Applications open · 3–4 December 2026 · Budapest · venue TBC · By application
“Any organisation or institution that is not explicitly right-wing will over time drift and become left-wing.”
O'Sullivan's Law · John O’Sullivan · 1989
This December, 3-4, John O’Sullivan will be inviting a first cohort of Repealers to Budapest — to begin the controlled demolition of his Law.
O’Sullivan’s Law Conference · Budapest · MMXXVI
Across 48 hours, the Repealers will form teams, to design the organisations that build a world in which the Right is the default choice. The winners will receive coaching and funding. Everyone will go home with a range of startup skills, new partners, and a fledgling enterprise.
Call it the Y Combinator of Conservatism.
The forces ranged within our society are designed to make rightism uncool, incorrect. In the world we inhabit, where there is a conflict, leftism, as a matter of chivalry and harm-prevention, should simply prevail.
In Repealing O’Sullivan’s Law, John O’Sullivan and partners want to push back against the notion that the Law is deterministic. If a group will drift leftwards unless otherwise acted upon — then we should act upon it.
As such, the inaugural O’Sullivan’s Law Conference is about increasing the number of right-coded institutions in the world, and about making those institutions more powerful and more robust.
John wants to challenge the conservative world to talk less and act more. He has essayed the problem. We know the diagnosis. What then is to be done?
Simple: we get organised. And before that: we learn how to organise. That’s what this conference is about.
Over the course of 48 hours, thinkers, leaders, managers and organisers from across the conservative spectrum will descend on Budapest — John’s home, and the home of toothy conservative institution-building — to begin to build the world we want to live in.
Delegates will be asked to form teams, to come up with an idea for a conservative-coded organisation that could enhance the mission, and to develop the business plan for it over the course of the conference.
They will identify a need, stress-test the bones, then be run through a series of seminars and challenges that will refine it — ideas about law, finance, management theory, marketing, fundraising, governance.
At the end, they will participate in a competitive pitching challenge — call it a Conservative Dragon’s Den — that will rank-order the ideas, with the winners offered ongoing coaching and support from O’Sullivan & Partners.
The rest will return home with a well-tested idea they can nurture to flight.
Delegates will work together in coming up with concepts, then across eight seminars — four a day — hear a series of lectures from top experts, and be put through coaching exercises that will refine their concept and operationalise it.
Coming up with ideas. Spotting gaps in the market. Identifying ‘needs’ versus ‘nice things’. Turning a need into a product — and turning a product into a business. Identifying the right scope. Writing a vision.
Why does anyone want this? How can you test whether you have a business idea, or just a nice idea? What does market research look like in the sector? How to write a strategic plan and budget that takes you through the first three years.
What are the banking and legal structures you can adopt to get set up in no time — while protecting the long-term? What are the best ways to hire, and how do you know if someone is right? Creating an organisational culture that is more than the sum of its parts. Values that actually bind: how the organisations that kept their shape wrote it into their constitutions — and enforced it.
Who is going to pay the bills? We hear from builders who have gone down various routes: direct donor funding, grants, fanbase-revenue, and earned-revenue through selling services. And we hear from donors — about what they look for and why.
What are the tried and tested management strategies that make novices competent? What are the systems you need to build first to get the machine to run on rails? Assigning roles and man-managing. Analysing processes, generating improvements. Avoiding hassle.
How do you get the message out? What does a comms strategy look like in 2026? How to build podcasts, grow newsletters, make short form video, cultivate journalists, stage events, break through into public consciousness?
A system to make anyone capable of defining their business and framing their need, based on the Y Combinator method of venture-capital pitching. Getting the proposition exactly right. What funders want to hear. Building a deck. Selling the sizzle. How to speak with warmth and clarity. How to handle tricky questions. Negotiation.
The conference ends with each team pitching their now burnished idea to our panel of expert judges.
The Prize
All other teams will be asked to keep building what they began: they’ll also be invited to a personalised 90 day check-in with O’Sullivan & Partners, and to join the O’Sullivan & Partners Foundry Network.
Convened by
O’Sullivan & Partners is the organisation behind the Repealing O’Sullivan’s Law Conference. Founded with John O’Sullivan, to deliver projects and consultancy across the think tank world, to make the Right more durable.
We make conservative civic society effective by building and running the machinery on which its ideas propagate.
Sponsorship
So we’re interested in hearing from sponsors who’d like the same.
We’re offering headline sponsorship of the conference. And individual place sponsorship: fund a single seat and the delegate who fills it. Please contact us at sponsorship@osullivanpartners.com.
The course takes place on 3 and 4 December, but you should budget to be with us by 7pm on the evening of 2 December for the gala dinner. We welcome applications from all kinds of weirdos and misfits — we are delighted to come to know the full breadth of the Right, and excited to pair you with a team who can balance your strengths. There is no fee to apply — payment happens once you are offered a place.