Conference News: Clubhouses, Fun & Games at SXSW and Web Summit; Coming up – Sustainability & Mobility Events
Join the Club(house) at SXSW: Brand new in 2026, SXSW will debut Clubhouses for the Innovation, Film & TV, and Music communities. Imagine a central SXSW “neighborhood” that provides a home base, hangout, networking – and maybe even refreshments. Clubhouse hours vary by festival. From 12 March-18 March from noon to 10pm, the Innovation Clubhouse will run in Brazos Hall and the Film & TV Clubhouse will run at 800 Congress; while the Music Clubhouse runs 13 March-18 March from noon-8pm. And take note: To attend, SXSW goers will need the matching badge – or a Platinum badge to visit all three Clubhouses!
All Fun & Games at Web Summit: Web Summit likes to ensure that companies on its stages are representative of each region where the event takes place. For that reason, Web Summit Vancouver will add a track for Film and a track for Gaming to the agenda this year. Vancouver is North America’s second largest filmed entertainment production center after Los Angeles. The region is also home to gaming giants such as Electronic Arts, Relic Entertainment, The Coalition, Kabam, and Blackbird Interactive, plus hundreds of indie studios working in mobile, AR/VR, and experimental games. You can find a list of all of the tracks happening at Web Summit when it returns to Vancouver on 11 – 14 May here.
Submission Opportunity: LWTSQUAD Summit gathers 500 leaders from the Lesbians Who Tech and Allies community – operators, executives, founders, and decision-makers – to discuss “what’s actually working in their teams and organizations.” And they are now seeking speakers to lead leadership conversations, develop hands-on workshops, or share case studies. They are interested in anyone who has “led through rapid growth or transformation, navigated AI adoption or organizational change, or built systems, culture, or strategy that others are trying to replicate.” If you have a topic idea, submit via their online form as soon as possible. They will review applications on a rolling basis.
Lunchtime Learning: The MIT Sloan CFO Summit, started in 2002, is one of the premier CFOs events in the US, bringing together cross-industry senior financial executives and leading faculty from MIT. The annual event offers a day of interactive learning and thought-provoking discourse on the future of finance, accounting, and business. To understand the breadth of the topics covered, check out the videos from last year’s event. They feature sessions on AI Compute: Powering the Past, Present, and Future of Business Solutions; Risk & Resilience for CFOs; How To Lead, Structure, and Manage Change; The CFO Career Path – Routes, Detours and Building Big, Building Fast and Growing Fair.
Coming Up Next Week: MWC Barcelona gets underway 2 March under the theme “The IQ Era,” exploring how human insight and tech prediction intersect in this new age of intelligence, as well as the implications for leaders across the connectivity ecosystem, broader tech, and policy. At Executive Platforms’ North American Sustainability & Responsibility Summit/NASRS, more than 350 sustainability and corporate responsibility executives will gather from 1-3 March at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Denver. Meanwhile in London, events like The Economist Impact Sustainability Week/UK (2-4 March) and its co-located Energy Transition Summit, along with BizClick Sustainability Net Zero (4-5 March) and its co-located Procurement & Supply Chain: Net Zero Summit will spotlight how business can achieve sustainability and profitability, attracting chief sustainability officers, chief procurement officers, and other business decision makers across the week of events. Bloomberg Invest is held 3-4 March in New York and will examine how investors can adapt to AI disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, shifting central bank policy, and the convergence of public and private markets. And on 3 March at The Hibernia in San Francisco, [un]prompted kicks off its inaugural event, styled as “an intimate, raw, and fun gathering for the professionals actually doing the work, from offense to threat hunting to program building to national policy.”