Episode Transcript:

ADAM MCGOWAN [00:08]: Welcome to episode four of Ventures in Tech, brought to you by Firefield. This is Adam McGowan and on today’s show we’re going to discuss an initiative I started earlier this year called the Spark Series. I’m again being joined by my colleague from Firefield, Henry Reohr, who’ll be guiding today’s chat. And with that, I’ll let Henry take it away.

HENRY REOHR: [00:30]: Adam, back in February of this year, you brought together ten people for lunch at Cambridge. Why did you assemble that crew?

ADAM [00:38]: Well, it goes back to the fact that in my normal course of my day job, I have to do a lot of networking, go to a lot of events, meet a lot of people. And I think what I’d found was that events seemed to be falling short in two generally broad categories for me. One was really extremely transactional stuff. Hawking business cards at each other; referral type networks; it was very “what have you done for me lately?”. And at the other end of the spectrum, it was the overly social events – maybe not all “booze cruises” but effectively many of them were, just without the boat. There was not really a lot of engaging stuff happening.

And what I found was that I started to feel like neither was really suiting my needs and I thought that I should stop complaining and start doing something about it. So what I did was I created a lunch series. The criteria for attendees was pretty straightforward; people who had a peripheral connection to the Greater Boston innovation economy; people who had deep experience in their field; and most importantly, people who really believe strongly in the pay-it-forward approach. And my thought was, “Put them around a table. Good things will happen.” And I started that back in February with, like you said, it was a group with ten people.

HENRY [01:52]: So it sounds like ultimately what you’ve created is another networking group. What makes this one different than the others?

ADAM [02:01]: Well, I think the thing that’s the most unique about it is the way that we describe ourselves when we go to lunch. Everyone will go around the table and what you won’t hear is the traditional, “Hi, I’m so and so. I just founded such and such company. We‘ve raised this much money. We have this many employees…” Maybe not intentionally, but it’s oftentimes mildly boastful about who you are and what you’re doing. You are trying to sell yourself; you’re trying to pitch somebody.

This is different. The intro is very explicit and it’s about you describing the element of your personality that you’re very, very passionate about. In particular, something you’re passionate about that you leverage when you’re out trying to help other people. So it’s a very “otherish” type approach. You do talk about yourself but in the context of being helpful to others. I find it leads to really an extremely different feel. People get a deeper connection with people and they realize they want to further connect with them because of who they are and not because of what they do. And I think that’s been a big difference here.

HENRY [03:09]: Every first time attendee for one of these events gets a small gift. Can you tell me a little more about that?

ADAM [03:17]: Yeah. So, first time lunchers actually see two items at their seat when they join me for lunch. The first one is a handwritten personal welcome note from me. It might seem like a really small thing, but to me it’s actually pretty important and I think it’s important because everybody’s time is really precious. I think a lot of times, even when people are hosting events like this one, they might seem like they’re very self-serving for the host and I wanted to show, frankly, the fact that I just appreciate people taking the time to come, to sit and to share. I realize, regardless of who pays for lunch, that’s still a pretty big ask. And so, the idea of showing some appreciation – having the notes all be custom – it takes time. It takes effort and I think it matters, and I think people have reacted well to it.

But what you might have been talking about, with respect to the gift, is that the other item at the table for everyone is a book. It’s a book written by Adam Grant. He’s a professor at Wharton, the book’s called “Give and Take”, and the book really… it focuses on going about helping others and how that actually can drive your own success.

HENRY [04:28]: There’s quite a few books out there that describe this pay-it-forward mentality that you mentioned. What’s different or special about Adam Grant’s book?

ADAM [04:40]:. Well, I think “Give and Take” is a little bit different because it provides this underlying empirical evidence to support the argument that we can actually help ourselves when we’re focusing on other people first. It’s not just the feel good karma element of being other-centric. So that’s one big thing.

And I think something else that’s unique is the idea that Grant talks about describing the way we interact with both ourselves or we think about our own self-interest and the self-interest of others actually happens in two spectrums. And what I mean by that is… I know that before reading the book I felt like it was a zero sum game. The more you help others, the less you help yourself. And you have to figure out where you want to end up on that spectrum – where one end is totally focused on others, and the other end is totally focused on yourself.

Well, he argues that there are two spectrums; that one of them is how “otherish” you want to be and the other is how selfish you want to be. And I think what was really interesting was how he defined this existence of people who really excelled on both spectrums. They were very much focused on others while still being very much focused on themselves. He describes these as “otherish givers”. And frankly, my goal is to keep filling the Spark Series tables with exactly that type of a person.

HENRY [06:05]: That first lunch was more than nine months ago now. What’s happened since then?

ADAM [06:12]: Well, I actually just came back from the 19th one of these lunches since the first of February. I think today we had our one hundred and forty first unique attendee who’s come. I think that more than 50% of those attendees are people who have come to a lunch based on the recommendation of somebody who had come to a previous lunch. So that’s really great and speaks to this being a self-sustaining type event. And at the moment we continue to have these first timer attendee lunches scheduled every two weeks for the foreseeable future. So three to five more this year, and we hope to keep that train rolling.

HENRY [06:56]: These lunches, they’re invite only I believe. And since you’re trying to build a community, don’t you think that might be a bit off-putting to certain people?

ADAM [07:08]: Sure, I can understand that, and yes they are, technically, invitation only because they’re not open to the public. But I think there’s a pretty important reason for that and as I just mentioned, the new attendees are people who have either gotten recommended to come to lunch by someone who had attended in the past, or they get invited by me personally because of the relationship we’ve built and because of my belief that they personify a lot of those pay-it-forward values that I think are really important.

But the objective here is to really avoid the concept of something you would see in Grant’s book called the “Taker”. It’s frankly not that common in my circle. I don’t think it’s all that common necessarily in the Boston or Greater Boston innovation ecosystem. But I think we all know what these people are like, and they are not going to really contribute a lot of value. They’re probably going to extract a lot of value from the table, and I don’t think that benefits anybody there. Well, even the taker, in the long run, I think it doesn’t benefit them either. But I really don’t think that we will be able to maintain the essence of the event if we didn’t have at least a little bit of a measuring stick by which we decided how we were going to populate tables.

HENRY [08:23]: So looking back on almost a year’s worth of the events now, have you seen any patterns emerge?

ADAM [08:31]: We’ve seen a number of them and a lot of them have been pretty exciting stuff. I think one of the biggest ones is the idea that people seem to get really excited about opportunities to give. And I don’t mean the ability to write a check to a charity. I mean the ability to engage with someone where you can actually provide some value based on your own personal experience and willingness to give.

We get a surprising number of testimonials in that regard and frankly a multiple more than the testimonials of people saying, “Hey, I met a great person at lunch and now they’re my customer. Thanks so much.” I guess there was a little bit of that, but it was more of people coming and saying, “I had this great opportunity to meet so and so and helped her with X, Y and Z. Thanks so much for giving us that opportunity to do so,” And I think it’s a really great outcome.

And I also think the willingness and frequency with which attendees have made unbelievable recommendations of other givers has been totally awesome. And another one of the big trends – I think the alumni of the lunch series are really looking for more ways to continue to engage. We’re trying to figure out what those are but it’s a great trend to have.

HENRY [09:45]: 2018 is just around the corner. What are your plans for the future of the series?

ADAM [09:52]: Well, one of the important things I wanted to make sure I did once we had a critical mass of attendees was to not make too many assumptions about what I thought we should do. I wanted to get some more evidence around it. So we recently surveyed prior attendees and had an unbelievable response rate. I thought it was fantastic how many people are willing to engage to share their thoughts, and they came up with some really great suggestions.

One of the biggest ones is really around this idea of alumni events. We haven’t hammered it all out yet, but I think this idea of having possibly more intimate subject-matter lunches, maybe around a topic posed by one of the Spark Series lunchers. Maybe it’s a broader based topic. I’m not sure how it’s going to play out just yet, but there was a lot of interest in continuing to engage in those smaller groups around a particular topic, likely over lunch.

And another idea is this notion of maybe a semi-intimate gathering without real structure. Maybe later in a day or an evening drinks kind of a thing, where the group is small enough, 20 to 25 people, where people can really engage with almost the entire room in a really unstructured setting. So I think you might be seeing more of that stuff happening next year as well.

We also learned that there’s been some interest to potentially have us leverage some more tech to help coordinate events and facilitate member engagement. So we’ll see. There may be some of that coming out as well in the coming months. And then also this notion of the interest from some members to help us broaden the geographic footprint – to maybe spread this out beyond Boston and Cambridge. We haven’t quite figured out how we want to do that, but the interest has been there for a number of different locations, and we’re really excited to see if we could possibly facilitate the start of that broadening of the footprint next year.

HENRY [11:38]: If someone is interested in becoming a member of the Spark Series, what do they need to do to get involved?

ADAM [11:44:]: Well it’s pretty simple. You pretty much need to get in touch with me. It could certainly be the case that if you happen to know someone who has attended a lunch that through a connection to them, you can be recommended. But that seems like a bit of an either lower likelihood or slower path.

The direct path is to come straight to me and talk about the reasons why the lunch series sounds compelling, the way you think you’d be able to contribute to a table. And I think if you, frankly, were motivated enough to do that, it seems pretty likely you should be coming to lunch. So you can reach out to me via email (adam@firefield.com) or you can connect with me via LinkedIn, I’m the first Adam McGowan, I think, that shows up when you search, so it should be pretty easy to find me. But I’m really open to that sort of connection and frankly, if you wanted to reach out for that purpose, I would love to have that conversation and hopefully have you join us in the future.

HENRY [12:36]: And that’s all we’ve got for today. I’m Henry Reohr from Firefield and you’ve been listening to another episode of Ventures in Tech.