We Built a Conference Where No One's Allowed to Pitch

Sixty-five GTM leaders. Tents in the Montana wilderness. No pitches, no name tags, no one asking what anyone does for a living. This is Arcadia, the leadership gathering Jason Yarborough built with his wife and co-founder Sam after years of watching partnerships get treated as an afterthought everywhere he worked. Three years in, they finally let us behind the curtain.

Jason walks us through why the whole event is built around trust instead of transactions, how the programming has quietly flipped from almost all go-to-market content to nearly all personal development, and the four blunt questions he asks every partner when a channel stalls out.

We also get into where AI is genuinely earning its keep in partnerships (it's not where you'd guess), why he thinks imposter syndrome is really just self-sabotage wearing a different name, and what it takes to run a company with your spouse without ever fighting about it. Sam joins near the end to talk about what three years of watching leaders show up and disconnect has taught her about trust.

If your partner team only hears from sales when there's a lead to hand off, you'll want to hear how Jason fixed that.

We discuss:

Why partnerships still isn't treated as a native GTM functionThe four questions that turn around a stalled partner channelWhere AI actually helps in partner identification and enablement, and where it doesn'tBuilding a trust-first community instead of a pitch-first conference

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(12:50) The anti-conference conference

(13:36) The community before the content

(17:22) Three years of programming: from all-GTM to all-personal

(21:27) Vetting who gets into a 65-person room