How to talk about what you do at a dinner table

Someone at dinner asks what you do. You have a thirty second answer ready and it is going to make the table worse.

The rehearsed pitch is built for a meeting: dense, slightly defensive, optimised for someone deciding whether to buy. At a table, nobody is deciding anything. They are making conversation, and your job is to give them something to hold.

Answer in one sentence, then stop

I help founders fill the room at their own events.

That is enough. It is short enough to be polite and specific enough to be interesting. Then stop talking. Genuinely stop.

What happens next is the useful part. If they are interested, they ask. If they are not, the conversation moves on and nobody has lost anything. Both outcomes are fine, and only the second one is ruined by continuing.

Have one story, not a description

When they do ask, do not explain the product. Tell them about one person.

There was a founder last month who had sixty people say yes and thirty turn up. We worked out she had never actually told anyone why the evening was worth crossing London for.

Stories are the right format for a table. Descriptions are not. A story also invites the other person to offer one back, and that exchange is why you came.

Do not ask what they do as a trade

The mistake after a good answer is treating it like a transaction: they asked, you answered, now you ask so you can pitch again. People can feel that.

Ask because you want to know. The best thing that happens at dinner is not that you sell to the person next to you, it is that they remember you well enough to mention you to someone else six weeks later. That only happens if the conversation was actually a conversation.

The register

Slightly less formal than you think. Contractions, plain words, no category language. If the sentence would look at home on a slide, it is wrong for a table.

When somebody's eyes glaze

They will, sometimes. It is not a failure. Change the subject cheerfully and without apology. Explaining harder is the only genuinely bad option.