chatted with a friend who has a really interesting recurring dinner series set up. he and four or five other very sharp people have dinner on a regular basis and invite an outside guest, oftentimes high-profile, to join them.
it sounded like a great way to generate interesting conversations and meet high-profile people, so i thought about replicating it, because i’m curious and my instinct is to try things out like this. get four other friends, copy the cadence (monthly or every other month), start reaching out to potential guests.
but my friend brought up an interesting point - this dinner series setup works very well for him because it arose organically. if others were to try and copy it, it may not work as well because the format is forced and may not come naturally to the replicators.
i started to think about how this applies to many other activities - hence the title “organic vs synthetic projects” - and the good things that can come from leaning into authenticity.
it might help to explore the example in more detail. my friend would get regular dinners with one or two of his friends because they got along very well and conversation happened naturally to them. eventually it grew to four or five people getting dinner regularly, but they started to get to know each other very well and the conversation topics would look very similar each time, so they decided to invite a friend from outside of their fields to spice things up. this worked well, so they repeated this a few times, and settled on this format.
if you were to cold-start replicate this, the risks are you might pick the wrong people (you might get along but conversation might not flow as naturally), the timing may not work (you pick an arbitrary date / time but find it’s not the best and people flake), the outside guests you choose don’t resonate (it’s hard to know what types of people will get the conversation flowing without trying a few iterations), etc.
the other approach here is do things that feel meaningful and authentic to you, without a specific end goal in mind, and see what organically things come out of it.
in order for a project to succeed, you need one person to wholly own the project, and also be wholly invested in it. i think a lot of projects fail because people look at what other people are doing and try to replicate their projects. even if you are a good “replicator” or “optimizer,” eventually it gets hard to do things that your heart isn’t in, or that don’t feel genuine.
it’s like trying to copy someone else’s personality after seeing a movie with a cool main character, or after listening to a podcast with someone who you admire. you might be able to keep the act up for a short while, but eventually you revert back into your natural personality.
oftentimes, the projects that stick are the ones that arise organically, by productizing the things you’re already doing (rather than trying to synthetically brainstorm ideas in a room full of people). this is kind of a bottoms-up approach to finding interesting projects (starting open-minded with simple observations and examples), as opposed to top-down (looking at what other people are doing, “coming up with ideas,” etc). it also relates to the leaning into strengths concept.
you can see the way this applies in venture by observing funds that seem to have a “personality.” in their branding, projects, interactions with partners, etc there is consistency. this is because instead of trying to scale up a synthetic brand identity or spin up a large number of unrelated projects (easier for this to happen at a fund with a larger headcount), it’s likely that the partners stuck to a smaller number of activities that seemed genuine to them.