Stop chasing rooms. Build your own.

We have all been there. You walk into an event, you do not know a single person, and you just drift around the edges holding a drink. Awkward as hell, and almost always a waste of an evening.

Most people respond to that by getting better at working other people’s rooms. There is a smarter move: stop chasing other people’s rooms and build the one you actually want to be in.

Why building beats chasing

When you attend someone else’s event, you are a guest competing for attention with everyone else there. When you build the room, everything flips in your favour.

You decide who is in it, so the quality is high by design. You are the host, which makes you the natural connector everyone wants to meet. And you start every single relationship from a position of having given, because you created the value that brought these people together, instead of arriving with your hand out.

That last point is the whole game. It is the difference between asking strangers for something and having a room full of people who already associate you with value.

Give, give, give. Then ask.

Here is the principle underneath it. Bring the right people together around a shared interest. Deliver value first. Give. Give. Give. Then, and only then, you have earned the right to ask.

This is not a manipulation tactic with a delayed payoff. It is just how trust works. As the 50/100/200-hour rule shows, trust is built through repeated, quality shared time, and hosting is one of the most efficient ways to generate that time with a lot of the right people at once. Every gathering is hours banked with everyone in the room.

The mistake almost everyone makes is reversing the order: they ask before they have given anything. The ask lands flat because there is no goodwill behind it. Get the order right and the asks, when they finally come, feel natural and get said yes to.

Why I built Club 23

This is not theory for me. It is exactly why Kate and I built Club 23. I looked around at the rooms available to me, did not see the one I actually wanted to be in, and so I created it.

That single decision changed the math. Instead of chasing introductions one awkward event at a time, I had a room of the right people who all met each other through something I built. The social capital that came out of that did not come from networking harder. It came from hosting.

You do not need to start with a club. You can start with a dinner. A small group around a shared interest, the right few people, genuine value on the table, done consistently. Keep showing up and giving, and a dinner becomes a room, and a room becomes the thing people want to be invited to.

How to start your own room

• Pick the shared interest. What would the right people gather around? Make it specific enough to matter.
• Invite small and high-quality. Five excellent people beat fifty random ones. You are setting the standard of the room with the first guest list.
• Lead with value every time. A useful conversation, a good introduction, something people leave better for having attended. Give before you ever ask.
• Be consistent. A one-off is an event. A rhythm is a community. The compounding only starts when it repeats.

Build the room, give relentlessly, and you will never have to drift awkwardly around someone else’s event again. And when you do attend events, you will do it the right way, which is the next part: how to prepare for a networking event.

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