Vivienne Errington-Barnes is the CEO and founder of Shift + Alt Events. She splits her time between San Francisco and London, but plans events around the world.
How she got her start: "I started my career in investment banking and ran change functions for 10 years, so project and program management. It left its mark in terms of being the foundation of my event planning experience—but on steroids, as banks are so risk averse.
Then I started my first event company doing immersive events. It failed. I did 15 events and made $5,000. The problem was that I was selling tickets, and that business model is incredibly hard to make profitable. I asked my competitors how they were making money, and they told me that they weren’t—they were surviving with arts grants. I’m not an arts grants bae, and my tiny younger mind couldn’t comprehend that there were people/companies out there willing to spend thousands to millions on events with no ROI apart from people having fun. 
Photo: Courtesy of Vivienne Errington-Barnes
I then went into tech for the next 10 years, doing C-level roles for unicorns, the last one being chief of staff at a meditation app called Calm. Tech was what gave us our first clients, and also taste—an understanding of what affluent people and companies with large budgets want to experience at an event. I never stopped doing events for fun on the side, and eventually some of the people I met in Silicon Valley started to offer to pay me to run events for them. The company was born!
Today, my company Shift + Alt Events produces hundreds of events a year all around the world, anywhere from NYC to Costa Rica. We’re headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in London. The size of the event ranges from a five-person dinner party to a 10,000-person summit. The team is spread across the USA, Europe, and Canada, and our clients are a mix of UHNWs, nonprofits, VCs, and corporates."
What sets her company apart: "I’ve never come across another event production company founder that has had my career path. Events are quite vocational, and most people on my career track wouldn’t logically go into events. But events are everything to me on an existential level. I’m an optimistic nihilist—which means that I think we’re all going to die and nothing’s going to happen, so we should make the most of the time and create our own meaning while we’re here. My belief is that the best way to achieve that is to spend our time intentionally and the best container for intentionality is an event.
In addition to this, all of our team are ex-tech execs who I met working in tech, who left for a better life in terms of lifestyle. I treat them like adults who are complete masters of their own time: unlimited vacation, no specific hours, days of the week, or times they should work—just focused on outcomes. They may work from anywhere in the world and use any tools they choose. This means that most of our planners have been guests at the events they are planning, and the quality of the event subsequently is so much higher." 
"We get inspired to be innovative by taking traditional formats and adding a twist and seeing how it could be reimagined," says Errington-Barnes.Photo: Courtesy of Shift + Alt Events
What innovation means to her: "Innovation is being original. You cannot be original without taking risks; if it hasn’t been done before, then you don’t 100% know it’s going to work. You can aggregate the risk over multiple smaller risks—e.g., let’s have five different completely new types of brand activations: one no one realizes is there, one people don’t understand how to use, two are fine but don’t set people alight, but the last has people talking for months—but ultimately, you have to take a risk.
It’s not just important for us to stay innovative. It’s our whole offering and how we define ourselves as a business. We are a bespoke event planning company focused entirely on originality.
We get inspired to be innovative by taking traditional formats and adding a twist and seeing how it could be reimagined. For example, we were asked to do a wine tasting for a private members wine tasting club, [which can be] very boring. We made it original by interpreting 10 wines through the five senses in pairs. So for sight, we had five dancers representing two wines, and you had to taste each wine and guess which dancer was which. For sound, we had two musicians playing, each representing a wine, and so on."
For the Solana event, "instead of a static party, we created an ecosystem where guests could see the blockchain come to life around them," she says.Photo: Kelsey Floyd
Memorable moments: "One of the most innovative and technologically ambitious events we produced was a light-art-themed launch party for Solana, the cryptocurrency. Held in a repurposed Brutalist power station, the event was a living, interactive artwork, where real-time Solana blockchain transactions directly influenced the lighting, visuals, and even the music. Instead of a static party, we created an ecosystem where guests could see the blockchain come to life around them.
We had a dynamic LED ceiling that pulsed in real time based on Solana’s on-chain activity—when transactions spiked, the venue glowed brighter. We had generative holographic NFT sculptures, which constantly morphed based on live market data from the Solana network. A motion-sensitive dance floor responded to guests’ movements, mirroring the liquidity and flow of Solana’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. An AI-driven NFT photo booth, where guests could mint their own one-of-a-kind, light-generated NFT portraits, stored permanently on the Solana blockchain.
To elevate the experience even further, we incorporated Solana-powered transactions at the bar—guests could tap their wallets to instantly purchase cocktails, unlocking special glowing drinks only available to crypto holders."
Her biggest hope for the event industry: "That AI removes a lot of the administrative grunt work and enables us to focus on creativity, communication, and relationship building."
