of us gets 30 seconds to name our top three companies of the day and explain our #1 pick.
The insight in that room is often electric. You hear a lifetime of investing intuition distilled into rapid-fire pitches. It’s classy, intensely informative, and forges a unique camaraderie among the members — people from all over North America and beyond. I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss it.
The Other Side of the Coin: The Partner’s Fund
This immersive, on-the-ground experience is the soul of CEM. The brain is their analytical and personal investment engine, exemplified by Ryan Iverson and the Partner’s Fund I discussed previously. There is never a company they present to its members they don’t also invest in.
While the conferences are about sourcing and qualitative judgment at the earliest stage, the Partner’s Fund is about applying rigorous, event-driven analysis to these opportunities. Ryan is the disciplined execution arm of CEM. The conferences provide a constant flow of ideas and market pulse; the fund provides the strategic focus.
Receiving Ryan Iverson’s latest report today was a welcome reminder to that world I lived and enjoyed so much. His focus on “The Corporate Unbundling” and specific catalyst-driven plays is the professional portfolio-manager counterpart to the raw, founder-driven energy of the conferences. Both are essential to understanding CEM’s ecosystem: one is about seeing the potential, the other is about mechanically capturing the value as it unfolds.
It’s this combination—the high-conviction, personal access of the conferences and Ryan’s disciplined, research-based strategy of the fund—that made CEM such a unique part of my professional life. Even in retirement, I loved seeing that report connect the dots… that’s the CEM magic.
To join the CEM list of attendees, as an investor or issuing company, you have to be referred by a member. If you have background, the stamina and are eager to participate, send me an email. Let’s chat.
Here’s a copy of Ryan Iverson’s report:
Neural Foundry—I agree. The energy is palpable when a small meeting room holds 64 internationally seasoned HNWIs and securities advisers. That's over 1,500 collective years of experience from investors and advisors who have just endured 18 grueling, 20-minute back-to-back pitches from CEOs and CFOs. The following Investor Breakout session is kept short at 30 minutes, so we get 30-seconds each, and the moderator (usually Ryan Iverson) has historically cut me off from rambling more than any other member.
The value is undeniable. A prominent mining CEO once confided to me apart from CEM that CEM taught him more about delivering a perfect 20-minute pitch—complete with time for introductions and a thank you—than any other forum. It's intense pressure for everyone, but by day's end, though exhausted, we're all ready for dinner and the party that follows.
The part about 30-second pitches at the end of these marathons is brilliant. That forced brevity makes people distill conviction from noise, and the public accountability aspect probably sharpens everyone's pattern recognition over time. I've done similar marathon pitch days in a diferent context and the exhaustion factor is real but also productive, like all the BS gets stripped away by hour 6. What's interesting is how this format sidesteps the usual conference theater where people chase whatever sounds hot and instead creates real stake in thoughtful evaluation.