What most offsites get wrong
The standard executive offsite runs like this: a hotel conference room in an attractive location, a facilitator with a whiteboard, a schedule that begins with agenda-setting and ends with action items. The setting is incidental. The conversations happen in the margins — at the bar after dinner, on the walk between sessions — and those are the only conversations anyone remembers a year later.
This is not an accident of execution. It is a feature of the format. Most offsites are built to produce the appearance of alignment: slides presented, consensus recorded, everyone back on a plane by Sunday. The format keeps things comfortable. Comfortable is not the same as useful.
The people in that room — competent, articulate, used to performing intelligence under observation — are often the hardest to reach. Their sophistication is a defense mechanism as much as a skill. The real tensions in a leadership team rarely surface in structured conversation. They surface when the structure is interrupted: when the body is doing something unfamiliar, when the hierarchy has nowhere to go because everyone is equally out of their element, when dinner runs long and no one has anything left to perform.
What we built at Templo is a different architecture. Four days at the edge of the Pacific, in a place that is genuinely good at what it does — a longboard wave a hundred meters from the door, a hexagonal shala in the trees, a property built by hand over years by people who live here. The program runs in the spaces between. Facilitated peer sessions in the shala. Shared meals. Mornings in the ocean with local guides who know this wave better than anyone. Ice bath and sauna and long afternoons with nothing scheduled.
We do not promise outcomes. We design conditions. What happens in those conditions depends on who is in the room.
The four days
Each cohort takes Templo for four days, Wednesday through Saturday. The entire property — all five spaces, the shala, pool, ice baths, barrel sauna, edible gardens — is yours.
The daily rhythm runs roughly like this: before the heat arrives, there is breath and movement in the shala, quiet and undemanding. Then the morning surf window with local Saladita guides in the lineup — typically two to three hours, depending on conditions and ability. No one is required to surf; the option is simply always there. By mid-morning, everyone is back at the property. Food appears. The shala opens for a facilitated peer session — ninety minutes to two hours, structured enough to be useful, loose enough to let things emerge.
Afternoons belong to individuals. The pool, the ice baths, the barrel sauna in the treehouse, the hammock, the walk to the point. The edible garden produces herbs and fruit throughout the stay. The ocean is a hundred meters away and available at any hour. We do not fill the afternoon. The afternoon fills itself.
Evenings are the densest part of the day. Dinner together — cooked at the property, long, with wine — and then the working session that the morning earned. This is where the actual peer exchange happens: specific problems, live stakes, the kind of candor that arrives after a day of shared physical experience. We run these structured; we do not run them formal.
The architecture over four days moves from arrival and orientation on Wednesday evening, through two full working days, to a closing half-day Saturday that is designed for integration rather than summary. There is no keynote. There is no closing-circle exercise. Saturday morning is the ocean and a final session, and then people leave for their flights.
Addie + Jordan
We host together because we bring different things to the same problem.
Addie Conner
Addie has founded and exited three technology companies. Most recently Breathwrk, acquired by Peloton in 2025. Before that, Decoded, the data-driven creative consultancy acquired by S4 Capital in 2018. And before that, SocialCode, which she scaled to a $100M+ valuation managing more than a billion dollars in annual media spend. She served on the Facebook Product Council on advertising measurement, auction design, and identity. Her degree from the University of Vermont is in economics, statistics, and history.
She has been in the rooms that these retreats are designed to improve. She knows what it costs when a leadership team cannot surface what is actually true. The things she built in technology — modeling behavior, designing systems, running controlled experiments — apply to retreat design in ways that were not obvious until she started doing both.
Jordan Smith
Jordan runs Templo day to day. Before this she spent a decade as a professional surf coach with instructor tenure at three of the most technically rigorous coaching programs in the world: Las Olas Surf Safaris for Women in Sayulita, Surf Simply in Nosara, and Surf Sister Surf School in Tofino. She does not coach in the Saladita lineup — only local guides do, and we honor that — but ten years of teaching adults to move through an unfamiliar physical medium leaves a specific kind of expertise: how people respond to being out of their element, what they need when they are frightened or frustrated, what changes when the body is engaged and the ego has nowhere to hide.
Jordan is the reason the property functions. She is also the reason the facilitation works at a register that pure strategy retreats rarely reach.
The wave, and the rule
La Saladita is a left-hand point break on Mexico's Pacific coast in Guerrero state, approximately 180 kilometers south of Manzanillo and 45 minutes north of Zihuatanejo. It is consistently ranked among the world's finest longboard waves: mellow, long, and reliable, with rides that regularly run several hundred meters from the point to shore. Warm water year-round. A lineup that has been surfed by the same community for decades.
The rule at La Saladita is simple and worth naming explicitly: surf coaching in this lineup is done by local Saladita guides only. This is a community standard that the village has maintained and that we take seriously. Jordan has a decade of professional surf coaching behind her, and she does not coach in this water. The local guides do. Their knowledge of this particular wave — the tides, the sets, the channels, the etiquette — is not something that transfers from a coaching credential elsewhere. It is specific, accumulated, and theirs.
For this retreat, that separation is useful. Local guides handle the instruction in the water; Jordan brings her decade of teaching-adults-in-bodies expertise to the facilitation framing onshore. Most surf retreats blur these roles. We don't. The surf session is a shared morning practice for a group of operators, not a performance evaluation. The local guides make that possible.
If you do not surf or have never tried, La Saladita is one of the most forgiving waves available for a first session. The guides are experienced with beginners. Nothing about the retreat requires surf competence. The water is simply there, every morning, available.
Who is in the room
Y1 cohorts — the inaugural late-2026 cohort and all four 2027 dates — are for women and non-binary operators. This is a deliberate choice for the first year, not a permanent constraint. We are building the program inside a community of operators where a certain kind of directness and shared experience can move fast. Mixed-gender cohorts may follow.
Within that frame, we are looking for founders, CEOs, and C-level executives at companies that are growing, post-investment, or mid-transition. People who have already cleared the credibility hurdle and are now navigating something harder: scale, team, the gap between what the company says it is and what it actually does day to day.
Self-selection matters here. This is not the right retreat for someone who wants to be told what to do next. The peer session format surfaces what is already true; it does not install new frameworks. What we look for in applications is evidence of genuine stakes — something live and real that would benefit from eight hours of peer attention over four days — and a disposition toward candor over performance.
English-speaking. Global. We expect participants from the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and English-speaking founders from Bangalore, Berlin, Singapore, Dubai, and beyond. Eight seats means the room is small enough to be honest.
Dates, price, and how to apply
An inaugural cohort runs late 2026, followed by four fixed cohorts in 2027 — each Wednesday through Saturday:
Each cohort is eight seats. The price is $15,000 per seat, all-inclusive at Templo Saladita. This covers four days and three nights of accommodation at the property, all meals, facilitated sessions, daily surf access with local guides, and use of all property amenities. International flights and travel insurance are not included.
Admission is application-only. We do not offer rolling enrollment; each cohort is reviewed and filled as a group. If you are accepted and the timing doesn't work, we will invite you to a future cohort before opening the seat publicly.
$15,000 per seat · all-inclusive · 8 seats per cohort
Four days at Templo Saladita. Meals, sessions, surf, amenities included. International flights not included. Application required.
Apply for a 2027 cohortFrequently asked questions
Questions before applying? Write us at hello@templosaladita.com
— Addie & Jordan