The investor dinner, and how to run one people accept
A dinner is the highest-yield event format available to an investor, and the one most often done badly. Done well it is fourteen people who will take your call for the next decade. Done badly it is an expensive pitch night with wine.
Who you invite decides everything else
Everything else is logistics. Spend your time here.
Two or three anchors: founders or operators good enough that other people accept because they are coming. Ask them first, and tell them plainly that they are the reason the evening will be worth attending.
Six to eight people you want to know. These are the point of the evening: people you have never met, or met once, working on things adjacent to each other.
One or two who connect the room. Somebody who knows half the table and makes introductions without being asked. Every dinner that works has one.
Nobody who is there to sell to the room, including you.
Fourteen is the upper limit for one conversation. Above that it splits into three, and you will only be in one of them.
The invitation
One at a time, written individually. A dinner invitation that looks mailed is a dinner invitation that gets declined.
Say four things: what the evening is about, who else is coming (name two), that there is no pitching and no programme, and the date and place. Four sentences.
Expect to invite twenty to seat fourteen, and expect two to drop out on the day. That is normal, not rudeness.
What it costs
Fourteen people at a private table in a decent London restaurant is £70 to £120 a head with wine, so £1,000 to £1,700 for the evening. A private room usually carries a minimum spend rather than a hire fee.
Compare that with the cost of a conference ticket plus travel plus two days, and it is frequently cheaper as well as better.
Seating
Do it deliberately, and use place cards. People sit with whoever they arrived with otherwise, and the whole point is that they do not.
Put your two anchors at opposite ends, not next to each other. Put the people you most want to talk to each other on the same side, two seats apart, because people talk across and diagonally more than directly opposite.
Sit yourself in the middle of one side, never at the head. You are hosting, not chairing.
The one question
Somewhere around the main course, ask the table one question and let it run. Not a round-robin introduction, which kills the energy of every dinner it touches.
A good question is specific, slightly contentious, and something everybody there has an opinion on from experience.
- "What is the thing you believe about your market that your competitors do not?"
- "Where did your last hire go wrong?"
- "What would you do differently if you were starting again this year?"
Then stop talking. The host talking for more than a few minutes is the most common way a dinner fails.
What not to do
Do not let anybody pitch, and that includes going round the table for introductions, and it includes slides. If somebody starts, it is your job to move the conversation, kindly and immediately.
No phones out for photographs. People perform once they know they are being photographed.
Do not talk about deal terms at the table. Anything that turns the evening into a transaction turns it into a different evening.
The week after
The value of a dinner is realised afterwards or not at all.
The next morning, send one message to each guest. Something specific to what they said. Ten minutes each, and it is the highest-return hour in your month.
Make the two introductions you thought of during the evening. Everybody at a good dinner leaves thinking of one connection they could make, and most of them never make it.
Write down who should come to the next one before you leave. Half your next guest list is sitting at this table.
Run it every six to eight weeks with the same core and a rotating half, and within a year you have something no fund can buy: a room people want to be invited to.