Fifty Founders and Investors, One Invitation-Only Trip to Kashmir, and No Conventional Conference Format: The Charter and Secret Bring Startup Leaders Together in Sonmarg
MUMBAI, India, Sept. 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Charter and Secret, the team behind Gulmarg’s invitation-only Secret Ski Party, brought together fifty founders, investors, senior entrepreneurs and cultural voices in Sonmarg, Kashmir, for a three-day gathering designed around peer interaction, informal conversation and the relationships that can emerge when conventional conference structures are removed.
The Secret Charter brought together two complementary approaches to building entrepreneurial communities: The Charter’s curated founder network and Secret’s decade of experience creating small, hosted environments around a shared pursuit. The Charter selected who belonged in the room, while Secret designed the environment itself, drawing on a practice that began with the Secret Ski Party in Gulmarg in 2016 and has since expanded to the Secret Serve Party in the Seychelles.
Devarsh Saraf, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, The Charter, said, “Founders spend much of their professional lives in structured environments: meetings, conferences, investor conversations, public forums. We wanted to create a setting where those structures could be removed for a few days, and people could simply spend time with one another. The idea was not to replace the traditional founder event, but to create a different kind of environment for relationships and conversations to develop.”
The gathering extended The Charter’s wider approach to building founder networks. Entry to The Secret Charter was by nomination only, with twenty-five of the fifty places nominated through The Charter’s founder network and the remaining places nominated directly by Secret. There was no application form and no public route into the gathering. The result was a deliberately curated group designed to bring together people who could create connections across sectors, stages and disciplines.
The 50-person cohort comprised 25 founders between seed and Series B, 10 investors, five cultural voices and 10 senior founders who had built companies at scale. The mix brought together entrepreneurs at different points in their journeys alongside investors and leaders from outside the conventional startup ecosystem, creating the conditions for relationships that could extend beyond the three-day gathering into partnerships, collaborations, business opportunities and stronger entrepreneurial networks.
Krishan Anand, Founder, Secret, said, “Before Secret, I spent several years building CEO summits, at the Four Seasons Mumbai, the Leela Bangalore, the Leela Delhi. Three hundred of the most senior people in Indian business, in one ballroom, at enormous cost. They worked perfectly. And nothing happened. Ballrooms are built for facing a stage, and nobody has ever said anything true while facing a stage. The Secret Charter removed the stage. There was no keynote and no panel, and pitching was treated as bad manners. The room was composed before a single invitation went out, and then the room was left alone. That was the entire idea.”
The choice of Sonmarg was central to the format. Over the three-day gathering, participants took part in a glacier walk, fly fishing and mountain biking, alongside riverside meals and informal gatherings. The programme concluded with a traditional Wazwan and a Sufi mehfil. Rather than filling the schedule with presentations and structured networking, the setting created distance from the pace of everyday professional life and gave participants time to interact naturally.
For The Charter, the objective was not simply to bring fifty people together for three days, but to create the foundations for relationships that could continue to generate value after the gathering. Since returning from Kashmir, members have publicly shared plans to visit one another in their respective cities, extended personal invitations and continued conversations that began in the valley. Those interactions point to the broader ambition behind the format: creating trusted connections between entrepreneurs that can evolve into partnerships, collaborations, knowledge-sharing and new channels for growth.
The initial cohort of fifty will form the founding group for future editions of The Secret Charter, with the gathering intended to become a recurring platform for bringing together entrepreneurs, investors and influential voices across India’s startup and business ecosystem.
About The Charter
The Charter is one of India’s largest private startup communities, bringing together a curated membership of 550 founders, investors and creators across Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi.
Built around the belief that meaningful entrepreneurial relationships are built through trust rather than transactional networking, The Charter is a private membership community for founders who have moved beyond product-market fit, investors at principal and partner level, and creators who contribute to the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Membership is deliberately curated, with a waitlist of more than 55,000 people seeking access to the community. The Charter creates opportunities for members to build relationships across industries and stages of company-building through curated gatherings, peer connections and experiences designed to foster long-term engagement.
The community’s focus extends beyond fundraising and business introductions. By bringing together accomplished founders, experienced investors and influential creators in a trusted environment, The Charter aims to create the relationships that can lead to partnerships, collaborations, knowledge-sharing and new growth opportunities for its members.
The Charter currently operates across three Indian cities — Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi — with plans to deepen its presence across India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and build stronger connections between its members over the long term.
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