Devarsh Saraf, Founder and CEO, The Charter.
The Secret Charter brought 50 founders, investors and business leaders to Sonmarg for three days without panels, pitches or conventional networking. What happened there points to a changing idea of how professional relationships are built.
For founders, networking has become part of the job. There are conferences, investor meetings, industry dinners and carefully planned introductions, all designed to put the right people in the same room. But meeting someone and getting to know them are not necessarily the same thing.
The Secret Charter, held in Sonmarg in September, approached that distinction differently. Organised by The Charter and Secret, the gathering brought together 50 founders, investors, senior entrepreneurs and cultural voices for three days in Kashmir. There was no keynote, panel or formal pitching session. Instead, the programme was built around shared experiences, meals and time spent together.
The group was deliberately curated. Twenty-five places were nominated through The Charter's founder network and the remaining 25 through Secret. The cohort included 25 founders between seed and Series B, 10 investors, 10 senior founders who had built companies at scale and five cultural voices.
The premise was straightforward: remove some of the structures that usually define business gatherings and give people enough time to interact without an immediate transaction attached to the conversation.
In Sonmarg, that meant mountain biking, a trek, riverside meals, informal evenings, a traditional Wazwan and a Sufi mehfil. A planned hike towards Zoji La had to be changed because of rain, with participants taking a shorter trail instead. The change was hardly central to the experience. The setting, rather than the schedule, became the backdrop.
That may be the more interesting part of the experiment.
Traditional networking is often measured by what happens immediately: a new introduction, a meeting scheduled, an investment discussed or a business card exchanged. Relationships rarely develop on that timetable. Trust tends to come from repeated interactions, shared experiences and the familiarity that grows when people spend time together without having to perform a professional role.
That idea sits at the heart of The Charter's approach. The private founder community uses curated membership and gatherings to connect entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the business ecosystem. The Sonmarg gathering took that philosophy outside the city, placing people in an environment where professional identities were not the only thing bringing them together.
Participants have since spoken about continuing relationships after returning from Kashmir, including plans to meet again and invitations to visit one another. For the organisers, that is part of the point. The value of a gathering like this is not necessarily a deal made during the trip, but the possibility of relationships developing into partnerships, collaborations, knowledge-sharing or business opportunities later.
It is a subtle shift, but one that reflects a broader fatigue with always-on professional interaction. When every meeting has an objective and every introduction carries an expectation, the room can become transactional before a conversation has had the chance to become personal.
There is also something revealing about the setting itself. Founders spend much of their professional lives in rooms designed for efficiency: offices, boardrooms, conference halls and meeting rooms. A mountain town offers almost the opposite. There is less reason to rush between meetings, and the shared experience becomes part of the conversation.
The Secret Charter is not an argument against conferences or conventional networking. Those formats have their place. But the Sonmarg gathering suggests there is value in creating smaller environments where relationships can develop without an agenda dictating every interaction.
For The Charter and Secret, the 50 participants from Sonmarg will form the founding cohort for future editions of The Secret Charter.
The larger question is whether, in an ecosystem already crowded with opportunities to meet, the more valuable thing may simply be enough time for a relationship to become real.
Perhaps the future of networking is not more networking. It is fewer introductions, better rooms and enough time for people to forget why they were introduced in the first place.
