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_{^{Andrew Yeung arrived in New York in 2020 during the pandemic with a job, but few connections. He was 24 and grew up in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan and Toronto.}}

With the city largely closed, he turned to social media to build a friend group.

He posted an open invitation on Twitter and Reddit to meet in Central Park. Fifty people showed up.

The passion to connect people led to small dinner parties and larger cocktails and eventually 1,000-person parties on the roof of the Williamsburg Hotel.

He’s now hosted more than 26,000 people at events, some of which are sponsored by Fidelity. The parties attract CEOs, founders, fintech engineers and VCs.

He did this in his “free time,” while working as a product lead first at Meta and then Google. For the most part, it didn’t cost him any money.

It’s a quintessentially New York story. But also, a tale for the modern era.

Andrew bootstrapped his way into throwing the best parties for the most important industry in America shortly after graduating college.

And he did it in the world’s most competitive city — a place with an entrenched events business — even though he had never worked in the industry and wasn’t backed by a media organization or other institution.

I’ve been to half a dozen of Andrew’s “mixers,” and they are better than any networking event I’ve ever experienced.

He arranges parties the way Kobe played basketball, with a tremendous degree of intentionality. He’s constantly reviewing the “tape” to make events more accessible, entertaining and meaningful for attendees.

“It’s about putting the right people in the room,” Andrew told me at an event this week at the rooftop bar of CloudM on the Bowery.

Andrew’s playbook:

–Invite people publicly via social media
–Review applicants based on LinkedIn profiles
–Select “kind” people most likely to contribute
–Send a pregame email to connect small groups
–Deploy volunteers to facilitate networking

The events are free to attend. You just have to apply and be selected.

Everyone wears nametags (something considered gauche by many organizers, but very useful.)

People are assigned a group signaled by a color-coded dot. The colors signal your intention for the evening i.e. fundraising, investing or meeting people.

The most significant element is publicly inviting anyone and then hand-selecting the people who will make the event a success, with success being measured by the quality of networking.

Established organizations don’t work this way. Companies invite existing clients or prospects. Organizations invite donors. Everything is focused on sales.

It would be considered madness by most big companies to host a free cocktail for random city dwellers, including their competitors. How would they know if it paid off? What’s the ROI?

And yet, the people at Andrew’s events are the kind of people companies would kill to attract. They are raising money for startups or making investments. There are unusually talented and ambitious.

Andrew built the network leveraging Twitter and arranged for the venues by connecting with hotel owners and promising he would bring them a certain amount of business, putting down his credit card as a guarantee when necessary.

The operation is mostly run out of Google sheets and off his cell phone. He estimates he works 100 hours a week on his day job and side hustle.

It took effort, of course, but mostly it required the vision do it differently.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

Air Traffic Control: We are so back!

Obituaries: Henry Kissinger died yesterday at age 100, prompting a flood of obituaries and Internet commentary. Some people came to praise him as a diplomat and others to bury him for war crimes. The unexpected element for me was the large number of people who shared a passage from a book by food critic Anthony Bourdain excoriating Kissinger for what he did in Cambodia. It was a reminder that Bourdain was a fantastic writer and also how influential great writing can be in defining history and legacy.

The Internet Remembers: In an effort to stand out and find a unique angle, the Messenger dove deep into the archives of history to reminder us that Kissinger was once voted “the man I would most like to go out on a date with” by Playboy Club Bunnies.

Modern Communication: We live in a weird era where ChatGPT can write books and respond automatically to emails, but it’s still a challenge to communicate with the people we interact with in daily life. The owners of a brownstone in Harlem taped a note to the sidewalk in front of their house: “Do Not Deliver Oil. Delivery Cancelled.” It seems insane, but it’s also a pretty effective solution.

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