32/40 - Networking Franchises
Moving to the biggest city in the country surrounded by all the other people determined to make it in the city that never sleeps is a daunting challenge. Especially when you were working for a NYC based company in Texas and now you're working for a Texas based company from NYC. (I've been doing remote since 2007 - glad everyone could catch up thanks to the pandemic!)
Building a network from scratch was a challenge, but in the same way that everyone who moves to NYC has a certain type of craziness, they also are more open to just showing up to a random invitation and seeing what happens.
Especially if that invitation sounds like it is to something that has some kind of organization or history to it.
When I got to NYC, I was in a lot of meetings with tech people, creative agency people, and brand people. I knew that I wanted to get to know them better and see if there was any connection outside of the biz dev deal we were working on for Gowalla. So I tried an experiment for a few months.
Every few weeks, I'd send an email out to everyone I'd met for work reasons in NYC and say,
"I'm going to be having a drink from 5:30-7:30 at The Half Pint - if you'd like to join me, the only price of admission is bringing someone cooler than you are."
After a couple of times and a lot of people unexpectedly showing up and bringing in a friend, COOL KIDS was born.
Every few weeks, I'd send the email on Wednesday morning letting people know that this Friday there'd be a COOL KIDS. I never gave more than two days notice and it was never consistently a certain Friday of the month, just whenever I was in town and had a free Friday afternoon/early evening.
The list got up to 140 people at one point, so I went through the list and looked at the people who were invited but never came, people who never brought other interesting people or people who never chipped in to help pay the bill. I cut the list to 80 people. I then emailed the list letting them know that they'd made the cut. On accident, I CC'ed everyone instead of BCC'ing everyone like I normally do. It was a big mistake on my part, but ended up being the best thing that ever happened to COOL KIDS because some people hadn't been coming because their ex-girlfriend was on the invite list, or they didn't like someone who had shown up once when they were there. That next COOL KIDS had over 40 of the 80 people on the list and the bill was more than paid for.
At that point, I started adding a line to the invite,
"If you bring someone who is less cool than you are, you both will be asked to leave and you will be removed from this invite list."
And it worked. Even cooler people started coming and then they started bringing even cooler friends. From 2010 until 2017, I owe a majority of my NYC network to COOL KIDS. Heck, it is where I met my ex-fiancee and also the guy who ended up investing over $10,000,000 into my startup.
With the success of COOL KIDS at home, I wondered if I could recreate it while traveling to different cities. Hence, GOOD PEOPLE, GREAT DINNER was born. When I knew that I was going to be in a city long enough while traveling, I'd reach out to five people that I knew in that city and invite them for dinner and tell them that their price of admission was to bring someone cooler than them. Then at dinner, I'd tell everyone they had to sit next to people they didn't already know. It ended up building my network across the world and there are a lot of friendships that formed in those cities that began at those dinners. From 2010 to 2015, I hosted GOOD PEOPLE, GREAT DINNERs in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dubai, Sydney, London, Paris, Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Chicago.
Most recently, I've found a whole new franchise of connection that has changed my network in NYC again. Starting in 2019, GENTLEMEN'S DINNERS have been maybe my favorite of these three. It all started when my now co-host John and I kept seeing each other at a local restaurant during breakfast. We both hosted at least two breakfast meetings there a week and decided that we should have breakfast with each other on purpose instead of just in passing after meeting someone else. We realized that we both had great networks, but they didn't have nearly as much cross-over as we would have assumed. So I suggested we host a dinner together and that he brings three people he knew I didn't know and I'd bring three people he didn't know and we'd see what happened.
We've now done 27 GENTLEMEN'S DINNERS and it is some of the best open and candid conversations that I've had the chance to be a part of. Most of them have been in my #NotSoSecretGarden but as we've grown, others have offered up their rooftops, gardens, or restaurants and the variety has been key to continuing the fun.
I so appreciate my family for loving to host and teaching me how to love bringing people together. I love the doors that each of these three franchises has opened and can't wait to see what networks unfold in the years to come.
