CEO Update Is Launching Cohorts, Powered By RallyBoard

CEO Update announced its Executive Advisory Councils this morning: confidential, year-round virtual cohorts for members of its CEO, COO and CCO Roundtables, powered by RallyBoard. Read the full announcement on CEO Update.

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In the thick of the pandemic I was a first-time CEO in my early 30s, running an edtech company into a market downturn, and reasonably sure that anyone in the room could tell I was improvising.

One of my investors introduced me to the Edtech Founder Club and encouraged Mentor Collective to cover the cost. I said yes mostly out of deference to the investor.

The format was plain. Ten other CEOs, each of whom had raised at least $20 million in venture capital, at roughly Mentor Collective's stage, on a three-hour Zoom. No keynote. No panel. We took turns putting a live problem in the middle of the room and letting nine people who had already faced it say what they would do.

I left every session with something I could act on that week: a board conversation I had been avoiding, a pricing decision, a hire I was slow to make. The more durable thing was harder to put on a slide. I stopped being alone in the job.

Then I went looking for the same thing for everyone else

Mentor Collective had more than 70 employees, and most of them had the version of my problem that no vendor was pricing for: a manager, a designer, a customer success lead who would benefit enormously from eight people doing that exact job somewhere else, willing to be honest about it.

I could not find anything remotely affordable. Cohort-based programs were priced for founders and executives, sold by the seat, and built on human coordination that made them expensive by design.

That gap is why I started RallyBoard as my second entrepreneurial venture in 2024, and why I started it inside associations rather than inside employers. The networks these programs need are already latent in a membership: the shared credential, the shared vocabulary, the shared stakes, the trust that took the organization decades to earn. An association does not need to go recruit a peer group. It needs to organize one, at a cost and a cadence a staff of four can actually sustain.

Why the Roundtables were the right place to prove it

CEO Update's Roundtables earned their traction the hard way, by being an actually confidential room of vetted peers in an industry where most convening is still a speaker at the front of a ballroom. Association executives keep coming back because the room is useful, not because it is on the calendar.

When I first spoke with Brittany Carter, she described wanting to bring small-group interaction to more of the industry than an in-person calendar could reach, and to the senior leaders around the CEO rather than only the CEO. Given how RallyBoard started, that landed with me immediately.

Every executive in a CEO Update Roundtable also runs an association that could deliver this model to its own members. In these councils they will sit in a matched cohort themselves, as a participant, well before they ever have to decide whether the format belongs in their own organization. No demo I could give them comes close to that.

For a category that has spent a decade being told about engagement, that is a rare chance to show it instead.

What two years of building with associations taught us

Before RallyBoard was a product it was a research project. In 2024 we interviewed roughly 75 association executives about member engagement: what they had already tried, where participation stalled, how much time their staff and volunteer chairs actually had. Most of what is in the platform today traces back to something one of them said, and to the design partners who launched with us the following year. We build with our market rather than for it.

Executive Advisory Councils put us closer to association leaders than any single deployment can. The executives in these councils lead the organizations we build for, and in the councils they will be experiencing the model as members themselves. We are incredibly grateful for this vantage point and look forward to using it to further advance RallyBoard's capabilities.

The first councils convene this fall, open by application to current Roundtable members. If you lead an association and you are not in a Roundtable, the program is worth your time: ceoupdate.com/roundtables.

And for me, this all returns to my original insight: a peer group cohort changed my career trajectory. Associations are the only institutions that can bring these experiences to the entire workforce.

Read CEO Update's full announcement of the Executive Advisory Councils here.