Built for the decision you can’t take to your team, your board or a vendor.
CIO Cafe exists because the most useful conversation a technology leader can have is with a peer who has already made the decision, and who has nothing to sell.
Why we exist
Built on a simple observation.
CIOs are asked to make decisions whose consequences outlast their tenure: which AI to trust, which core systems to rebuild, how to organize the people who run everything. At the 1,000 largest US companies, the average CIO stays in the seat for 4.6 years (Korn Ferry, 2020). Most of the advice available comes from someone with a product, a practice or a keynote to sell.
The best advice comes from a peer who has lived the decision, can tell you what it cost, and gains nothing if you follow them. That conversation is rare because it needs three conditions at once: trust, the right people and no audience.
CIO Cafe is built to create those conditions on purpose: small tables, vetted peers, the Chatham House Rule and no vendors in the room. The coffee is a metaphor. The confidentiality is not.
Where we are today
A founding cohort, said plainly.
12 tables of eight are forming now. Each circle is one seat. A seat is filled in here only when a member has been accepted, and the count will show the date it was taken.
What is true now
- The founding cohort is open: 96 seats across 12 tables, closing .
- The price, the house rules and a sample Field Brief are all published before you apply.
- Every request is read by a person and answered within two business days.
What you won’t see here yet
- Member quotes or logos. The first tables have not met, and we will only publish words a member has agreed to in writing.
- A member count. When we show one, it will be real accepted seats with the date it was counted.
- Named hosts. They will appear on this page, with their consent, before the first table meets.
How we are funded
Members pay for the room.
CIO Cafe is paid for by member seats, usually through the member’s company: $4,800 a year for a monthly table, or $2,500 for a First 100 Days cohort. That is the whole business model for the tables.
No sponsor pays for a table, sits at one or receives member details. Up to 3 research partners a year may fund the free public playbooks and glossary only, credited on each piece.
Four house rules every table keeps.
Chatham House, always
Use what you hear, never who said it. Nothing is recorded.
Bring a decision
Every table starts from a real decision a member is facing now.
Say what went wrong
The part that failed is the most useful part of the story.
Easy to leave
Two clicks, no call. We would rather earn your next month.
Hosted by practitioners, not presenters.
Every table host is a current or former technology executive trained to keep eight senior leaders on one decision.
Frame the decision beforehand
One week before the table meets, the host works with the presenting member to distil the decision, constraints and options into a single page.
Keep the 90-minute clock
Ten minutes to frame, forty-five for peer cases, twenty-five to challenge assumptions, ten to commit. Nobody gets more than their share of the clock.
Protect the room
No vendors, sponsors or observers sit at a table. If a discussion drifts into a pitch or breaches confidentiality, the host steps in immediately.
Deliver the Field Brief
Within five business days, the host drafts a two-page anonymized Field Brief and circulates it to the eight members for review.