How Darktrace and DigiCert sponsored CEEATTLE's CISO Executive Dinner at Goldfinch Tavern in the Four Seasons Hotel Seattle

On a Thursday night in October, in a private dining room at Goldfinch Tavern inside the Four Seasons Hotel Seattle, the people responsible for securing some of the region's largest organizations sat down to dinner with one thing in common. Each had arrived with a problem they had not yet solved.

Security leaders are not short of places to talk. They are short of places to think. Conferences move them from session to sales conversation, and the problems that keep them up at night, this year most of all the arrival of agentic AI inside the enterprise, rarely get a full evening with peers who carry the same risk. As Cee Ng, the founder of CEEATTLE, put it afterward, they needed "something that they could not get within their organization."

Darktrace, the AI cybersecurity company, and DigiCert, the digital trust company, decided to give Seattle's security leaders that evening. Working with CEEATTLE, the Seattle company that produced the event, they took the private room at Goldfinch Tavern for the night of October 15 and opened it to the CISOs and security leaders of the Puget Sound. For Cee, the dinner had been a long time coming: two years of relationships, one room.

The table was private. The invitation was wide. Darktrace, DigiCert, and CEEATTLE each invited their own communities through the event's registration page, which asked two questions no conference asks. Which problem area should the table work on? And what is the one problem you want the table to work on? The answers shaped the night before anyone sat down.

The list was curated so that every seat belonged to a peer, and each one was confirmed personally. The room was built for sixteen. CEEATTLE negotiated it to eighteen. In the final days two more leaders, from NVIDIA and Visa, asked for seats, and the sponsors said make it work. By dinner the table held security and engineering leaders from companies including Visa, DoorDash, Blue Origin, and NVIDIA.

The topic was securing agentic AI workflows across the enterprise, and the room ran under the Chatham House Rule: nothing said at the table is attributed to a person or a company, and the guests appear here by company only. There were no speakers and no pitches. "It's not a pitch haven," Cee said of the format. "I must curate an environment that truly they are able to walk away with knowledge." A Darktrace field CISO and DigiCert's field CTO joined the table as peers, not presenters.

CEEATTLE took care of the rest. It booked the room, set the menu, printed the sponsors' logos on it, placed a name card with each guest's company at every seat, handled the dietary notes, sent the confirmations and calendar invitations, and seated the sponsors at the two ends of the table with Cee in the center to run the conversation. Angie Gonsalez, a senior named account executive at Darktrace, and Christy Marquez, regional vice president for Enterprise West at DigiCert, came as hosts, free to spend the whole dinner with their guests.

It was a crowded night to hold a dinner in Seattle. The Seahawks were playing, and three other CISO events were under way across the city. Three of the leaders in the room had chosen this table over the others, "strictly because of who was in the room," Cee said.

Dinner was served family style at 6:00 pm. Cee ran the table through people, process, and tools, and put engineering leaders and security leaders in the same conversation on purpose. She asked the engineers where security blocks them, and let the room argue. "Very candid conversation," she said later, "bringing the right different perspectives to then create debate, so that it is thought provoking, and for people to be able to walk away literally to get better the next day." When one exchange ran hot, she reset the room with the night's other news: the Seahawks had lost, 17 to 14.

One guest, a vice president who usually meets security chiefs one at a time, worked his way around a circle of introductions that went CISO, CISO, CISO, and said afterward he could not believe he was standing in a room full of them. Another, among the most respected leaders in the field, gave the shortest review of the night: "I'm still processing."

What was said in the room stays in the room. What each leader carried out was their own: notes in their own words, a clearer business case for their CFO, CEO, CTO, and security engineering teams, and a short list of peers across Seattle who now know their name and their problem.

For the sponsors, the night did what a sponsorship is meant to do. Darktrace and DigiCert spent an evening at the table with the security leaders they most wanted to meet, as peers, with no stage between them. Within a day, Darktrace had replies from five guests on LinkedIn and four to five follow-up meetings in motion.

For the guests, the measure was the dinners they already attend. Leaders who sit at several executive dinners a month told the hosts this one was among the finest they had been to, and the difference was the room: real conversation, real disagreement, and nobody selling. "We broke bread," Cee said the next morning. "That's what happened last night."