The Best Meetings Might Be the Ones I Didn't Schedule

A few weeks ago, I walked into our office expecting to grab a cup of coffee before my first meeting.

Instead, I found a founder already sitting around a table with several members of our team.

I hadn’t scheduled the meeting.

I didn’t even know it was happening.

For a split second, I wondered if I’d walked into the wrong conference room.

Kate was talking through marketing positioning and community strategy. Jenny was already thinking about which investors would care once the story was refined.

I grabbed my coffee, listened for a few minutes, added a thought or two, and then walked away.

For just a second, I had the strange feeling that I was no longer the center of every conversation at Rising Tide Partners.

Then I realized that was exactly what we’d been trying to build.

For a long time, RTP looked like many small venture firms.

Every founder relationship.

Every investor introduction.

Every follow-up.

Every community event.

Everything flowed through me.

That works...until it doesn’t.

If every relationship depends on one person remembering the next step, you’ve built a bottleneck, not an institution.

This summer we’ve been asking ourselves a different question:

What system needs an owner?

Last week I introduced the RTP team and the systems each person now owns.

A few days later, I realized those systems were already starting to work.

Most people think community means events.

I don’t.

Events are simply where people enter the ecosystem.

Community is what happens after they leave.

Did they come back?

Did they meet someone new?

Did they solve a problem?

Did they become someone another founder can call?

Those are the questions we’re trying to answer.

Instead of measuring success by attendance, we’re beginning to measure something much harder:

Are people moving?

From attendee...

...to contributor.

From contributor...

...to advisor.

From advisor...

...to customer.

From customer...

...to investor.

From investor...

...to someone introducing the next great founder.

That’s a much more interesting funnel than asking, “How many people RSVP’d?”

The office has become one of my favorite examples.

When we moved into one of our portfolio company’s offices a few weeks ago, I thought we were renting desks.

Instead, we accidentally rented an ecosystem.

Founder Max came in for one meeting and left having met another founder, Ira.

Neither conversation had been planned.

Someone grabbed coffee in the kitchen and ended up talking with our neighboring engineering services team about manufacturing.

Investor Shiva stopped by and bumped into another founder in the hallway.

None of those interactions were on anyone’s calendar.

Every one of them created value.

That’s not an event.

That’s infrastructure.

One of my favorite moments this summer happened after one of our founder roundtables.

The event officially ended.

Most people headed home.

A few stayed behind.

Those conversations turned into office visits.

Those office visits turned into introductions.

Those introductions are already turning into real opportunities.

If we had only measured attendance, we would have completely missed the most valuable part of the evening.

The event wasn’t the outcome.

It was simply the beginning.

A few weeks after re-connecting with the Truvian team at one of our roundtables, our entire team was touring their headquarters and learning directly from them. That's what happens when conversations continue after the event ends.

I’ve started thinking about community the same way I think about roads.

Roads aren’t the destination.

Neither are bridges.

They’re valuable because they make everything else possible.

The same is true for what we’re building at RTP.

We don’t organize events because we like events. We organize events because they’re one of the fastest ways to create collisions between people who can help each other.

Our goal isn’t simply to host great events.

It’s to shorten the distance between people who can help each other.

Sometimes that’s two founders.

Sometimes it’s a founder and a customer.

Sometimes it’s an investor meeting a future portfolio company months before they’re fundraising.

Sometimes it’s simply walking someone twenty feet down the hallway.

Every time that distance gets shorter, everyone benefits.

That’s why Kate doesn’t simply “run community.”

She owns the system that helps relationships compound.

And if we build this the way we hope to...

...the most valuable conversations at Rising Tide Partners won’t require me to be in the room.

They'll happen because the system made them inevitable.

That’s not losing control.

That's how an institution is built.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue sharing how different parts of RTP work behind the scenes.

Next up: why one coffee meeting between two venture funds can create value for founders months before either side realizes it.