Strategic by design. Exceptional by delivery. Unforgettable by nature.
Gianna Gaudini has led event strategy for some of the most influential brands in technology. Over two decades, she built Google Cloud Next from inception and scaled it for three years as Executive Producer, led the global events function for one of the largest venture firms in the world, and launched inaugural programs for a portfolio of category-defining technology companies.
Her work spans intimate gatherings for global VIPs and conferences of more than 30,000 attendees. Across every scale, she is known as an industry taste maker, and as one of the few strategists operating at the intersection of business, hospitality, and discernment.
Today she advises a selective roster of founders and marketing leaders on the event programs that matter most to their companies. She is the author of The Art of Event Planning, a bestseller taught in hospitality management curricula across the country, and the teacher behind the Event Strategy Masterclass.
The first thing guests notice in a room is never on the agenda.
It is the light. The music. The way the space holds them before anyone has said a word. Gianna's work lives there. In the decisions most plans do not bother to name, and the ones that decide whether a program is remembered.
"I'm an optimist at my core, and I believe mindset determines ninety percent of your success. If my work can inspire you to think bigger, create bolder, and build experiences that truly matter, then I have done my job."
- Gianna Gaudini
It started with a dinner table.
In college at UC San Diego, on a pre-med track, Gianna began hosting Sunday dinners for her friends. The original point was to learn how to cook. What she noticed instead was that the part she cared about had nothing to do with the food. It was the music playing when the first guest arrived. It was who was seated next to whom. It was the kind of attention most hosts do not pay and most guests cannot name but always feel. Pre-med lasted another semester. The dinners kept going. The instinct underneath those dinners is the same one that runs the work today.
Taste, trained.
Taste, for Gianna, was not an instinct. It was a curriculum. She is a certified interior designer, trained at the Interior Design Institute and raised at the San Francisco Design Center alongside her mother's practice, Chameleon Interiors. She is a Court Master Sommelier, a credential she has carried into her publication Decantress Wine Diary and into consulting work that includes designing the original wine list for the San Francisco wine bar Noir. She studied classical piano for years. The combination produced the kind of operator she calls an event unicorn: someone who can hold strategy, taste, and execution at once. The network those worlds gave her, a black book of chefs, venues, designers, and industry luminaries, is something most advisors simply do not have access to.
When she’s not in the room.
When Gianna is not designing events, she is usually living the kind of experiences she loves to create. She runs the trails of San Francisco, plays tennis and piano with her son Giacomo, and keeps a steady practice of meditation and yoga to stay grounded in a high-pressure industry. She is a regular at her local farmers market, loves cooking family dinners, and escapes to Napa wine country with her husband Garrett whenever the calendar allows.
She is as passionate about attending exceptional experiences as she is about designing them. A live music performance, a thought-provoking exhibit, a hotel property worth writing about. Most of what she loves off the clock, the meals, the music, the travel, quietly sharpens the eye she brings to every program the rest of the year.