Why Brandon Klein Made United We Transform’s Best Tools Completely Free

Most people who run corporate gatherings would rather not know how bad they are. Brandon Klein decided to find out anyway. Over 25 years of facilitating rooms for Fortune 100 companies, he kept noticing the same thing: the applause, the wrap-up email, and then nothing changed on Monday. So when AI made it possible to measure that gap at scale, he pointed a wall of agents at 23,624 real event agendas and scored every one of them. The number that came back stopped him cold. Not a single agenda in the entire set scored above 60 out of 100.

Klein is the founder of United We Transform, and what he built with that data is a free public atlas, a grading tool anyone can run on their own agenda in seconds, and an open standard for what a well-designed gathering actually looks like on paper. He talked with us about why he open-sourced the tool that took him five years to build, why he refuses to name and shame the events in his dataset, and what it looks like to run a company as one human directing a team of AI agents.

Tell us about yourself and your business.

I’ve spent 25 years on one question: Why do people do their best work in some rooms and waste their lives in others? I started my first company at 18, built and sold Europe’s largest natural health platform to Tesco, became the first Chief Collaboration Officer at a Fortune 100 company, ran transformations for 32 Fortune 100 companies, and wrote a number-one Amazon book on facilitation. Then AI arrived, and I realized the thing I’d been doing by hand for two decades could finally be measured, scored, and rebuilt.

United We Transform is that rebuild. I published the book, “United We Transform: A Practitioner’s Guide to Solving for Clarity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” and then did something authors usually don’t: I built the evidence. We read and scored 23,624 real event agendas, published the whole thing as a free public atlas at unitedwetransform.com, and shipped free tools on top of it: a grader that scores any agenda in seconds, a team formation engine we open-sourced, and a library of more than 2,000 facilitation exercises.

The aspiration is bigger than events. Most gatherings still run on a format from the Middle Ages: one person talks, everyone else pretends to listen, nothing moves on Monday. I want to completely reinvent how people gather. Humans doing what only humans can do, connection, judgment, commitment, while AI agents do the grunt work that used to eat the humans alive: the prep, the research, the note-taking, the follow-through. That’s not an efficiency play. It’s a redesign of the room itself.

How does your business make money?

Right now, deliberately, mostly it doesn’t. The atlas, the grader, the exercises, TeamCreator: all free, with a hard neutrality wall around them. No upsell in the tools, because the moment your referee sells you shoes, you stop trusting the calls. The revenue paths sit behind the standard: the book, licensing the team formation engine to event platforms, and advisory work on transforming how organizations gather. We believe our partners will benefit as the world wakes up to changing the way they convene their most important team members. When you publish the scoreboard everyone plays on, you don’t need to chase the game.

What was your inspiration for starting the business?

I read the agendas of thousands of conferences, offsites, and all-hands events, and more than 9 in 10 showed no evidence that anything was designed to change after everyone went home. Billions of dollars, millions of hours, applause, and then nothing. And nobody was measuring it. There’s a Consumer Reports for cars and a Michelin for restaurants, but the thing companies spend fortunes on, gathering their people, had no scoreboard at all.

The deeper inspiration was watching AI change what’s possible. For 25 years I could only fix one room at a time, by hand. Suddenly I could point agents at every public agenda on the internet and score them all. The moment the first thousand scores came back, this stopped being a consulting practice and became a movement.

How and when did you launch the business?

It launched in stages, each one bigger than the last. In 2024 we received a grant and ran a 1,000-person gathering, which became the proving ground for everything: the live test that a room designed differently produces different outcomes. In 2025 I published the book (with co-author Tom Kehner) and opened a 10k sq ft physical space – the world’s first AI Office. In 2026 we rebuilt unitedwetransform.com from scratch as a free public evidence base: 23,624 scored agendas, a 1,000-event hand-verifiable gold set, the grader, the exercises, an open standard we call GatherReady, and a State of Gatherings report. I built most of it with AI agents doing the work a ten-person team used to do, which is fitting, because that’s the whole thesis.

How is the business funded?

Bootstrapped. No outside money. And the biggest funder, honestly, is AI itself: the build cost a fraction of what it would have two years ago because agents did the former grunt work.

How did you find your first few clients or customers?

The first community came from the work itself: the practitioners, facilitators, and transformation leaders who came through the 2024 gathering and the book, people who’d been living the same frustration I had. From there it grew into dozens of partners pioneering new ways of collaborating. We believe those partners will benefit as the world wakes up to changing the way they convene their most important team members.

Here is a fun fact: I’ve made 2,825 introductions over 21 years and asked for one back 49 times. You do that long enough, and you don’t have a customer acquisition problem; you have a community that shows up when you build something real. The atlas works the same way: we give the entire evidence base away, and the people who need the deeper work find us.

What was your first year in business like?

The first year was analog, which surprises people. 2024 was a grant, a 1,000-person gathering, and the terrifying experience of testing 25 years of conviction in one room. It worked, and the notes from that room became the spine of the book and the company. 

Then there was wanting to share this publicly with no team. It was me and a wall of AI agents running around the clock: scoring agendas overnight, verifying people’s profiles against public records, archiving sources, testing the grader against the real scoring pipeline until the two matched exactly.

It would’ve been easy to torch every event organizer on earth with this data. We chose the opposite: we grade the agenda, not the event. We publish our misses. We built the whole thing so anyone can check our work. Trust is the product, so effort spent on honesty is effort spent on the moat.

And I was a dad of three the entire time. My kids watched this get built and helped set parts of it up. That’s not a footnote. Teaching the next generation what work looks like in a human-first AI future is the banner over everything I do.

What strategies did you use to grow the business?

First, give the evidence away. With the propagation of AI, we realized it was much bigger than a small team app. Therefore, TeamCreator and the entire atlas are free and open to every AI crawler on the internet. When someone asks ChatGPT or Claude whether conferences actually work, I want our data to be the answer. Being the citation is the new being on page one.

Second, build tools people use, not content people skim. The grader gives you a score for your own agenda in seconds. TeamCreator builds your breakout groups from a pasted attendee list, and your data never leaves the browser tab. Every tool is a reason to come back, and every shared grader score is an argument for the standard.

Third, open source the crown jewels. We gave away TeamCreator, five years of team formation work built on our patented method. Sounds insane. It’s not: AI can rebuild code in a weekend now, so the code was never the moat. The reps, the judgment, and the standard are the moat. Effort is the only moat left.

Fourth, publish the standard itself. GatherReady is our open specification for what a well-designed gathering publishes about itself. Standards beat marketing. Whoever writes the ruler wins the argument.

Fifth, repeat a small number of ideas until people can quote them back. I keep eleven core ideas and every piece of content advances one of them. Reset, don’t optimize. Effort is the only moat left. Innovation with no change is theater. When a stranger uses your line without crediting you, you own the idea.

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?

Restraint. We’re sitting on data that says most gatherings change nothing, and the temptation to name and shame is enormous. Every viral instinct says do it. We didn’t, and we won’t. We grade published designs, not events or people; we make no causal claims, and we treat every score as an invitation to correct us. The challenge was accepting that trust compounds slower than outrage but is worth more at every point on the curve.

What have been the most significant keys to your business’s success?

One, the data moat: nobody else read 23,624 agendas, and you can’t fake that with a weekend of prompting. Two, neutrality: free tools, no upsell, evidence anyone can audit. Three, AI leverage with human judgment on top: agents forecast, a human verifies, and we show the misses next to the wins. I’m wrong more than 99% of the time on purpose. That’s the strategy, not the problem.

Tell us about your team.

One human and a lot of robots, honestly. I set direction and keep judgment. AI agents do what junior teams used to do: research, scoring, verification, site builds, drafts. Around that core are dozens of partner organizations pioneering new ways of collaborating, plus a community of practitioners who stress test everything we publish. It’s a preview of what I think most organizations will look like: small human core, large agent workforce, wide partner network all trading trust, data, ideas, and implementations. 

What are some of your favorite books, blogs, podcasts, or YouTube channels?

Anything from the MG Taylor body of work, the lineage my patented facilitation method comes from. Buckminster Fuller, especially “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.” The Stanford generative agents research out of Joon Sung Park’s lab, which showed simulated humans behaving believably and inspired our Gathering World Model. Andrej Karpathy on YouTube for how to actually think about AI.  

What was the turning point when you knew your business was successful?

• When we hosted 1,000 people for 15 experiments on how gatherings of people over 25 people could be re-invented. Getting that many people to show up was pretty crazy.
• When we scored the corpus, then rebuilt the scoring rubric to be harsher and more honest, rescored all 23,624 agendas, and the finding didn’t move: not one agenda in the entire corpus scored above 60 out of 100. That’s when I knew we weren’t publishing an opinion. We were publishing a diagnosis.

What separates your business from your competitors?

Nobody else is the referee. Event platforms sell tickets, agencies sell production, consultants sell hours, facilitators sell agendas, and event organizers fill seats. Everyone in the industry has a reason to tell you your gathering was great. We built the one thing the industry never built for itself: a neutral scoreboard with the evidence published underneath it. And we’re the only ones simulating the room before it happens: our Gathering World Model lets you run a gathering forward, as a model of every attendee, and see who actually meets whom in a traditional format versus a transformed one. Simulate the room before you book the venue. That’s where this whole category is going.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

Stop optimizing broken systems. Reset them. Everyone’s instinct when something underperforms is to run it harder: more reviews, more tools, more meetings about the meetings. The braver move is admitting the design is the problem. And in the AI era, put your effort where it can’t be copied. Your tools are everyone’s tools now. Your reps, your data, and your honesty are yours alone.

What is your favorite quote?

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller. It’s the whole company in two sentences.

What are your future plans for the business?

Total reinvention of how humans gather. Near term: the State of Gatherings report becomes an annual fixture, GatherReady gets its first wave of adopters, and the grader becomes the thing you run before you dare send an agenda. Longer term: the Gathering World Model becomes real. Before your next offsite, you simulate it, with a model of each attendee, see that your current design produces four hallway collisions and zero commitments, redesign it, and watch the simulation change. Humans bring the connection and the judgment. Robots do everything else. The gathering stops being theater and starts being the most leveraged hours an organization spends.