Spring conference season doesn't announce itself. It arrives all at once. Four of the five events below land within the next 85 days. The calendar looks manageable until it doesn't.

The alternatives calendar is entering its densest stretch of Q2. From mid-April through late June, the institutional event stack runs nearly unbroken: VC operators in San Diego, flagship multi-asset in LA, family offices in New York, healthcare PE and real estate in Washington back to back. For LPs managing travel budgets and GPs running dual mandates, the prioritization calculus is real. This issue maps the rooms worth the trip.

VC Platform Summit | April 13, San Diego

In its 10th year and still the only conference built specifically for venture platform leaders. Not LPs, not founders, not analysts. Five hundred peers, three days, and a speaker list drawn from Kleiner, Lightspeed, USV, and Scale. If you touch platform at a fund of any size, this is the room. Thirteen days out.

The Annual | April 20, Los Angeles

Twenty years in, With Intelligence's flagship conference has outlasted half the funds it covers. One hundred speakers across 29 sessions, institutional investors and family offices in the same room, North American scope. The longevity is the signal. If it weren't useful, it wouldn't still be running.

Single Family Office Summit | May 28, New York City

The Family Office Club's 19th annual puts 150+ investors and 75 speakers on stage across six networking sessions, including four centimillionaire fireside chats. The audience skews genuinely wealthy, not aspirationally wealthy. That distinction matters if you're there to source.

Kayo Healthcare PE Summit | June 22, Washington D.C.

Only in its second year, but Kayo's track record in niche PE verticalization earns the benefit of the doubt. One hundred fifty attendees, 50 speakers, focused entirely on healthcare private equity operators and investors. The DC location puts it adjacent to the Kayo Real Estate Summit two days later. Worth noting if you're already flying in.

Kayo Real Estate Summit | June 24, Washington D.C.

Nine years running, 300+ attendees, 70 speakers drawn from Bain Capital, Ares, StepStone, AEW, and Global Endowment Management. The Kayo Real Estate Summit is the most established women-in-real-estate-PE conference in the country. The speaker quality this year is as strong as the event has ever listed.

Real assets are still getting the allocation. Blackstone's BREIT took in more money from investors than it paid out in February, the first time that has happened since 2022, a signal that retail appetite for non-traded REITs is thawing after an extended period of redemption pressure. The fund attracted $7.2B in new capital across 2025 and quadrupled its internal rate of return year over year. Institutional allocators are watching. The event calendar reflects it: real assets conferences account for the second-densest category in the next 90 days, trailing only multi-asset institutional events. Whether this is a genuine rotation or a relief rally will depend on what rate expectations look like by Q3.

The fundraising environment is stratifying, not recovering. Q1 2026 is shaping up to be the biggest fundraising quarter since 2021, with over $80 billion confirmed across venture capital and private equity in the US alone. But the top five VC closes account for more than $35 billion of that total. The top ten PE funds took their largest share of US fundraising in more than a decade, as LP capital continued consolidating around established names. Emerging and first-time managers are operating in a materially different market, which explains why conferences built for the non-megafund world keep drawing capacity crowds even as overall fundraising timelines extend.

The Annual at 20: What It Means When a Conference Survives

Most institutional conferences don't make it to 20 years. They merge, rebrand, lose their anchor sponsor, or simply fail to adapt when the audience's priorities shift. The Annual, produced by With Intelligence, has done none of those things. That longevity is worth examining rather than treating as background noise.

The conference launched when hedge fund of funds was still a growth category, when alternative investments were still structurally exotic for most endowments and pension funds, and when "multi-asset" wasn't yet the catch-all it's become. The fact that The Annual has survived across that entire arc, through 2008, through the democratization wave of alternative access, through COVID and the subsequent volatility cycle, suggests it has done something right structurally.

That something is probably the refusal to specialize. With 29 sessions spanning institutional investors, family offices, and investment consultants, The Annual has maintained enough breadth to stay relevant as allocator composition has shifted. It is not the deepest conference in any single category. It is the only one at this scale covering all of them simultaneously.

For LPs, that breadth is the value. For GPs seeking LP meetings, that breadth is the opportunity. At its 20th edition, The Annual's chief asset is simply that the right people still show up. April 20, Los Angeles.