Founder Series No. 04.
Four partners, one room.
For the fourth Founder Series, we brought together a founder with a story, one of the most beautiful rooms in downtown Denver, a caterer worth tasting, and a crowd worth meeting. One evening at The Reserve, built so that everyone who took part came out ahead.
The Starting Point
The Founder Series is an event series for founders, built so founders can meet other founders. It is presented by RG Syndicate, the partnership between Ninth Degree's Gabe Anderson and Roberto Seidita, and produced by Ninth Degree. We built the brand from scratch, and that story is its own case study.
The first three editions filled a coworking floor in Denver. For No. 04, the series moved downtown, and the goal was a bigger night all around.
The brief had four parts: a featured founder with a story worth hearing, a venue that would impress the room, food people would remember, and a crowd that made the trip worth it.
On a planning call on August 27, 2026, the date was set for Thursday, October 1. That gave us five weeks to bring four separate parties together and fill the room.
The Challenge
Everything depends on everything
The invitation could not go out until the speaker, the room, and the food were all locked in. Every partner had their own calendar, their own people, and their own reasons to say yes.
Every partner needs a reason
Nights like this fall flat when someone is only doing you a favor. Every party at the table needed to walk away with something real, and they needed to see it before they signed on.
A room most guests had never seen
The first three editions ran in the same building. No. 04 moved to a venue many of our guests had never set foot in, so the invitation had to sell the room as well as the founder.
The Ninth Degree Process
The Client: Coach Ricardo Patton and Clear Step
Coach spent thirty years in Division I basketball, including his run as head coach at the University of Colorado. Today he is the founder of Clear Step, an entry mat he invented that dries, grabs, and sanitizes shoes at the door, and a client of RG Syndicate. He signed on as the featured founder on September 10. When he asked for help shaping his talk, we wrote him an outline built on story prompts instead of a script, because people buy into the person before they care about the product.
The Space: The Reserve
We partnered with The Reserve and its founder, Kyle Allon, to host the night. The Reserve is a private event space at 1820 Blake St in Denver's Dairy Block, half a block from Coors Field: historic brick, heavy timber beams, tall windows full of afternoon light, a fireplace, and a piano on a mezzanine that hangs from the beams. A room like that sells itself once people are standing in it, so we set up the happy hour as a vendor mixer and put the people who book and plan events downtown on the invitation list.
The Food: Serendipity Catering
We first met the team at Serendipity Catering, a preferred caterer of The Reserve, when they toured the space in August. The Founder Series gave us a reason to bring them back. They signed on as the evening's food partner on September 13, and their logo went on the invitation the next day. Passed appetizers kept the room talking: Colorado lamb meatballs, bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese, wild mushroom tartines, chicharron tostadas, watermelon skewers, and a dessert table of two-bite sweets.
The People: Denver's founders, creators, and curious minds
A great room needs the right people in it. We tapped Ninth Degree's large network across Denver: founders, operators, creators, and curious people, plus the people who book and plan events downtown. Every partner got ready-to-post copy to share the night in their own voice, and RG Syndicate's first newsletter carried the invitation to 959 people. Every piece named every partner and what they do, so nobody had to guess who was who.
The Night: A fireside chat
Guests were greeted at the door, walked through the space, and gathered in the kitchen before finding a seat. Then Coach sat down beside the fireplace, Gabe and Roberto led the conversation, and it turned into a true fireside chat. Afterward, Serendipity passed appetizers, the dessert table came out, and people stayed to keep talking. The recap page was live on rgsyndicate.com the next day.
The Strategy
Every decision traced back to one question: what does each partner walk away with? If the answer was fuzzy for anyone, the night was not ready yet. So we planned the evening from each partner's side of the table, not ours, and built the whole night around the answers.
Here is what each side of the table took home.
Coach Patton and Clear Step
A stage for his story, and a room full of people who can open doors to distribution partners.
The Reserve
A room full of Denver business owners seeing the space at its best, with a real crowd in it.
Serendipity Catering
Its name on every invitation, and its food in front of a room of Denver business owners.
The guests
A founder's story worth hearing, and an evening spent meeting each other.
The Work
One invitation, every channel
Ninth Degree produced every piece the night ran on: the invitation card, the event page, the Evite, the personal invitations, the posts and partner copy, Coach's talk outline, the opening remarks, and the recap.
The Invitation
One card for every channel. It names the founder, the date, and the room, and gives each of the four partners its role: presented by RG Syndicate, food by Serendipity Catering, produced by Ninth Degree, held at The Reserve. It ran on the Evite, the event page, every email, and every post.
The room
The Reserve on October 1, 2026.
The Outcome
More than thirty people filled The Reserve on a Thursday afternoon: commercial real estate brokers, bankers, wealth managers, software founders, people from the ski industry, AI agency owners, and more. Coach told the story behind Clear Step and closed with two asks: support the Porter-Billups Leadership Academy, where he serves as Executive Director, and introduce him to anyone in distribution who should see the mat. It was a good room for both.
Coach is a client of RG Syndicate, and he has become a friend. That showed all evening.
Since October 2, 2026, the Founder Series has lived at rgsyndicate.com/founderseries. How we built the brand behind it is case study No. 05.
One coach. One fireplace. A room that leaned in.
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