The world’s largest gathering of investment advisors took place last week at a conference called Future Proof in Huntington Beach, California. More than 3,000 people attended. 

The event was notable for both who arranged it and how it was organized. 

Future Proof is the brainchild of the pirates at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Tired of stuffy East Coast conferences, Barry Ritholtz and Josh Brown hosted their confab on the playa. 

With events ranging from sunrise yoga, surfing and a sound bath, it was designed to feel more Coachella than conference. Method Man and Redman performed. 

There were big-named speakers, of course, but also a heavy emphasis on networking that made it clear that the events were planned more to benefit attendees than sponsors.

To drive home the point of how different this was from most financial conferences, I created a side-by-side collage of two social media posts. 

One is a post from this year’s Future Proof; the other is from 2022’s Greenwich Economic Forum, an alternative investment event slated this year for the week of Oct. 4th. 

At Future Proof, Brown, a portfolio manager and blogger with more than 1 million Twitter followers, chats with “Bond King” Bill Gross, who appeared overdressed in a polo and jeans.  In the text, Brown describes Gross as the GOAT and OG.

The second photo is from last year’s event in Greenwich. Jennifer Prosek, managing partner at Prosek Partners, is pictured on a more traditional stage with Ken Kencel from Churchill Asset Management. Prosek writes about her experience in a more professional, formal manner. 

There is no one way to do a financial conference, of course. 

But there is one way they have generally been done and that’s the Greenwich way. 

Future Proof suggests we’ll see conferences become more casual in the future. 

There is another, bigger trend at play here. 

Most conferences fall into two camps. Either they are organized by event planners, think tanks or media companies and are open to anyone who pays to attend. Or they are organized for clients and closed. 

Ritholtz realized that there is no real barrier to entry. You don’t have to be a media company or event planner to host a conference. You just need to throw a great party. 

They targeted the industry for registered investment advisors and as an independent pulled off something Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, UBS and the big players in the RIA business probably couldn’t. 

By arranging an open event for its own industry, Ritholtz accrued a slew of benefits including brand recognition and connections across the industry that the bigger Wall Street firms would love to have.

What’s more, this is only Future Proof’s second year and they doubled attendance from last year. Josh Brown told me that next year would be even larger. 

Matt Ober, a general partner at the venture firm Social Leverage, said that event stood out for the open-air location and informality of food trucks and attendees in shorts. 

Ober said the best part was the variety of people from vendors to RIAs to asset managers and VCs and “speed dating” meetings which created efficient networking opportunities. 

I asked Brown why they decided to start hosting the event in the first place. 

“We started the event because we’re completely insane. Thank God it worked out.”