Events Lead

The Ken; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

The Ken in Bengaluru seeks an events lead to plan and execute an 18-month live events calendar across cities, formats, and sizes, balancing tickets and sponsorships to make attending attractive before we ask. You’ll design repeatable formats, own pricing, and run the events to The Ken’s standard.

You’ll test learnings to guide product decisions across stories, newsletters, and podcasts, while ensuring venues, speakers, registration, and follow-ups are smooth and profitable.

Qualifications

• 2 to 4 years in events, programming, or partnerships.
• Experience delivering paid events and sponsorships.
• Ability to design recurring formats and test ideas in rooms.

Responsibilities

• Write and own an 18-month events plan with formats, sizes, and costs.
• Design events as repeatable products with clear in-room value.
• Own ticketing, pricing, and sponsorship strategy for each event.
• Build a compelling sponsorship offer and close deals.
• Plan event logistics: venues, speakers, registration, and follow-up.
• Test learnings from events to inform other products (stories, newsletters).
• Ensure events serve multiple goals: subscribers, corporate teams, podcasts.

Skills

Event planning

Project management

Budgeting

Sponsorship sales

Stakeholder management

Tools

Ticketing systems

Vendor management

CRM tools

Job description

You build an 18-month plan for The Ken s live events across cities, topics, formats, and sizes, then run it so attending or sponsoring a The Ken event becomes something people want before we ask.

Bengaluru; full-time; 2 to 4 years of experience.

About the role

The Ken has been running live events for a little over a year. There have been six so far: small rooms, sharp topics, a crowd that reads us and argues back. Five of the six sold out. All made money. The last one had sponsors as well as tickets.

That's a promising start, but still not a business. Each event has been planned, sold, and run more or less from scratch, and the calendar depends on who has time. We want events to become a thing people know The Ken for, alongside the stories and the podcasts, and the one part of what we do that can't be summarised by a chatbot: a room full of the people we write about and for, in the same place, with something worth arguing about.

You ll be the first person with this as your whole job. You ll build the plan, design the formats, decide what runs on tickets and what on sponsorship, run the events to The Ken s standard, and use the room to test what the rest of the company does next.

What you will do

• Write the plan, then live by it. In your first quarter, build an 18-month events plan: cities, recurring series, one-off flagships, sizes (a 30-person salon, a 200-person evening, an all-day flagship), the ticket and sponsorship mix for each, and the cost. It goes in front of the founders, gets argued with, and becomes the calendar everyone can see.
• Design events as products, not occasions. Every event has a format that repeats, a reason to attend that s obvious from the title, and something that happens in the room that can t happen on a screen: a structured debate, a live poll with results on the wall, a guest who only says it in person, a dinner where the seating is the point.
• Make the calendar sell itself. Own ticketing: pricing, tiers, early access for subscribers, what corporate customers get. Build the series people put in their diaries before the lineup is announced. Decide, per event, whether it runs on tickets, sponsorship, or both, and show why.
• Build the sponsorship offer. Work out what a sponsor actually gets from an event by The Ken, package it, price it, and hand it to the people who sell it in a form that closes and renews. A one-off sponsor who don t come back is a product failure, not a problem with the pitch.
• Run them well. Venues, vendors, run-of-show, speakers, registration, the room on the night, next morning s follow-up. You ll have help for the heavy lifting; the standard is yours. A Ken event feels like The Ken: considered, no filler, nobody reading slides.
• Use the room to test things. Topics, formats, and hosts that work live tell us what might work as a series, story, newsletter, or podcast. Write up what you learned after every event and push it to the people who can use it.
• Make each event do more than one job. Events are where subscribers meet in person, where corporate customers bring their teams, where a podcast gets a live audience, and where reporting gets a room.
• Measure it. Per event and per series: cost, ticket revenue, sponsorship revenue, margin, sell-through, who came (subscribers, corporate seats, new people), who came back, what they said. Report monthly in the open review and let it change the plan.

What we are looking for

• 2 to 4 years in events, programming, community, partnerships, or a producer role at a media company, a conference business, a membership organisation, or a brand that runs its own events. We care more about what you ve put on and what happened than about titles.
• You will do well here if: You ve put on things people paid to attend, and you can say what you d do differently.
• You think in formats and series, not one-offs. Shown a topic, you can describe three different rooms it could be and which you d run first.
• You can hold a plan and a checklist at the same time. The 18-month vision and Thursday s seating chart are both yours.
• You read numbers and act on them. A sell-through rate, a margin, a no-show rate: you ve changed an event because of one.
• You understand what sponsors buy: access, association, and a story they can tell internally, not logos on a banner. You can package that without touching what s said on stage.
• You can get people to do things even when you have no authority over them: a reporter to host, a founder to speak, a venue to hold a date, a colleague to show up at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday.
• You care about what happens in the room more than what the photos look like.
• You're honest afterwards. When an event don t work, you say so and say why, before anyone asks.
• Useful but not required: events in more than one city; sold or packaged sponsorship; ran a dinner, salon, or workshop series as well as a stage event; worked with a newsroom; been to one of ours.

What you get

A line of the business that is yours to build, at a publication whose readers already turn up. A calendar you wrote, and a monthly number everyone in the company sees. An audience most event businesses would kill for: subscribers who pay for business journalism, founders, operators and investors who read it, corporate customers who send their teams. They come to argue, not to network. And a real test bed, where what you learn in the room changes what the newsroom and the podcasts do next.