Notification: Brunch with the girls! @ Sat 15 Aug 2026 11am – 1pm (EDT)
What was once a spontaneous thought has become a calendar item.
I love a full calendar, and the tools were never the enemy. Coffee chats, meetings, one-on-ones, mentor calls, hangouts. But somewhere along the way, everything became a thing to book and be at. Has it always been part of adulthood, or are we facing it more than usual? Has the culture of workplace meetings trained us to turn every hangout into a colored block of mutual commitment? And has the new norm of rare, scheduled meetups made us more deliberate about what those meetups need to be like – so deliberate that good old networking events feel nerve-wracking now, and we’ve moved toward something newer, something better?
The $400k Room
Large companies like NVIDIA and Anthropic have posted urgent roles for event leads at $400,000 a year.
In The Elective I wrote:
“People once studied what was crucial to building technologies. Now that building is the easy part, everyone is focused on making those technologies feel necessary to humans. That is exactly what’s happening.”
The one currency corporations cannot generate themselves is loyalty and trust. Ads are no longer sufficient. Humans connect to humans. In-person hackathons, founder dinners, and developer pop-ups are doing more than any virtual demo pitch or social media ad ever could by generating traction and genuine feedback simultaneously. Before, ecosystem meant a company’s range of products. Now it includes the rooms a brand creates and the people inside them, who leave as advocates whether they intended to or not
People want in. People want to feel special. And these private, informal gatherings deliver exactly that: building the company’s brand while reflecting back onto the attendees themselves. It has become easier to understand people through where they go and what they attend than through asking them directly what they value. Ask someone what events they enjoy, and you’ll hear them describe the exact values they’re reaching toward with an animation and specificity they couldn’t have summoned any other way.
The Transient Third Place
These events work. They are genuinely appealing: a room of people who use the same tools, care about the same problems, and showed up on purpose. Companies bank on that motivation, making the event exclusive, ticketed, controlled. In an era of personal branding, the gathering becomes symbiotic: the event generates content, word spreads, more people want in, and the company sees returns compound.
But my question is whether this functions because there’s a shared mission and a host in sight, or because people are simply deprived of warm human interaction in a world that has slowly dismantled the spaces that used to hold it casually.
Hosting
The networking dinners and exclusive circles of today are a return to what salons used to be in the eighteenth century: gatherings operating outside formal structures, organized by hosts, predominately women, who understood that the right room could change the shape of ideas. Enlightenment thinking, literary movements, political philosophy – all of it circulated through salons before entering formal discourse. The salon wasn’t networking. It was a gift economy of ideas, where the currency was conversation and the only admission requirement was genuine curiosity.
Hosting doesn’t come easily to me, though I see its appeal. There are always invisible strings to pull: the pacing of arrivals, the seating that either opens or closes conversation, the moment you feel a room tipping and have to quietly pull it back. The host is never fully off stage. They have set the scene, cast the room, and are performing within it simultaneously.
I find myself more naturally drawn to a different register of togetherness. Coworking spaces, artist-led rooms, the particular atmosphere of focused people who happen to prefer working in the same space. They may interact minimally, but in those few words, something opens. A glimpse into the expansive universe inside a person, offered without ceremony. The ambient sociality doesn’t build a relationship on the basis of a pitch, but the depth that forms between fellow creatives provides something engineered networking rarely does: the feeling of being alongside someone rather than across from them.
Dramaturgy
But a thought persists: what does it mean that even the most genuine gatherings are still, at some level, designed by someone?
Erving Goffman called this dramaturgy. All social life is performance. We are always managing the impression we make, navigating the gap between who we are and who we are presenting ourselves to be. Every gathering has a front stage, where the performance happens, and a backstage, where the performer steps out of role. The host occupies both simultaneously. And the guest, whether they know it or not, is also performing.
“What is important is the sense a person provides others through their dealings with them of what sort of person they are behind the role they are in.” – Goffman, Frame Analysis
The tension hosting culture rarely names directly: when you curate the conditions for genuine connection, are you undermining the genuineness of what happens inside them? Or is curation itself an act of care?
The most memorable gatherings I’ve been in weren’t undesigned. They were carefully tended. The lighting, the pacing, the absence of a rigid agenda. All of it shaped what was possible in the room. But none of it substituted for the invisible quality underneath: whether the person who called the room together actually wanted you there.
Jan Gunnarsson distinguishes between hospitality, the provision of comfort and the right conditions, and hostmanship, the genuine desire for another person to feel they belong.
Hospitality can be performed. Hostmanship cannot.
People feel the difference even when they can’t name it. It is the gap between technically correct and spiritually inert, which, it turns out, is not just a problem of design. It is a problem of intention.
The Personal Brand in the Room
Hosting culture is having a trend moment. And like everything that trends, it is immediately being absorbed into the logic of personal brand strategy. Host a dinner to build your network. Curate a gathering to establish yourself as a connector. The advice is everywhere and it isn’t exactly wrong, but something changes when the motivation shifts.
The dramaturgy problem becomes explicit here. When hosting is a strategy, the backstage becomes legible and the room feels different. People can feel the difference between being gathered because someone genuinely wanted them there and being gathered because someone wanted to be seen as the kind of person who gathers people.
The tell is subtle but consistent. It lives in whether the host is present to the room or performing their presence in it. Whether the gathering creates space for something unplanned to happen, or whether every moment is accounted for in service of an outcome. Whether you leave feeling you gave something and received something or that you were content for someone else’s brand.
As I wrote in The Elective:
“The danger isn’t that something valuable will be ignored. It’s that it will be co-opted; stripped of the very qualities that made it valuable, packaged as a strategy, and handed back to us as a deliverable.”
Hosting is not immune.
What the Room Does to You
Kaleido is a form of hosting. I set conditions: the pacing, the absence of an agenda, the particular quality of attention I try to bring to each Lens and then let go of what happens inside them. The resonances, the moments when someone says I’ve been thinking about this too, those aren’t things I designed. They are what the room produced once the conditions were right.
That distinction between designing a room and tending one is what the hosting culture conversation keeps circling about. Design implies control: the right conditions, the intended outcome, the measurable return. Tending implies something slower. Ongoing responsiveness. Attention to what the room needs rather than what you want it to produce.
At the micro level, this shapes people. Goffman would say every room we enter gives us a script: cues about who to be, how to present, what to perform. But tended rooms are different. They create enough safety for the backstage to surface. It is in those unguarded moments the conversation outlasts the agenda when you speak to the person under the performance.
At the macro level the stakes are larger. Designed rooms serve the brand and they will keep working because the human need for belonging is real and a well-curated event genuinely meets it, at least temporarily. But designed rooms have a lifespan tied to the entity that called them into being. When the brand pivots, the room closes.
Tended rooms behave differently. The salons didn’t survive because a company kept funding them. They survived because the people inside kept returning because something happened there that couldn’t happen anywhere else.
In Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein writes:
“In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources. The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear.”
The tended room already enacts this at small scale, every time it gathers without a sponsor, without a metric, without a brand to outlast.
I don’t think brands are the villain and I don’t think tending is always superior to designing. They serve different purposes and hosting culture needs both. But I am curious what it does to a society when the ratio tips too far in one direction: when every room has a sponsor, every gathering has a metric, and the unplanned conversation becomes the exception rather than the norm.
The question worth sitting with for a generation of digital natives who grew up performing connection more than practicing it is not whether hosted gatherings will continue to grow. They will. The question is which kind, and what that choice produces in the people who keep showing up.
Designed rooms teach you to network. Tended rooms teach you who you are when nobody is performing. Over time that difference compounds, shaping not just how people connect but how they understand themselves in relation to others. Which is, in the end, the oldest definition of culture there is.
Here’s what I’ve been up to:
- I have been volunteering as a social media manager and I just mentored my first intern!! Definitely a new experience.
- Super close to the finish line of the RGD project based mentorship program this August! Excited to present it soon.
THIS!! “Whether you leave feeling you gave something and received something or that you were content for someone else’s brand.”
the feeling of being alongside someone rather than across from them!!!!!!!!