Amy Peters, Co-Owner of Secret Knock The Room Where Nobody Performs “Women Lifting Up Women” Series
Secret Knock is the #1 networking event in the world. What makes it unique?
Others have done the ranking. What I can tell you is what it felt like the first time I walked in: intoxicating, and full of people who wanted to know you. Not your title. You. In twenty years of business I had never been in a room like it, and I walked out belonging to something. I didn’t know yet that Paul and I would one day run it. I only knew I never wanted to leave.
What makes it unique is that the room is capped — by invitation or application only — and it lives by four rules: the room is never sold to; give before you ask; what happens here stays here; show up and give it your all. Everyone agreed to those before they arrived, and you can feel it within five minutes. Nobody is working an angle on you. After twenty-one years, that is still why people come back.
Greg Reid built that. He co-wrote Three Feet from Gold, about the people who stop digging just short of the breakthrough, and he told us Secret Knock is that book built into a room — a place where nobody quits three feet short, because the person beside them won’t let them. He put a copy in our hands and told us it was to be our blueprint. It is.
And then there is the feeling of the place, which takes three phrases because it has never fit in one: part modern-day circus, part glitz and glam, part mind-expanding personal development. Greg says the idea of Secret Knock is “seeing things that you don’t normally see,” and this year the same stage held the co-founder of Priceline, a Grammy-winning vocalist and a sword swallower named Dan Meyer, who stood in front of a room of founders and said the thing every one of them needed to hear: “It takes courage to fail and failure to succeed. The most successful people you’ll ever meet were once the greatest failures who overcame defeat. Dare to fail. Reach to succeed.” It all made sense together, because the point was never the résumés. You come for the room and leave with a different sense of what’s possible.
Why does Secret Knock belong on every entrepreneur’s must-attend list?
What surprises people when they walk in is that a networking event can feel like this. You know it within the hour: it is the one room where you don’t have to perform.
Founders spend a great deal of their lives being read for advantage. It’s exhausting, and it’s why so many capable people quit three feet short — not for lack of talent, but for lack of one person beside them who won’t let them. Secret Knock is built so that person is in the next seat. I know what a door is worth. I once needed someone to open one for me, and now I get to say yes to the next woman. Jeff Hoffman, who co-founded Priceline, gave the room the line that explains why I do this at all: “Intelligence is equally distributed across the human race. Opportunity is not.” Secret Knock exists to close that gap for the people in it. I’ve watched a conversation over lunch turn into a partnership, a stranger’s question turn into a book, and a founder who came in tired go home with a plan and three people who’ll hold her to it.
You don’t come to Secret Knock to collect business cards. You come to be seen and to see other people, and to give before you ask, which turns out to be where everything worth having begins. Every founder I know has a version of the same wish: to be in a room full of people who are already doing what she’s trying to do, and who are glad she showed up. That’s what this room is. I would have given anything to walk into it years earlier than I did.
Tell us about the women who have been supportive during your journey.
I’ll start with my mother. Before I was born, my parents couldn’t make rent, so my father sold insurance door to door — and my mother studied in the car, inching it along the curb while he walked from house to house. That is the first picture I have of what a partnership looks like. We moved eleven times before I finished high school, and every one of those houses felt like ours within the week, because she made certain of it. And of everything I carry from those years, the memory that still drives me is a sound: my mother’s heels on a Sunday morning, when I was still in elementary school. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I knew I wanted to walk into rooms the way she did. I was made for business, and she is where I first heard it.
There was also a season of my life when I was rebuilt by women who refused to let me disappear. I made the climb myself — no one can do it for you — but I have never once stayed up there alone, and I no longer want to.
Dr. Victoria Rader — Vica, to the people who love her — is a TEDx speaker and the founder of YU2SHINE, and she was Paul’s coach first. She was so wonderful that I took her for myself, and Paul has been gracious about it. She married us. One of her books is called Worthy mE, and that is not a coincidence: when I had quietly decided I wasn’t worthy of a room like Secret Knock, let alone of running it, she refused to let the decision stand. She reminded me that I am made for something far greater than myself, and then she held me to it. When Greg was deciding who should carry Secret Knock next, she made the case for us. She had been making it to me for years.
But if I’m honoring one woman, it’s Lauren Beam. I grew up with one sister, and I’ll tell you plainly that I now have two — not by blood; by choice, and by fire. Lauren earned that title the only way it can be earned: she showed up when showing up was expensive. Telling the truth on my behalf cost her something real, and I won’t say what, because that story is hers. She did it anyway, when a great deal was riding on it and silence would have been easier. What she says to me, always, is three words: You got this. Plenty of people say that. Lauren said it in a way that made me believe it, and kept saying it until it was true.
And then she did the thing I find most remarkable of all: she stayed. She is co-founder and CEO of Raindrop Digital, which builds custom software for small and mid-sized companies, and Raindrop built Happy Hire, the platform I’m launching at House of Higher. The woman who stood up for me is building the company with me, and we work together every day. My rock bottom didn’t only produce a survival story. It produced a sister, and she is in the room where the future is being built.
Who are the women you have lifted up through Secret Knock Women? Tell us about Secret Knock Women, and share a few personal stories.
Secret Knock Women is a two-day retreat for women who are already shaping something — a company, a city, a field, a family — and who need a circle they don’t have to perform for. Camaraderie rather than competition. No stage, no hierarchy. A table and a circle, where every woman has something to give, something to receive, and something she is still discovering. Come as you are; leave as who you’re meant to be. Of everything we do, it is the part I would have done for free.
I use “lifted up” carefully, because the lift in that room comes from somewhere better than a hand reaching down. Women arrive carrying more than they realize, and they are allowed to set it down in front of people who understand exactly how heavy it was. What lifts them is being seen, and what keeps them lifted is discovering they no longer need to ask the room for it. I know what it is to be a capable woman with nowhere to bring it. This is a place I need, and now every woman who needs it has it.
The women I’d point to were at my table at Secret Knock this year: women in the process of becoming, seated beside people who had already become. What I watched happen was less about me than about proximity. A hero turned out to be a person you could sit beside. A lunch with someone one of them had only ever seen on a screen turned into a career opportunity for her son. A stranger turned out to be exactly the patent attorney another one needed, and more than one walked out with the first real intention to write a book.
Dr. Remina Panjwani is a physician and an author in this community; her novel Odd Girl Out received an International Impact Book Award this year. She said something from our stage that I think about often: “I’m an internal medicine physician, and I was always told, ‘No, you can’t.'” That sentence is the whole reason the room exists. Every woman in it was told the same thing by someone.
Eileen E. Galbraith, an author, coach and speaker who now sits on our council, said it in two sentences I couldn’t improve: “I originally came to Secret Knock thinking I was attending a networking event. Instead I found my people.” And Shanna Lee Moore, who has been part of this community for years, put her finger on why it works at all: “We don’t gather because we need someone to lead us; we gather because we recognize the strength, courage, and purpose already living within each other.”
What I can tell you without naming anyone is the moment I watch for. It is always the same: a woman who came in composed says one true thing out loud, the circle doesn’t flinch, and something in her shoulders lets go. Everything else we build is in service of that moment.
Share your vision for Secret Knock Global and Secret Knock Women for 2027 — and a bit about your event in March.
I should say a word about “we” first. Paul is my husband, my best friend and my confidant; we do life together, and we do this together. We are true opposites who somehow match — he’s an analytical thinker, I’m a process thinker — and what holds it in harmony is a shared conviction that we’re here to leave the world better than we found it. That’s the whole partnership. It also happens to be the whole business plan.
The vision is a community rooted in purpose and prosperity, one that supports the growth of every business in our family and everyone we collaborate with, and has a blast doing it. Paul said it from the stage this year better than I’ve managed in a hundred meetings: “When you unite purpose and service, you truly change the world.” That is the whole plan.
When Paul and I signed, the first decision we made was what we would refuse to change, and the answer was the heart of it: the sense of community and connection Greg created. Everything after that is extension, not renovation. Secret Knock has always been a room. What we’re building is a way for that room to keep going after the doors close, with support behind it and value in it for everyone who belongs, so that anyone in this community can rise with us and around us — doing good, building authentic prosperity, and feeding a hunger for knowledge and growth that, in the best people, never ends.
The next one opens March 23–25, 2027, in San Diego, the first Paul and I will run. The room stays capped, the four rules stay, and the trust that twenty-one years earned stays. What we’re adding is depth: three days that move from learning to celebration to connection, including an evening that honors the authors this community has produced. There are a few things I’m not going to spoil. Expect the unexpected. Expect an experience.
Secret Knock Women is about to become more than two days a year. In 2027 it becomes a circle that meets between retreats — women in the process of becoming beside women who have already arrived, with the retreat as the high point of the year rather than the whole of it. You apply, and the door opens for the women who came to give. The rest I’m keeping close, because it’s being built the way everything I care about has been built, on purpose and by hand. Someone taught me how to build prosperity that holds. The only honest response is to turn around and teach the next woman, and to ask her the question I ask myself: is your younger self proud of you?
Take the You that you have, and love her. Show her the compassion you would show anyone else. You are so much more than you think you are.
