Why the Most Valuable Conversations in Startup Space Happen Off the Record

What gets shared publicly in the startup space industry is often considered, measured, and shaped for an audience. Despite the nature of social media, it is often a one-way communication. It's useful, but it's one layer of a much deeper conversation.

CodeBase's Closed Door Dinners series is built for what sits underneath: the kind of exchange that only happens when experienced operators are in a room together, off the record, and thinking out loud.

The format is deliberately simple: a carefully curated group of senior leaders gathered around one table for three uninterrupted hours with no agenda beyond honest exchange. What's discussed stays in the room, and that's precisely what makes it work.

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Who's in the Room

There's intentionally no application process. Everyone in the room is present by invitation only. The goal isn't just to fill a room but to build one where the conversations actually compound in value and go somewhere. That means thinking carefully about the mix of experience, sector, and stage at the table, and making sure everyone there has something real to contribute and something real to gain.

The series has brought together senior engineering leaders from high-growth companies across London, Scotland, and, next up, Dublin. CTOs operating at the knife-edge of unprecedented transformation, where AI has rewritten the rules faster than any playbook can keep pace. We brought them together because when the terrain is uncharted, the people best placed to help you navigate it are the ones already in the trenches, advancing the frontier themselves.

The first dinner, co-hosted with Barclays Eagle Labs and Duku AI, brought together CTOs from high-growth businesses spanning seed stage to 400-plus employees. Collectively, the room represented £300m+ in ARR and £200m+ in funding raised, with backers including Y Combinator, Epic Games, Warner Music Group, Index Ventures, and Mayfair Equity Partners. The experience they brought with them was hard-won at Amazon, Google, Meta, Goldman Sachs, and Citi. The second dinner raised the bar further. The room included Kevin Kerr, VP of Engineering at Skyscanner, James MacIver of Phlo, the 13th fastest growing tech company in the UK, Iria del Rio, Head of AI at rapidly scaling fintech Aveni, and Ryan Anderson, co-founder and CTO of Sentient Studios, from the founders of FanDuel, who had announced a $10 million raise the day before.

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The Kind of Conversations That Move Things

No two dinners cover the same ground. The topic shifts with the room, shaped by whoever's sitting at the table and what's actually live for them right now. These aren't curated panel discussions with predetermined takeaways. They're rather designed to be working conversations, led by experience, driven by the problems operators are genuinely trying to solve.

The London CTO dinner went deep on AI in production. The specifics stay in the room, but the shape of the conversation will be familiar to anyone leading an engineering team right now. How engineering risk shifts when AI is doing more of the heavy lifting. What's actually working inside real teams, and what isn't.

That's the kind of conversation that shapes how technical leaders actually make decisions. It doesn't happen at panels or big gatherings. It happens here, and that's what separates information from intelligence.

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Why This Exists

Ecosystems run on trust, and trust accumulates in moments of genuine exchange between people navigating the same terrain. The Closed Door Dinner series creates the conditions for that. Small enough to be honest. Curated enough to be useful. Consistent enough to build on.

For everyone involved, the series is an extension of the same thinking: that the highest-value thing you can offer a senior leader isn't another event. It's access to a room where the conversation is the product.

Watch this space for how the series evolves.

More cities. More disciplines. The same commitment to keeping the table small and the conversation real.

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