WE BUILT THE ROOM YOU’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.
10 Series A and B founders, carrying the same weight you are.
4 days in Las Vegas doing hard things. F1 week as the backdrop.
A guest CEO who's already successfully built what you're building,
in a setting intimate enough to ask the questions you can't ask anywhere else.
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November 18 - 22, 2026
Las Vegas
The Environment Is the Strategy
Every Vanguard Apex starts with one question: who needs to be in this room, and what does the room need to do to them?
Nothing about the weekend is incidental. The peer group is assembled deliberately, ten founders at the same altitude, so no one is the most or least experienced person present, and everyone can speak as an equal. The intensity is calibrated on purpose, enough physical and intellectual pressure to build real trust in days rather than the months it would otherwise take. And the rhythm is engineered, a deliberate sequence of adrenaline and stillness that creates the conditions for honest conversation instead of hoping it happens.
You may already belong to a founder community. The good ones are genuinely valuable, and if you're in one, keep it. What they build over a year of monthly meetings, we compress into four days, because shared intensity does something scheduled conversation can't. Trust that would take twelve sessions to earn gets built in one morning on a track and one cold plunge nobody wanted to get into. The founders you meet here don't become contacts you develop over time. They become people who watched you at your limit by Thursday.
This is the part most events get backwards. They book a venue, fill seats, and hope the magic shows up in the hallways. We build the conditions that make it inevitable. The composition of the group, the pacing of the four days, the balance between the track and the quiet; every piece is chosen to produce something a conference room never will: a room of people operating without their armor, getting to the real work faster than they thought possible.
That's the difference between an experience and an expense. One you endure and forget. The other changes how you operate at home.
We Do Hard Things Together
The breakthroughs don't happen in a session. They happen at 9 a.m. on a racetrack with your heart rate climbing, when someone you met yesterday watches your line through turn four and offers up their take. They happen in a cold plunge nobody's thrilled to get into, and the laughing that gets you through the shivers afterward. They happen over lunch when the conversation finally drops past the pitch and into the thing you've actually been wrestling with.
We do hard things together on purpose. Four days of them. The track, the cold, the early starts, the long conversations. Not for the difficulty's sake. For what meeting it together does: it strips the armor off ten people forced to be very good at keeping it on, and what's left is the most honest peer group you've ever had. You'll leave sharper, steadier under pressure, and no longer carrying it alone.
Your Only Job is to Show Up
The rarest thing a founder gets is a stretch of days where nothing competes for their attention. No logistics. No decisions about where to be, when to eat, how to get there. No friction at all.
Our operations team runs silently throughout the entire weekend. Transfers, accommodations, dining, scheduling, every request in between, handled before you think to ask. The architecture is invisible by design. You won't notice it working. You'll notice that your mind is quieter than it's been in months.
That quiet is the point. When the logistical noise disappears, the bandwidth opens for the only thing that matters here: being fully present with your peers, fully immersed in the experience, and finding highly relevant answers to the questions you’ve been stacking for months but never get the opportunity to ask the right people.
The Agenda
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The weekend starts the moment you land. Concierge handles everything from the tarmac forward, so the only thing you arrive with is yourself.
That evening, the ten of you are in the same place for the first time. A private welcome dinner, no agenda, no presentations. Good food and the first real conversations about what's actually on your mind right now. By the end of the night you already have a feel for who's in the room.
The real work starts tomorrow.
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We head to the racetrack, and we're not treating it like a joyride. Every run is fully instrumented: video of your drive, real-time telemetry for every input. Braking points, throttle, steering, apex timing, sector splits.
Between runs, a master motorsport coach breaks your data down corner by corner. Not generalities. Where you lost two-tenths. Where your eyes went before your hands followed. Then you go back out and test the fix, and you feel the improvement in the seat immediately.
The peer dynamic is the part most track days never produce. By midday the conversation between runs shifts from competition to collaboration. "Watch my line through four and tell me what you see." Experienced drivers and first-timers trading honest feedback, everyone faster by the end of it than they were alone.
That evening: the Paddock Club for practice sessions, a VIP paddock tour, a pit lane walk, and world-class dining. The conversations from the track come with you.
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Yesterday was adrenaline. Today is the opposite, on purpose.
The morning is a hands-on somatic regulation session with Remedy Place. Pilates and stretching for the soreness, guided breathwork, and a cold plunge, nobody's thrilled to get into. Expect nervous laughter and a few people who'd rather be anywhere else. That's the point. Doing the uncomfortable thing together, and coming out the other side of it together, does something no scheduled icebreaker can.
Then the group convenes for the weekend's first real working conversation. What's working, what isn't, how AI is reshaping your teams, and what the next twelve months actually look like. The walls came down on the track. They stay down here.
Evening returns to the Paddock Club for final practice and qualifying. By now, you're not strangers watching a race. You're peers with shared history, two days deep.
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Everything builds to Saturday. Two days of doing hard things together have already stripped the armor off. The session meets the room where it is.
Led by a CEO who's already successfully built what you're building, this is a full working day, from breakfast through a working lunch into the afternoon. The ground is set ahead of time, but where the day actually goes is read, in real time, in the room. The weekend becomes the material. The feedback loop from the track becomes a conversation about where you're holding on too tight and not trusting the people around you. The discomfort of yesterday becomes a conversation about what you've been avoiding.
From there, it goes where founders rarely get to go. The decisions that scare you, and the fear of being wrong about them. Who you're really measuring yourself against, and whether that scoreboard is even yours. Who still belongs in your circle now that the stakes have changed, and who you're keeping out of loyalty instead of best judgment. Hiring fast enough without hiring wrong, firing fast enough without losing control of your team’s culture. What the climb is doing to the people who knew you before this started, and to your own mind, whether either one is holding up as well as you let on. These are the conversations you can't have with your board, your team, or your co-founder. They happen here because of what this group has been through together.
You leave with clarity. Not a to-do list. Clarity about what you're carrying, what to relieve yourself of, and what the people around you actually need from you. The kind that comes from being seen by people who carry the same weight.
Then off to the Paddock Club for the championship race. The conversations don't stop. They just change venues.
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Checkout and a final breakfast together. Concierge manages every transfer, to the FBO for private departures or to Harry Reid for commercial, handled the same way it's been handled all weekend: completely, and without you having to think about it.
You return home with a clearer head, nine peers who now know the real version of you, and the kind of perspective that only shows up when you get far enough outside the business to see it. The group chat stays active. The connections hold. Monday feels different.
What You Take With You
You don't leave with a binder or a slide deck. What this weekend produces lives in what shifts during it and what holds after.
The capstone is a full working day led by a CEO who has already built what you're building. Not a coach, not a facilitator running a framework, someone who has sat in your exact chair, made the calls you're facing, and come out the other side. The session connects everything the weekend surfaced, the decisions made under pressure on the track, the honesty the discomfort produced, to how you're actually leading right now. It goes where most executive programming is too polished to reach: what you're carrying, what you've been avoiding, and whether the way you're operating still serves the thing you're trying to build.
You leave with three things that compound. Sharper judgment under pressure, from a weekend spent making real decisions with incomplete information and immediate feedback. A peer group built on shared intensity rather than exchanged business cards, nine founders you can call who will tell you the truth. And clarity, about your blind spots, your next moves, and what the people around you actually need from you.
The strategic work still happens when you get back. The difference is you're doing it with a clearer head, stronger conviction, and people on the other end of the phone who actually understand the weight.
Who This Is For
You chose the hardest career there is. This is for the few who'd choose it again.
The Vanguard Apex is built for Series A and B founders. Past the scrappy beginning, into the part nobody warned you about. You've raised real money, you're carrying real weight, and the decisions only get heavier from here. You're good at making it look handled. Most days it is.
This room is for the founder who wants ten peers at exactly this stage. Not mentors, not a network, not a thousand badges in a convention hall. Nine other people who are building what you're building, right now, and one who's already done it.
If you're looking for a conference, this isn't it. If you want to be sold to, coached at, or added to someone's funnel, you'll be happier elsewhere. But if you've been quietly wishing for a room of people who actually get it, the ones you can talk straight with because they're in it too, you've found it.
Request a Seat
Here's what we won't pretend: this is the first room.
There's no alumni page, no testimonial reel, no highlight video from last year, because there was no last year. What there is: twenty-eight years beside CEOs, one CEO who's successfully built what you're building, a weekend engineered down to the hour, and ten seats being filled one deliberate conversation at a time. You're not buying a track record. You're being invited to become one. The founders in the first room aren't attendees of an institution. They're the reason it exists, and every cohort after this one will be measured against the ten of you.
The Vanguard Apex is limited to ten founders, selected for fit. This isn't first-come, first-served. The room only works if the right people are in it, so every seat is approved before any payment is made.
The process is simple. You request a seat. We talk, briefly, to make sure the room is right for you and you're right for the room. If it's a fit, you're in, and we handle the rest from there.
Investment: $50,000 per founder (including 3-day VIP Paddock Club Passes)
Once you're approved, a 50% deposit secures your place, the CEO, the venue, and F1 hospitality for the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend. Paddock and circuit access is limited and committed well in advance, so seats are confirmed in the order deposits are received among approved founders.
The room stays small. Ten founders, by design. F1 VIP hospitality for the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend is limited and moves fast. Once the cohort is set, it's set.
Concierge. Extended stays, hospitality upgrades, and personal requests beyond the standard package are welcome and handled by our team, billed separately to the payment method on file.
Deferral and credit. The 50% deposit is non-refundable, since it commits the venue, hospitality, and the guest CEO's time on your behalf well ahead of the weekend. Anything paid above the deposit is preserved in full as a credit toward a future Vanguard Apex experience. No portion is returned as cash. Genuinely extenuating circumstances may be considered at the sole discretion of PhoenixNormand Events.
Tax. Packages may include components treated differently for tax purposes, and deductibility depends on your circumstances. Consult your own tax advisor. Itemized invoicing is available on request and reflects the calendar year of the experience.
