Every attendee, speaker, sponsor, and staff member at YOUR BUSINESS agrees to the code of conduct below. We've enforced it before. We will enforce it again. Read it once. It's short.
The conference is a room of about 1,400 strangers, half of whom are about to do work you'll envy. The other half are early — early in their careers, early in their public-facing voices, early in showing the work that is about to be a big deal. The room is fragile. What you say, applaud, ignore, retweet, and gossip about for the next three days makes the conference what it becomes for those people.
That's why kindness is rule one. Not "niceness" — niceness is performance and we don't owe anyone that. Kindness is generosity of attention. It's reading the bio on the badge before you write the person off. It's introducing someone to someone they should know rather than waiting to see if they'll figure it out. It's not making the same joke about the closing keynote during the closing keynote.
The conference exists to put work next to other work and have an honest conversation about what's interesting, what's overhyped, what's quietly broken, and what's about to matter. Work — including ours — is fair game for criticism. Especially work that's getting a lot of applause.
Being skeptical of work is not the same as being mean to people. Punch up at ideas; never down at people. If a talk fails, ask better follow-ups. If a workshop is shallow, take notes about why. If you disagree with a keynote — and you will — write up your disagreement somewhere we can read it.
You don't get to touch people without consent. This is the shortest rule and the one that has gotten people removed. "Touching" includes hugs, shoulder-pats, the back-slap, the conspiratorial elbow, and reaching across someone for a cup of coffee. If you're uncertain whether someone wants the contact, you don't get to make the contact. Ask.
This applies in equal measure to speakers and to attendees. To founders and to interns. To people you know and to people you don't. To "Latin culture" friends and to "British culture" friends. The conference is in Lisbon, but the conference is not a culture. The conference is a working environment.
The best conversations at YOUR BUSINESS happen between talks, in the foyer, on the rooftop, on the metro back to your hotel at 23:00. These are not on the record. If a person tells you something in the hallway, the social, or over a drink — you do not quote it on social media, you do not write it up in a recap newsletter, you do not screenshot the slide they showed you on their phone.
This is the rule that lets people be candid here. We have built the room so that designers in their first public year can talk to the heads of design at major studios on equal footing for three days. That equality is fragile. If you broadcast it, you break it.
If something violates this code — directly to you, near you, or upstream of you — we want to hear about it within minutes, not days. We have three pathways. All of them are read by humans on the safety team within an hour of conference doors opening.
Reports stay confidential. We do not share names with the parties involved unless you explicitly request it. We do not retaliate. We have removed three people across the L23, L24, and L25 editions for code violations and we will do it again.
We follow a four-step escalation. Steps can be skipped if a violation is severe (assault, threats, doxxing, etc.) — but most reports are handled at L1 or L2 with everyone still in the room.
A safety-team member speaks with the reported person privately within an hour. Most reports end here. No record kept beyond that conversation.
Reported in writing. Both parties (anonymized as appropriate) get a copy. Filed for the year. Two L2 warnings = automatic L3.
Badge revoked. Removed from venue. No refund. Removed from the conference app and all post-event channels. Filed permanently.
Removal as L3, plus banned from all future YOUR BUSINESS editions and any partner-run events. Used four times since L21. Public when victims request it.
EFFECTIVE FROM EDITION 04 · LISBON · SEPT 17–19, 2026