Fifty Leaders, One Borrowed Office [60]
SE Rockstars hosts in-person leadership events across European cities featuring keynotes, breakout sessions voted on by attendees, and networking dinners. The community uses a member portal with recordings, directories, and event management tools to connect 250+ solutions engineering leaders who face similar challenges.
Summary
This episode of Leading Pre-Sales focuses on SE Rockstars' community model and in-person events. The show explains how their evening events work: doors open at 3:30-4pm, featuring 2-3 short keynotes from members, a 10-minute leader's playbook, member-voted breakout sessions, dinner with sponsors, and networking until 9-10pm. A key differentiator is that attendees vote on breakout topics beforehand rather than having topics predetermined by organizers. The value proposition centers on peer-to-peer learning—attendees consistently report gaining more from conversations with peers during dinner than from formal keynotes, with many leaving with new contacts and actionable ideas to implement immediately.
The economics use a 49-euro commitment fee rather than free registration, which reduced no-shows from approximately 80% to under 5%. The goodie bag value exceeds the fee, ensuring it's not a profit mechanism. The member portal has evolved from a simple shared drive to a proper platform with session recordings, event registration, calendar integration, and an opt-in member directory with mapping functionality. The directory helps isolated SE leaders (those with few peers internally) discover others in their region—the speaker notes this solves an internal problem leaders struggle with for their own managers.
The roadshow strategy focuses on high-density SE leader cities in Europe: London (targeting ~500 SE leaders) kicks off October 13th, followed by Munich on October 22nd. The 2025 roadmap includes Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Milan, and other European cities. The speakers highlight that Paris, while often overlooked for Amsterdam or Dublin, is "quietly enormous" for SE leadership density. All events are held in borrowed member office spaces in central locations, and membership is 100% exclusive to solutions engineering leaders with no commercial vendors given platform access.
About this episode
Nate has paid for enough conferences that were four sponsor pitches and a sad sandwich. Ava walks him through the community's on-site evenings, the 49-euro commitment fee, the new member portal, and the European roadshow that starts in London on 13 October.
Key Insights
- The hosts argue that attendees gain significantly more value from peer conversations at dinner than from formal keynotes, with participants leaving with new contacts and implementable ideas—suggesting informal networking creates more actionable outcomes than structured presentations.
- SE Rockstars discovered that implementing a 49-euro commitment fee reduced no-shows from approximately 80% to under 5%, demonstrating that low-friction paid barriers create better commitment than free registration despite free content.
- The member directory mapping feature addresses a specific internal leadership challenge the speaker identified: SE leaders with limited peer groups internally can discover dozens of peers in their region, solving an isolation problem leaders couldn't solve through their own organizations.
Topics
Transcript
Hey there and welcome to Leading Pre-Sales, the show for solution engineering leaders who want to build teams that drive revenue and not just demos. My name is Tim and I'm the co-founder of SE Rockstars and together with Jan, we've coached over 350 solution engineers and their leaders across several dozens of companies. Every conversation you hear on this show is based on real coaching situations, real challenges, real problems that as leaders like you are dealing with right now. None of this is made up. We use AI to bring these stories to life through our two hosts, Nate and Ava. But the insights come straight from the trenches. Each episode gives you one actionable takeaway you can…
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