For the high-achiever who has won the game, and is asking a different question now: what is worth building next? A 5-day return to your unoptimized self in the French Alps.
The Intermission
ANNECY, FRANCE · 11–15 NOVEMBER 2026 · 16 PLACES
The room
Between the two facilitators, this circle has held founders, CEOs, and senior leaders across tech, finance, and creative industries — people who have built companies, led global teams, and sat in the rooms where the real decisions get made. No spectators. No one here to impress. Just peers who understand the specific weight of being the one everyone counts on.
The place
Annecy is where the lake meets the mountains — a place with the rare ability to quiet the noise without asking you to disappear from the world. Clear water, sharp air, long horizons, and just enough distance from everyday life to see things differently. Not an escape. A shift in perspective.
The experience
5 days
Not a program. Not a protocol.
A series of carefully chosen disruptions - physical, relational, elemental - designed to bypass the part of your brain that has been running the show.
This is a boutique experience for 16 people.
The curation, the private house, the personal chef, the caliber of facilitation, and the specific alchemy of a room where no one is performing.
We won’t tell or show you more than that.
Not because we're being mysterious — because the point is that you don't know what's coming.
For someone who controls everything, that's already the beginning of the work.
We review every application personally. Not to gatekeep but to guarantee. The specific absence of performance tax you are looking for only exists if every person in the room has earned the right to set it down. That is our promise to you.
Why we built The Intermission ?
Audrey Ghozael
Sciences Po. MIT. A decade in Berkeley building a coaching practice for leaders who already had everything — and were quietly wondering why it didn't feel like enough or happy. Audrey kept seeing the same pattern: brilliant people, beautiful lives, and a persistent hollow at the center. She became obsessed with one question: what does it actually take to lead from a place of joy instead of pressure? This retreat is her answer.
Paris, FRANCEMaria-Alejandra Gonzalez
Ale had the career. The MBA. The tech salary. She was the breadwinner, checking every box, performing a life she didn't write. When her startup crashed, the doing stopped — and in that silence she realized she had spent twenty years rearranging the furniture in a cage she built herself. This retreat is the door she wishes someone had opened for her.
Mexico City, MEXICO