Is this retreat right for a CPO or CRO at a growth-stage company?

Yes. A Chief Product Officer or Chief Revenue Officer at a company that has crossed a Series A or B and is scaling into something genuinely new is a very strong fit. The problems at this stage — building a product org, managing a VP layer for the first time, calibrating revenue motion as the deal size changes — are the kind of problems that benefit most from peer input from people in comparable situations rather than from coaches or advisors who are two steps removed from the work. The format requires that participants bring specific, live problems. Post-funding CPOs and CROs typically have them in abundance.

I am a solo operator with a profitable small business. Is this for me?

Probably not yet. The retreat is designed for operators navigating decisions at scale — headcount, capital, market position, organizational structure. Pre-revenue or early-revenue solopreneurs are not wrong for wanting what this retreat offers, but the peer format works because the stakes in the room are roughly comparable. A founder managing a $400,000 salary business and a founder managing a $40M ARR business with a 60-person team are navigating fundamentally different risk surfaces. The room is more useful when the differences are textural (industry, geography, model) rather than structural (stage).

I am a C-level executive and I want individual coaching. Is this a match?

No. The Templo retreat is a peer format, not a coaching program. Addie and Jordan do not serve as advisors or coaches to individual participants during or after the retreat. The peer sessions are facilitated — there is structure, and there are questions Addie asks to keep the conversation useful — but the intelligence in the room comes from the other seven operators, not from the facilitators. If you are looking for an experienced executive coach to work through a specific problem with you one-on-one, that is a legitimate need and a different product. This is not that.

I do not surf and have no interest in trying. Is this a problem?

If you genuinely have no interest in ever entering the water, this retreat is probably not the right fit — not because surf competence is required, but because the morning session is the hinge the rest of the day turns on. Participants who sit out the surf session entirely lose the shared physical experience that changes the register of the evening sessions. What we are looking for is a willingness to try: to stand on a board in warm water with a local guide who knows this wave, to feel briefly out of your element, and to let that inform the conversation that night. La Saladita is one of the most forgiving waves in the world for that purpose. But we cannot manufacture the value of the surf session for someone who wants no part of it.

Is this retreat right for executives who want to network within their industry?

No. The Templo retreat is not designed for industry-specific networking. We actively weight cohort composition toward diversity of sector — a founder in fintech alongside a CEO in healthcare alongside a CPO in B2B SaaS alongside an operator building in climate. The peer exchange is more productive when participants are not each other's competitors, are not sharing a deal pipeline, and are not performing for an industry audience. The value is in the cross-sector pattern-matching and in the candor that becomes possible when no one in the room is positioning for the next funding announcement.

Who This Retreat Is For — and Who It Isn't

Q: Is this retreat right for a founder who just exited her company?

Yes — with a caveat. A third-time or fourth-time founder navigating the post-exit transition (figuring out what to build next, how to re-engage as a principal, whether to back companies or start them) is a strong fit. The peer session format works best when participants have live stakes and specific decisions in progress. If you exited recently and are genuinely deliberating — not just decompressing — you belong in the room. If the exit was six months ago and you are still in a holding pattern, wait until there is something concrete to work on. The peer exchange format is not therapeutic; it is operational.

The question worth answering honestly

We get it wrong as an industry. Most retreat programs describe who they are for in terms of aspiration — the language of transformation, the promise of breakthrough — and sidestep the harder question of fit. That is a disservice to the people reading, who are trying to make a sensible decision about four days of their time and a significant sum of money.

So this is the version I would want to read before committing. Not a list of attributes engineered to seem exclusive, but an honest sorting: the operator types where this format adds the most, and the ones where it adds nothing, or where a different program would serve better. I will be specific about both.

The format, briefly: eight seats, four days, application-only, women and non-binary operators, all at the property at La Saladita. Facilitated peer sessions morning and evening, local surf guides in the lineup each morning, unstructured afternoons. The sessions are not coaching; Addie and Jordan facilitate, not advise. The intelligence in the room comes from the other seven operators, applied to the specific problems each person brings.

Who this fits well

The clearest fits fall into five operator situations. Not personality types, not career stages — situations, which tend to be more diagnostic than either.

The third-time founder navigating exit-to-next

What the situation looks like You have exited once or twice before. The third company just closed — acquisition, merger, earnout completed — and you are in the first year of figuring out what the next version of your operating life looks like. You know how to build. You are less certain about whether to back companies, start them, or lead one at a different scale. The peer sessions work here because the deliberation is live, the stakes are real (capital, time, identity), and the people most useful to you are not advisors with pattern-matched frameworks but other operators who have made comparable decisions recently.
What the retreat adds Eight hours of peer attention over four days, compressed. You arrive with the specific question — build or back, operator or investor, this idea or that one — and leave having been genuinely challenged on the reasoning, not just affirmed. The physical environment helps: there is no conference room, no whiteboard, and the evening session happens after a morning in the ocean that has already interrupted the performance reflex.

The CPO or CRO at post-funding growth stage

What the situation looks like The company raised a meaningful round — Series B, maybe C — and the function you lead is now expected to scale into something it has not been before. You are building a team under a team for the first time, or calibrating a revenue motion that worked at $5M ARR but is cracking at $25M, or figuring out what a product org looks like when you need six people doing what you alone used to do. The people around you at your company are either your direct reports (who need you to have answers) or your peers on the leadership team (who are navigating their own versions of the same transition). Neither group is ideally positioned to be your sounding board on this particular problem.
What the retreat adds Access to a room of operators who have been through the specific scaling transition you are in. Not coaches who have observed it, not investors who have watched it from a remove — people who have navigated it as principals and can offer specific, opinionated input from that vantage point. The format makes room for that kind of candor.

The founder mid-pivot

What the situation looks like The original thesis is not working, or working slowly, and you are in the middle of a decision about what the company becomes next. The pivot is not obvious — if it were, you would have already made it. You have a board and advisors with opinions, but their incentives are not identical to yours, and the advice landscape around a pivot decision is reliably noisy. You need people who have been in the room where the original thing was not working and made a call, and can tell you what the deliberation actually looked like.
What the retreat adds A compressed window of peer input at the moment it matters most. Four days is long enough for the real shape of a decision to surface — what is actually driving the resistance, what has not been tried, where the reasoning has gaps. The format is designed for this: specific problem, live stakes, a room full of people who have navigated comparable decisions and have no particular interest in telling you what you want to hear.

The woman C-level at a company about to scale

What the situation looks like You are the CTO, CFO, or COO at a company that is smaller than your ambitions and is about to grow faster than its current systems support. You have built a function that works at this size. The question is whether it will hold at two or three times the headcount, the revenue, the complexity. You are the only person in your position at the company, which means no peers nearby who understand what you are managing.
What the retreat adds Peers who have been in your functional seat at a higher-scale company. The retreat is deliberately cross-functional in composition — we do not fill it with a room of CTOs or a room of CFOs, because the pattern-matching across functions is part of the value. A CFO who hears how a CTO navigated headcount scaling sometimes finds the exact analogy she needed. The cross-function structure is intentional.

The operator between roles

What the situation looks like You left your last role — by choice, by acquisition, by the company running out of road — and you are evaluating what comes next. You are not a solopreneur and not pre-career; you have operated at a meaningful level and are now deliberately choosing the next context. You want to think through the decision with people who have made comparable calibrations and who are not trying to recruit you, fund you, or sell you something.
What the retreat adds Space to deliberate without an audience that has a stake in the outcome. The peer session format — specific problem, time-boxed, with structured input from the group — is useful here precisely because the people in the room have no incentive other than to be honest. Four days at a remove from email and calendar is also, frankly, useful for thinking. That is not therapy; it is logistics.

Who this does not fit

This section matters as much as the one above. The wrong person in the room is a cost to the group — eight seats means every seat is load-bearing.

Pre-revenue solopreneurs. Not because the ambition is wrong or the problems are not real, but because the stakes are structurally different from the rest of the room. The peer format works when everyone is navigating decisions at roughly comparable scale. A founder managing a two-person side project and a CEO managing a sixty-person team are not wrong in kind, but the deliberation is not useful in either direction. We do not want to leave the first person feeling outgunned and the second feeling under-served. Apply when there is something real to work on with the group.

C-level executives seeking individual coaching. The retreat is not a coaching program. There is no one-on-one advisory track, no follow-up coaching package, and no relationship with Addie or Jordan that is structured as coach-client. If that is what you need — and it is a legitimate need — this is not the format. The value here is peer-to-peer, not facilitator-to-participant.

Executives looking for industry-specific networking. We weight cohort composition toward diversity of sector. A room full of fintech founders is interesting to fintech founders; a room of operators from fintech, climate, healthcare, media, and logistics is interesting to all of them. If you are coming to build a specific deal network or to be in a room with your direct-industry peers, this is not the right design. The conversations we want to enable require that no one in the room is each other's competitor, potential investor, or acquisition target.

People who don't surf and don't want to try. La Saladita is one of the world's most forgiving waves, and the local guides are experienced with complete beginners. No surfing competence is required. But the morning surf session is the hinge on which the rest of the day turns — the shared physical experience that changes the register of the evening conversation. If you have no interest in going near the water under any circumstances, the format will not deliver its full value. We are looking for willingness, not skill. A first session in warm water with a local guide who knows this break is genuinely accessible to almost anyone who wants it. The people who don't want it at all are a different conversation.

The peer session format surfaces what is already true. It does not install new frameworks. What we look for is evidence of live stakes and a disposition toward candor over performance.

The application and what happens next

The application is short and direct. We ask what you are working on, where the friction is, and what you want from four days of peer attention. We are not looking for a résumé or a polished narrative; we are looking for the actual situation, stated plainly. The most effective applications describe a specific problem, not a stage.

Addie and Jordan review every application. Admission decisions are made with the composition of the full cohort in mind — we accept people into a room, not in isolation. If the timing is wrong but the fit is right, we will hold your application for a future cohort before opening the seat publicly.

Each cohort is eight people. The inaugural late-2026 cohort runs at a founding-member rate of $11,250 — twenty-five percent below the standard price, in exchange for a written testimonial after the retreat and permission to be quoted in a case study. Standard pricing for the 2027 cohorts is $15,000, all-inclusive at the property. International flights to Zihuatanejo are not included.

If any of the operator situations above sound familiar, the application is worth thirty minutes of your time. If none of them fit, it probably is not the right moment — and we would rather tell you that here than after you have paid a deposit.

Questions before applying? Write us at hello@templosaladita.com

— Addie

Frequently asked questions

Is this retreat right for a founder who just exited her company?

Yes — with a caveat. Post-exit founders navigating what to build next are a strong fit when the deliberation is active and specific. If the exit was recent and you are genuinely working through a decision — not just decompressing — you belong in the room. If you are still in a holding pattern, wait until there is something concrete to work on with the group. The peer exchange format is operational, not therapeutic.

Is this the right retreat for a CPO or CRO at a post-Series-B company?

Yes. Post-funding C-level operators navigating their first experience of scaling a function into a new order of magnitude are among the strongest fits for this format. The problems — building a team under a team, calibrating a revenue motion that worked at $5M but is cracking at $25M, managing a VP layer for the first time — benefit enormously from peer input from people who have been in the same seat at a comparable scale.

Do I need to have founded a company to attend?

No. The room is open to founders, CEOs, and C-level executives. What matters is that you are operating at a meaningful level — making decisions with real stakes, managing a team, responsible for outcomes rather than tasks. We have admitted CPOs, CROs, CTOs, and CFOs alongside founders. The peer format works best when participants share operating context, not identical title history.

What makes a strong application?

The applications we find most useful describe a specific situation, not a stage. "I am a three-time founder figuring out whether to build or invest" is a situation. "I am a CEO at a growth-stage company and my product org is not scaling the way I need it to" is a situation. Generic descriptions of career achievement are less useful than an honest account of what you are working through and what eight hours of peer attention might move.

Can men attend?

Year-one 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. Mixed-gender cohorts may follow in 2028 depending on what the program learns from year one.

I am between roles but have operated at a senior level. Does that qualify?

Yes. Operators between roles — by choice, by acquisition, by the company running out of road — are a strong fit when the deliberation about what comes next is active. The peer format is useful precisely because the people in the room have no stake in your next decision. No one is trying to recruit you, fund you, or sell you something. What they can offer is honest peer input from comparable operating experience.

Who this retreat is for — and who it isn't