On Tuesday 13 October, more than thirty business owners and professionals came to the Backstage Bar at the Grosvenor Rialto for the V8 Nexus October Members’ Evening. We set ourselves three jobs for the night, and we did all three.
What we set out to do
- Read every answer before anyone arrived. The solo booking form asked one question that mattered more than the rest: who would you like to meet? I read every answer and went looking before the doors opened.
- Make the introductions in person. Face to face, on the night, with the reason said out loud.
- Keep the room small enough for that to work. Forty seats. Past that, an evening stops being a set of introductions and becomes a crowd.
The evening
We opened, as in September, with the members’ film: a short piece about relationships built on trust. Lee from the Rialto team kept the programme moving from the microphone, and we closed the formal part with a business-card draw out of the crystal goblet.
Then the part that matters. The formal programme is short on purpose, because the useful conversations happen after it, at the tables, once people are past the job-title exchange and into what they are actually working on.
What comes next: the network
Here is the new part, and if you were in the room on Tuesday, you hear about it first.
An evening ends at half past eight. The useful part of it shouldn’t. So over the coming days, everyone who came will get an email from us asking one question: who would you like to meet?
This is how it works:
- Tell us what you do, and who you do it for. If you answered the question at booking, we’ll start from that and you correct us.
- Tell us who you’d like to meet. A type of client, people who work with the same clients as you, a supplier.
- We look in the network and ask them first. No names are shared until both of you say yes.
- Your first introduction is on us. The person you’re introduced to never pays.
It runs on Axia, the AI system V8 built. Axia keeps track of who is looking for whom, and spots likely fits between people who have never met. It can be wrong about a fit, and it can’t vouch for anyone. So a person checks every match and sends every message, and the evenings carry on, because trust is still built in a room.
Members who were there on Tuesday go first, because you have already met us and each other. Everyone else can tell us who they’d like to meet on the V8 Nexus page.
Thank you
To Grosvenor Casinos, and to Nina Inceman and the Rialto team, for hosting us again and making the logistics invisible, and to Lee for running the stage.
To HongKongers Magazine UK and Pauline Lau, for the community partnership and the magazines on every table.
To V8 Global and Alan Law, for the sponsorship and for building the system behind the introductions.
And to everyone who came. A curated room only works if the people in it are worth introducing to each other. You were.
Be in the room next time
Evenings are forty seats, because the introductions only work at that size. The next date is announced once it’s set. Tell us who you’d like to meet through V8 Nexus, and you’ll hear when it is.
See you at the next one.