On the Value of Small Rooms

There’s a number above which a dinner stops being a conversation and becomes a performance.

We’ve landed on twelve. Not because it’s tidy, but because it’s the largest group where everyone can still hear everyone else — where the person at the far end of the table isn’t effectively at a different event.

Twelve means no hiding. You can’t zone out and scroll. You can’t deflect to the person next to you and call it networking. You’re in it.

The formats that scale — the conferences, the summits, the all-hands — are optimized for broadcast. You consume. You absorb. You maybe ask one question if the timing is right.

Small rooms are optimized for something different: the kind of thinking that only happens out loud, in front of people who can push back.

That’s what we’re building.