What Adventure Capitalist Event Guide Actually Is
The Adventure Capitalist Event Guide is basically a curated collection of meetups, podcasts, workshops, and networking events tied to the Adventure Capitalist community and entrepreneurship scene at large. John Lee Dumas and his team compile dates, locations, registration links, and occasionally brief descriptions so that entrepreneurs know where to show up. It's not an official conference organizer. It's more of a aggregator with some editorial filtering applied. I found this out the hard way back in 2022. I was trying to plan a quarter of event attendance for my small team. I pulled the guide, registered for three events listed in it, and showed up expecting to find Adventure Capitalist staff on-site handing out badges or running things. They weren't. The events were third-party conferences and local meetups where Adventure Capitalist simply had a presence — sometimes a sponsored meetup table, sometimes a panel slot, sometimes nothing at all beyond a mention in the event description. I wasted a flight to Austin because one of the listed "Adventure Capitalist events" was just a local entrepreneur breakfast where John Lee was a guest speaker. Not a bad experience, but completely different from what the guide implied.
How to Use the Adventure Capitalist Event Guide
The practical way to use it is as a starting point, not a itinerary. Here's the process I go through now: First, I pull the guide and scan for events within a reasonable travel radius of my location or where I'm already planning to be. I note the dates. Then I independently verify each event. I go to the actual event's official website or ticketing page, not the Adventure Capitalist page, and check what's really happening. Who's speaking? What's the format? Is it a panel, a workshop, or just a venue rental with a name? I read the last few reviews on the event page if they exist. If it's a meetup, I check the Meetup.com page or Facebook event for recent attendance numbers and activity level. The guide links are usually reliable, but the context around those events shifts. A speaker might cancel. A panel might get moved to a different day. The event might have been renamed or rescheduled. I always confirm within 48 hours of traveling.
Registration through the guide typically works fine. Most events use standard platforms like Eventbrite or the conference's own registration system. I've noticed that some of the smaller local meetups listed in the guide have a cap of 20 to 40 people and fill up fast. If you're not registering early, you're usually standing in the back anyway. That's not a dealbreaker, but it affects how useful the experience is for you. One thing the guide doesn't always make clear: the difference between events where Adventure Capitalist is the primary organizer and events where they're a sponsor or participant. I learned this distinction by attending the same event twice in different years. One year, John Lee hosted a masterclass session. The next year, he was just in the audience. The guide listed both years under the same event name with no explanation of the difference.
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What the Guide Gets Right and Where It Falls Short
The main strength is convenience. Someone else has already done the legwork of scanning the event calendar for relevant entrepreneurship gatherings. That saves probably two to three hours of research for someone who doesn't spend their days tracking down these kinds of events. For a solo founder working full-time, that's meaningful. The weakness is accuracy and specificity. The guide doesn't always reflect the current state of an event. I've seen entries where the price changed but the guide still showed the old price. I've seen events listed that had already been cancelled months prior. This isn't a huge problem if you're actively verifying, but it's a problem if you're treating the guide as the source of truth. It isn't. There's also the issue of geographic bias. The guide skews heavily toward US-based events, with heavy concentration in major cities like Austin, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. If you're outside those markets, the list gets thin fast. I live in a mid-sized city in the Midwest and the guide had exactly one event listed for my region in an entire quarter. That one event was in a city two hours away.
Another counter-intuitive thing I've noticed: the higher-profile events on the list are often the less useful ones for someone building a business from scratch. The big conferences attract established founders, investors, and media. The smaller local meetups, which the guide sometimes buries lower in the list, are where the actual hands-on networking happens. You can talk to the person next to you at a twenty-person breakfast. At a thousand-person conference, you're lucky if you exchange cards with three people and actually follow up with one of them.
Where to Find the Adventure Capitalist Event Guide
The guide lives on the Adventure Capitalist website, typically under the Events section or linked from the main navigation. I don't have a direct link to paste here because the URL structure changes when they update the page, and I'd rather not send you to a broken link. Go to adventurecapitalist.com and look for the Events tab. If you can't find it, search "Adventure Capitalist Events" in a search engine and the top result is usually the right page. There's no standalone downloadable PDF or offline version of the guide. Everything is web-based and requires an active connection. I wish there was an exportable version. When I travel to areas with spotty internet, I usually screenshot the relevant entries beforehand. Annoying workaround, but it works. The guide is free to access. There's no subscription wall. You don't need to be a JLU member or have purchased anything to view it. That's about the only straightforward part of this whole thing.
Practical Tips That Actually Matter
Don't register for more than two events in the same city within a single weekend. I learned this by burning both Saturday and Sunday at back-to-back events and realizing I had zero energy left for the actual networking portion, which is when everything interesting happens. The events themselves are fine. The exhaustion is the problem. Bring physical business cards even if you think you won't need them. I stopped carrying them after switching to digital solutions, and I regretted it twice at two separate events where the person I wanted to connect with didn't have a smartphone nearby or preferred paper. It takes twelve seconds to print a batch. Worth it. If an event on the guide lists a speakers lineup, check whether those speakers are actually confirmed. I've seen names listed in the guide that got dropped from the event after registration opened. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens often enough that I verify closer to the date rather than planning my trip around a speaker who might not show.
The guide also doesn't include pricing information for most events. Some are free. Some run a hundred dollars. Some are five hundred or more. I always budget for the worst-case scenario when planning. I've shown up to events assuming they were free based on the guide's vague listing and had to pay at the door. Awkward, but survivable. One thing I do differently from most people: I don't try to attend every event on the guide. I pick maybe one or two per month max. The ROI drops sharply after that. Travel costs, time away from your business, and the diminishing returns of event networking compound against you quickly. Two well-chosen events per month is about the right ceiling for most solo operators.
Alternatives If the Guide Doesn't Fit Your Situation
If you're outside the US or the guide doesn't have relevant events near you, try browsing Eventbrite with filters for entrepreneurship, startup, and business networking. It's less curated but covers more geography. LinkedIn Events is another option — search for entrepreneurship meetups in your city and you'll usually find several monthly gatherings that never make it onto the Adventure Capitalist list. If you're looking for structured learning rather than networking, consider whether a workshop or a short course might give you more for your time. Events are great for connections. They're not great for deep skill development. I've spent more time exchanging contact information at events than I have learning anything I couldn't have picked up from a podcast episode or a single book chapter. That's not a criticism of events themselves. It's just a reality of the format. The Adventure Capitalist community Discord and their newsletter also occasionally surface events that don't make it into the public guide. If you're serious about this, joining those channels gives you access to a slightly less filtered stream of information. The newsletter goes out weekly and sometimes includes event announcements that aren't on the main Events page yet.
