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A whole town becomes a conference
Friendship first
The event grew out of what its founder did not want: the typical conference, where people size each other up, look over a shoulder for the next target, eat crappy food they can write off, and do business in the hallway. He found those conferences soul-sucking and asked what he would want to go back to every year. The answer was real friendship before transaction.
The downtown takeover
So the event takes over 34 or 35 locations across downtown, including coffee shops, bookstores, and art galleries. Food and drinks are available everywhere, all the time, because it is hard to feel less transactional when you are hungry, tired, or constrained.
The activities
The activities include shooting with Navy SEALs, tennis, a barrel sauna, and a custom knife made with a knife forger. One year's fireworks came from a biplane over the Missouri River, which required two boats and dive teams in case the pilot crashed. The barrel sauna sat on a trailer and fit fifteen to twenty people, and one guest was still inside when it started getting wheeled away.
The event is built for introverts too, with quiet space to recharge, small lunches and dinners, and chances to meet that do not feel forced. Deals have gotten done and value has been created, but the organizers treat that as secondary to meeting a new friend.
Why does friendship come before business?
In a 1985 paper, sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that economic transactions are embedded in social relationships, and that personal ties build trust more reliably than contracts or rules alone. People who know each other can vouch for one another, which lowers the risk of dealing with a stranger. His paper, titled Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness, became one of the most cited papers in economic sociology.
How do introverts recharge at events?
Psychiatrist Carl Jung popularized the terms introvert and extravert in his 1921 book Psychological Types, describing the introvert as someone who draws energy from the inner world rather than from crowds. Susan Cain's 2012 book Quiet brought the topic to a wide audience. Modern personality research measures extraversion as a continuous scale within the Big Five model, so most people sit between the extremes.
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