The room wasn't built for deals.

Game Nights started as a small gathering of friends. No agenda, no pitching, no networking pressure. Just a room people genuinely wanted to spend time in. The rooms I was already in felt transactional in a way I didn't love — everyone there because they wanted something from someone else. I wanted a room where the only requirement was that you were a good person, and where the conversations could go wherever they went.

What started in one apartment with one group of friends eventually moved with me. San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York. Different cities, same room. As my personal and professional communities expanded, Game Nights expanded with them. It was never a single venue or a single scene. It was a way of bringing people together that traveled.

The thing I cared most about was the mix. People from worlds that don't usually overlap, in one room, with no pretense about why they were there. A founder talking to an athlete about discipline. An operator and an investor arguing about hiring. The curation was the whole product. Who I invited mattered more than what we did once we were there.

Attendance started exceeding capacity. Waitlists emerged. People weren't asking to come to a gathering anymore — they were asking to be part of the community that had formed around the events. That shift is the moment I realized this wasn't about Game Nights as a thing on the calendar. It was about the room, and the room had taken on a life of its own.

The clearest signal that the room had worked: the relationships, intros, hires, and collaborations it produced kept happening whether or not I was the one connecting people. Regulars introduced regulars. Investors and founders calibrated with each other directly. The compounding value lived inside the community, not inside me. That's when I knew community had become infrastructure, not branding.