The ShareHolders Society

Co-founded by Chris Voss. No agenda.

A private society of accomplished, curious people who gather twice a year in a new city with nothing to sell each other and nobody telling them how to be useful to one another. Chris Voss co-founded it. The next Social is in Austin, in October.

Apply for Membership

Every member is interviewed. Nobody buys their way in.

Chris Voss in conversation with members at a Society Social.

Why a hostage negotiator co-founded a society.

Chris spent a career learning how trust actually gets built: slowly, in person, by how you conduct yourself when nothing is on the line yet. Then he spent another career teaching it. Somewhere in there he noticed that the rooms built for accomplished people had the opposite design. Name tags. Sponsors. A speaker, a hot seat, an index card with your biggest challenge on it. Everyone performing, nobody listening.

So he, Nick Nanton, and Roy Milner built the other kind of room. A society in the older sense of the word: people who choose one another's company. Two Socials a year, each in a new city. An Adventure built around every one. No forums, no programming, no prescribed outcome. He hosts the Socials himself. This is not a name on a letterhead.

Chris Voss listening to a member at a Society gathering.

“Real influence comes from proximity, and you get proximity based on how you conduct yourself.”

Chris Voss

Proximity, not pitches.

Chris has a theory about the people worth knowing, and the Society is built on it. They avoid the loud rooms. When there's a crowd, they stand back a little. They are never going to walk up to you at a conference, because the conference is designed to make them a target. But put them somewhere unhurried, with people who have nothing to sell, and in a relaxed moment one of them walks over and says, "I've got an idea."

That moment cannot be scheduled. It can only be made more likely. The Society makes it more likely by curating the people intensely, curating the experiences intensely, and curating what happens between people lightly or not at all.

“The people you really want to meet, when there's a lot of people around, they're never going to want to walk up to you.”

Chris Voss

“You're going to say things to me that I haven't thought of. You're going to give me insights. And those are the kind of people I like to talk to.”

Chris Voss

“If you really want to get to know somebody, you need to get to know their character. You need to see them in a different environment, around different people, in a place where they can relax.”

Chris Voss

No agenda. That's the point.

Nearly every organization built for accomplished people justifies itself by adding structure. Forums, accountability partners, coaching, worksheets, learning objectives. Many of them are excellent. All of them share a premise: put the right people in a room and give them a process.

The Society's premise is different. Put the right people in the right experience and get out of the way. You go to Kentucky, or Austin, or wherever the next Social is. You eat together, travel together, see something unusual together. Nobody says "back in the conference room at 8:00 with your challenge on a card." And because nobody is forcing a business outcome, interesting outcomes become more likely. Relationships happen sideways.

A mediocre room needs programming. A remarkable room just needs time. That is why every member is interviewed, and why the gate is who you are, not what you bill. We curate the people because there is nothing else to hide behind.

“It was just two people trying to get to know each other. Neither one was trying to sell anything.”

Mark, President of a packaging company that makes hundreds of millions of boxes a year

The experience is the meeting.

Two Socials a year, each in a new city, each with an Adventure built around it. Last fall it was Louisville: a day through bourbon country, ending at a room with bottles stacked four stories high, where a man who has run a company for decades sat down and went quiet for a minute. Between Socials there are Expeditions abroad. Members who go, go because they want to. Nobody is keeping attendance.

Members of the Society on an Adventure, Chris Voss among them.

Next up: Austin, October. Apply now and your conversation with our Membership Director happens before the room fills.

There is a bourbon. It has never been for sale.

Every room needs somewhere to begin, and this one begins with a glass. The Difference® was blended for the Society by Roy Milner, our Master Blender, from some of the rarest barrels in Kentucky. The debut expression took Double Gold in San Francisco and Best of Class in Los Angeles. It has never been sold to anyone, at any price. It ships to members each quarter and it gets poured at the Socials. That is the entire distribution.

Chris calls it the handshake. It gives two strangers something to hold, something to talk about, and a reason to stay at the table a little longer. What happens after that is up to them.

The only way to the glass is to be in the room.

Chris Voss with a glass of The Difference.

None of this was planned. All of it happened.

Three members. Three things that happened because the right people were in the same room with nothing to sell each other.

Mark Mills and James Kennedy on the factory floor at Spectrum Packaging in Orlando

James and Mark. One connection, one reinvention.

James Kennedy spent thirty years in technology serving manufacturers, and for twenty of them he knew he wanted to change his business without knowing how. He ran a services firm, and he could describe its limit with a precision most people reserve for other people's businesses: “You can put me in and take me out and replace me with someone else.”

He met Mark Mills on the Louisville Adventure, two strangers making the usual opening moves. By afternoon they'd found manufacturing, the Midwest, and Florida in common, “tie after tie after tie.” Mark is the President of Spectrum Packaging in Orlando, a company that makes hundreds of millions of cartons a year (if you've bought a 12-pack of Celsius, there's a decent chance he made the box), and a man who once nearly shut his own company down to reinvent it. Casually, with no agenda, he said: “When you're in Orlando sometime, come take a look at my factory.”

James went. On the floor, Mark walked him through a very expensive machine and thought out loud about where automation was taking his business. James asked the question that would cost him his old business model: “Tell me how I can help you get to that level.” Mark told him. Then Mark agreed to be the alpha client for the AI platform James had been quietly building, and offered to spread the word to other manufacturers.

James walked out with a roadmap he'd been looking for since the 1990s. He rebuilt his company from a replaceable services model into a productized brand, and his revenue is on track to triple from 2025 to 2026. He attributes a very substantial part of that to one evening in Louisville.

Mark, asked why he said yes: “I think as a member of the Society, you kind of should help.” And then: “We would have never met. We would probably never have trusted each other. It never would have happened.”

Charlyne White at Atelier Savas in Nashville

Charlyne. She came for the bourbon. What she got was her life back.

Charlyne White flew for Delta for twenty-three years. In March 2022, three days after closing on the house she'd built in Georgia, she was injured on an airplane in Denver and never flew for them again. For the next three years she went from doctor to doctor, out of work, on medications that weren't fixing anything, building a freight brokerage on the side because the house still had to be paid for.

She was one of the first six people to join the Society, before there was a single bottle to taste. She heard Chris Voss was involved and that was that. At the first Social, in Las Vegas, a man in teal suede shoes named Michael listened to her story, asked whether she'd met the neurologist in the room, and walked her over. Camilo listened to the same story and said the thing no one had said in three years: “Call my office. We'll figure out what it is.” Then Michael said the harder thing, carefully, the way you say a hard thing to someone you've known for eleven minutes: some of it might be in her head.

She was insulted. Then she went home and started asking the question herself. She took her health into her own hands, came off what she'd been on, and learned to manage what was left of it. Today she runs her own courier company in Georgia, driving transplant medications to Emory most mornings. Two days before we interviewed her, Delta called to ask if she'd consider coming back.

Neither man had anything to sell her. That's why the question got through.

“I joined because of the bourbon. I stay because of the community, but the bourbon is the foundation.”

Russell Rosario at the Gibson Garage in Nashville

Russell. The CFO who couldn't model it.

Russell Rosario is a fractional CFO who has been inside sixty companies. He runs every decision through a spreadsheet, and he'll tell you the costliest thing in any business is the one that never shows up on the statement. When a close friend told him about the Society, the name that got his attention was Chris Voss, whose book is the only one Russell has ever read three times. He still hesitated. He couldn't see the mechanism for a return, and he joined anyway, knowing he was doing the thing he tells clients not to do.

Then he moved from South Florida to Dallas. In the last day or two before the truck, he drove around handing his bottles to clients and friends he was leaving behind. He is not, by his own account, someone who gives gifts. It landed anyway, because the people he works with can buy anything they want, which makes them nearly impossible to gift, and this was something they couldn't find anywhere. “The bottle doesn't end the conversation. It starts one.” He found himself explaining Chris Voss, explaining the Society, watching them lean in.

A year in, he's clear about what he bought: relationships strengthened rather than transactions closed, and a network with more highly successful entrepreneurs in it than it had before. “I joined because I wanted to increase the number of highly successful entrepreneurs in my network. I stay because that has happened, and I also get some great bourbon on the side.”

His advice to anyone weighing the same decision comes down to two questions: Do you want to be part of a group of highly successful people? Do you love bourbon? “If those two factors are true, I think then they got to join.”

We didn't arrange any of it. We put the right people in the right room and got out of the way. The full stories are in the Bourbon Brief, the members' quarterly magazine.

Co-founded by Chris Voss.

Chris Voss spent 24 years with the FBI, led its international kidnapping negotiations, and wrote Never Split the Difference. He co-founded the Society on a conviction he's spent a career proving: the thing every deal is actually made of is trust, and trust gets built shoulder to shoulder, not across a conference table. He hosts the Socials. You'll be at his table.

Nick Nanton, co-founder, is a 24-time Emmy Award winning documentary director. Roy Milner, co-founder and Master Blender, has spent 25 years in the beverage industry and co-founded Blackberry Farm Brewery and Art of Alchemy Spirits.

Two of the three members above said the same thing about why they applied. “And then with Chris Voss, I was in.”

A seat in the room.

Membership is a monthly due, month to month. No annual contract, and no reason to stay except wanting to be in the room.

  • Two Socials a year, included, each in a new city with an Adventure to match. Austin is next.
  • A case of six bottles of The Difference every quarter: this quarter's expression, blended once and never again.
  • Adventures and Expeditions throughout the year, open to members, priced per trip.
  • The Bourbon Brief, the members' magazine, every quarter.
  • A 25-minute conversation with our Membership Director before any of it, because the room is the product and we protect it.

Month to month is on purpose. A room people can leave any time has to be worth staying in, and that keeps us honest about who we admit and what we build. Nobody is here because a contract says so. A Membership Director will walk you through the dues on your call.

For members who give bourbon away.

Some members hand bourbon to people the way other people hand out business cards, except nobody throws it away. For them there is a Gifting Allocation: more of The Difference each quarter, including Shareables®, a 200ml bottle sized for handing to someone who matters. Mike will ask whether it's for you.

Three quick steps: Application, Interview, Acceptance

  1. 1

    Apply.

    Nine questions, five minutes. Two of them matter more than the rest.

  2. 2

    Talk with a Membership Director.

    25 minutes. They're deciding whether you'd enjoy the room and whether the room would enjoy you, and they usually know quickly. If the answer is yes, they'll tell you on the call and invite you to join. If it's no, they'll tell you that too. The answer is no more often than you'd think.

  3. 3

    Say yes, or don't.

    If you're in, your first case ships with the next release and your invitation to the next Social follows.

This isn't for everyone. That's deliberate.

If what you want from Chris is the method, his courses and his book are the place for that, and this page is not. The Society is not a negotiation class. He will be in the room, he will be himself, and he will not be teaching.

If you want a mastermind, there are extraordinary masterminds. If you want coaching, or a room that will critique your portfolio, there are extraordinary options for both. If you don't much care for bourbon, this may not be the one for you, and there's no shame in that.

The Society is for accomplished, curious people who enjoy being around other accomplished, curious people, who would rather spend a day in Louisville than a day in a conference room, and who understand what Chris means when he says trust is built shoulder to shoulder. If that's you, we'd like to meet you. Our Membership Director would like to meet you first.

See the room for yourself.

Three places to start.

Never Split. Always Share.® →What the bourbon is for, in Chris's own words.Socials →Where the Society has gathered, and where it goes next.Adventures →Louisville, told the way it happened.

Co-founded by Chris Voss. No agenda.

“And then with Chris Voss, I was in.” A member, on what finally made her apply.

Apply for Membership

Every member is interviewed. Nobody buys their way in. Month to month.