The Shareholder Summit is KmikeyM’s annual shareholder meeting: a day-long gathering, in person with a free livestream, where Mike Merrill reports on the year, invited speakers present, and the community that holds shares in him spends a day in the same room. It has run since 2016 and is one of the project’s recurring institutions alongside Build Week and Shareholder Poker. The summit’s own site, shareholdersummit.com, carries each edition’s full program and recap.
The series
The first edition, in 2016, was called simply “Annual Review,” and it ended where these things tend to: with a shareholder asking what happens to their shares when Mike dies. The series picked back up in 2023 and has run annually since. The editions index on the summit site lists 2016, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026.
The Summit is a meeting, not a legislature. Binding decisions happen through the vote system year-round; at the 2026 edition, no votes or governance business were held at all.
Summit 2026: “Long Confidence”
Held Saturday, July 11, 2026 at the Panic office in downtown Portland, with around 35 people in the room and more on the livestream, broadcast and directed by Aaron Parecki. The theme was Long Confidence: KmikeyM at 18, and what it takes to keep doing your thing long enough that it stops being a “project” and becomes something like a career, but much weirder.
The keynote opened with a fake-out. Mike said “the experiment is over” and walked off stage, leaving MC Marcus Estes, who had genuinely not been briefed, to hold the room. Mike returned, delivered the annual shareholder review, and landed the real thesis: the experiment is over, but the project continues. What retired that day was the word. KmikeyM had been called an “experiment” for 18 years; from this Summit forward it is what it demonstrably is, a market in a person, with binding votes and since 2008 a working governance record.
The rest of the day, as the program ran: a panel on long-form writing with Sheila Heti, Kathryn Borel, and Zach Dundas, moderated by Mike, who stepped in when the booked moderator, Chris Higgins, came down with shingles days before (putting Mike on stage for 86 consecutive minutes); lunch of made-to-order pizza by Neven Mrgan; an anonymous guest in conversation with Mike about running a business off the books, whose pixelated stream feed was routed onto the room’s big TV so even the in-person audience watched him pixelated beside himself; and four shareholder Show & Tells, from Faith Dionne, Chris Higgins (who committed publicly, for the first time, to finishing a documentary he had carried for years), Neven Mrgan, and Jessa Graves, whose closing line the summit site singles out: “I’m a musician. Not because it’s how I make a living, but because it’s how I live.” The day closed with a conversation between Kathryn Borel and Sheila Heti, and continued that evening at a happy hour co-hosted with Alex Mahan.
Venue and support were community-carried: Panic hosted, Aaron Parecki ran the broadcast, Portland Game Library provided totes (printed by Grilka Press, sponsored by PGL co-founder Gene Merrill), and Alex Mahan backed the evening event.
Watching it
The livestream was free and open. Recordings are in post-production; the summit site is where replays appear as they are released. As of August 2026, no date for a 2027 edition has been announced.
Related
Build Week · Shareholder Poker · KmikeyM · Mike Merrill · The New Opportunity Vote