Why I host a climate afternoon at Oktoberfest

Munich in September smells like roast almonds and wet grass. The Theresienwiese fills up, the trams get slower, and every hotel in the city puts its rates where you would not believe them. Half the people I know in venture fly in for the week. There is Oktoberfest, there is Bits & Pretzels, and there is a stack of investor dinners in rooms with beige carpet.

On Thursday, 24 September 2026, I have the whole Metzger Stubn tent from eleven in the morning until five. That is the day I am writing about.

The ballroom problem

I have hosted a lot of rooms. Since 2024 I have convened the Tech for Impact Summit in Tokyo, and I have sat through more panels than any person should.

A hotel ballroom does a specific thing to people. Everyone keeps their jacket on. The chairs face forward, so you spend the session looking at the back of someone’s head, and the fifteen minutes of coffee afterwards is a scrum where nobody finishes a sentence. Then it ends and you go home with four business cards and no relationship.

A beer tent does the opposite, and it does it without anyone trying. Long wooden benches, so you sit next to a person rather than across a table from them. Food arrives whether you asked for it or not. There is a band. Nobody can stand at the front and present at you, because there is no front. You are shoulder to shoulder with someone for two hours, and by the end you know whether you like them.

That last part is the whole thing. The people who put money behind hard technology, the family offices and the corporates and the private investors, almost never get unhurried time with each other. They get pitched. In Munich that week they get pitched by everyone. So the first house rule of this afternoon is that nobody is raising in this room. No decks, no soliciting. Founders come to be met, not to sell. If a conversation deserves a follow-up it happens after the tent.

Enforcing that rule is most of my job on the day.

Why Munich

Because I live here. My kids are six and four and they are growing up in this city, and I would rather build the room I want ten minutes from my house than fly somewhere to attend someone else’s.

There is a less sentimental reason too. The people I most want in that room are mostly German-speaking, mostly not on anybody’s stage, and already in this city in the last week of September. You do not have to convince anyone to travel. You have to give them somewhere better to be at two in the afternoon.

I am co-hosting with Simon Herzog of UnternehmerTUM, which is the innovation arm attached to the Technical University of Munich, and the afternoon is held under the auspices of the Consulate-General of Japan in Munich. Tech for Impact grew out of Tokyo. Bringing Japanese industrial capital into a Bavarian tent is not a theme. It is just what my address book looks like.

The two things with a time on them

The day has a shape, but it is a loose one. You can come for an hour and leave.

At 13:00 the band stops and the Strategy Dialogues start. Small tables, each one anchored on a single question, each led by a peer rather than a moderator. What actually makes private capital move into climate, and what quietly stops it. Who can decarbonise a city when government cannot mandate it. Which industrials are actually buying these companies. It is a private hour under the Chatham House rule. Nothing is written up and nothing is read out afterwards. The music stays off the entire time, which matters more than it sounds: in a tent, the quietest person at the table is the one you lose first.

From 14:30 there are fireside chats. Two chairs on the tent floor, two microphones, no moderator and no slides. The first one is about Japan and the energy transition, because a first order from a large Japanese industrial buyer changes a European supplier’s life, and almost nobody in Munich knows how one of those orders comes about.

Between those, the music comes back up and people talk. That is not filler. That is the point of the day, and the structured parts exist mostly to give the unstructured parts something to be about.

Nothing is recorded. No badges, no booths, no press, no sponsor signage anywhere in the tent.

Bring your family

Oktoberfest is not a conference, so I am not going to pretend it is one. Partners are welcome. So are children.

This is unusual for an investor event and I have been asked about it more than once. My answer is that I am a parent in a foreign city and I know exactly what it costs to be the person who cannot come. If the choice is between attending alone or not attending, some of the best people in this field simply do not attend, and the room is worse for it.

So there is a family table. Children come with their own adult and sit there with them, through the Strategy Dialogues and the firesides. Nobody is minding them for you. The adult who brought them does that, the whole afternoon. The loud parts of the day, before one o’clock and again later in the afternoon, are exactly what a small child wants an afternoon in Munich to be.

If you want to bring family, write to me directly rather than putting it on a form. That one I want to handle myself.

What I am actually trying to do

I am not building an event business. Attendance is by invitation, the list is small on purpose, and I read every request myself.

What I want is narrower than a conference and harder to fake. I want conversations to happen on 24 September that would not have happened otherwise, and I want a few of them still going in a year. That is the only measure I care about, and I will not know the answer until 2027.

Details are at tech4impactsummit.com/tech-for-climate. If you allocate capital into climate, or you build the hard version of it, tell me who you are.

I will be at the door from eleven, in the wrong shoes, worrying about the seating.