On why we keep spending money to feed people who don't need feeding.
We've hosted, at last count, four hundred and thirty-seven dinners across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. None of them made any money on the night. All of them, eventually, did — and that lag between the bill and the return is the whole business, if you squint.
A dinner is, for what it costs, an absurdly high-bandwidth medium. You get four or five hours in a room with people who otherwise wouldn't clear their calendar for you. Nobody's on a screen. Nobody's pitching. Somebody, usually around the third course, says the thing they've been sitting on for six months, and you watch three other people quietly decide to help.
“The best rooms in Indian business were never advertised. We just built a nicer one.”
The mistake most people make with dinners is treating them as marketing. They aren't. They're infrastructure. You are, at some real cost, building a low-friction way for the right people to update each other. The introductions that come out of it are a side effect. The main product is that everyone leaves the table with a slightly more accurate map of what's actually happening.
Which is, in the end, the thing you can't buy anywhere else at any price. So we keep buying the wine.
Filed by the desk. Quibbles to hello@baaaz.club.
