Why Most Networking Events Fail

You have been to this event. So have I.

A hotel function room, or a co-working space with the desks pushed against the walls. A registration table with lanyards laid out in alphabetical rows. Wine that is somehow both warm and cold. A hundred and fifty people standing in defensive clusters, each conversation conducted at a volume just below shouting, each participant’s eyes performing that unmistakable flicker over their companion’s shoulder: is there someone more useful behind you?

Ninety minutes later, you leave with eleven business cards, a LinkedIn notification queue, and the vague, sour feeling of having spent an evening being marketed at by people you were simultaneously marketing at. Within a week you will struggle to attach a face to a single card. Within a month, the entire event will have left no more trace on your life than a cancelled flight.

Here is the question that interests me: why does this keep happening? Not occasionally — reliably. Across cities, industries and formats, the conventional networking event fails in the same way, for the same reasons, with the same warm wine. When a failure is that consistent, it is not bad luck and it is not bad execution. It is structure. The event fails because it was, in every meaningful sense, designed to.

I have spent the last few years building SPARK around a single obsession — getting verified people into real rooms where genuine connection can actually occur — and that work has forced me to study, in unglamorous detail, why most rooms don’t. This essay is my attempt at a diagnosis, and then at an alternative. Because the tragedy of the failed networking event is not the wasted evening. It is that the underlying hunger is completely legitimate. People are right to want rooms full of interesting strangers. They are simply being sold a broken version of one.

The Incentives Are Pointing the Wrong Way

Start with the least romantic explanation, because it explains the most: the economics of the conventional networking event reward everything except your outcome.

Most events make their money, or justify their existence, at the door. Ticket sales, sponsor impressions, headcount reported back to a marketing department. Every one of those metrics is maximised before a single conversation happens. The organiser’s job, commercially speaking, is complete the moment you walk in. Whether you meet anyone who matters to your life or work is — quite literally — not their business.

Follow the logic of those incentives and you can derive the entire familiar experience from first principles. Incentivised on attendance, the organiser wants the biggest possible room, so the event is oversold and overcrowded. Incentivised on sponsor visibility, the schedule fills with speeches and pitches that interrupt the very conversations the attendees came for. Incentivised on repeat ticket sales, the event must feel plausibly productive — hence the cards, the lanyards, the ritual exchange of details — without ever being measured on whether it actually was. Nobody emails you three weeks later to ask whether anything came of it. There is no dashboard, anywhere, tracking whether the room worked.

I wrote in Match Is Easy. Meeting Is Hard. about how dating platforms optimise for engagement rather than real-world meetings, and how that single misalignment quietly corrupts every downstream product decision. The conventional networking event is the same disease in a different body. Optimise a room for attendance and it will, with great efficiency, produce attendance. Connection was never the metric, so connection is never the result.

Once you see this, you stop blaming yourself for hating these events. Your instincts were correct all along. You were the product being counted, not the customer being served.

Business-Card Theatre

The second failure is behavioural, and we are all complicit in it: the conventional event replaces connection with a performance of connection.

Watch what actually happens in that hotel function room. Two strangers meet. Within forty seconds, each has delivered a compressed advertisement for themselves — role, company, the thing they are raising or launching or hiring for. Each scans the other for immediate utility. Finding none (the base rate for immediate utility between random strangers being, unsurprisingly, low), they exchange cards as a polite mechanism for ending the conversation, and move on to repeat the ritual. The card is not a bridge to a relationship. It is a receipt proving the transaction occurred.

I have come to think of this as business-card theatre, and the cruel thing about it is that it inverts how professional relationships actually form. Nobody worth knowing decides to trust you inside a forty-second pitch. Trust accretes — through context, through repeated exposure, through watching how someone thinks when the conversation is not about what they are selling. Mark Granovetter’s celebrated work on the strength of weak ties is often wheeled out to defend the card-collecting model, on the theory that a wide, shallow network delivers opportunity. But Granovetter’s weak ties were real relationships — former colleagues, old classmates, friends of friends — people who genuinely knew him, however lightly. A stranger holding your card is not a weak tie. A stranger holding your card is a stranger holding your card.

There is a psychological cost, too. Performing yourself for ninety minutes is exhausting in a way that a genuine conversation never is, which is why even extroverts leave these events depleted. And the performance crowds out the very signals that make humans decide they like each other: curiosity that is real rather than tactical, the unguarded aside, the tangent about something neither of you planned to discuss. The best professional relationship of your life almost certainly did not begin with an elevator pitch. It began with an actual conversation — the kind the conventional format is structurally incapable of hosting.

Nobody Curated the Room

The third failure happens before anyone arrives: an open door is not a guest list.

The conventional event admits anyone with a ticket, which sounds democratic and functions as abdication. Because the value of any room is not its size; it is its composition — who is in it, what they care about, what they might plausibly build with one another — and composition is precisely the variable the open-door model refuses to manage. The result is the room we all know: a handful of people worth meeting, diluted into a crowd of people hunting the same handful, seasoned with the recruiters, the multi-level-marketers, and the gentleman who has cornered you to explain his token launch.

Worse, the open door creates a selection effect that actively degrades the room. When an event is unfiltered, the people most likely to attend are those optimising for extraction — the hard sellers, the card sprayers — while the people everyone actually wants to meet learn, after two or three bad evenings, to stop coming. The thoughtful operators retreat into private dinners and closed circles. The open event is left, over time, with the people no curated room would take. Anyone who has spent a year on a city’s networking circuit has watched this decay happen in real time.

Then there is the question nobody at the registration table can answer: who are these people, really? No verification, no accountability, no context beyond whatever the lanyard claims. In an unfiltered room you are performing due diligence and conversation simultaneously, and the guardedness this produces is corrosive. People talk differently — worse, thinner, more defensively — when they cannot trust the room. This is why verification sits at the foundation of everything we build at SPARK: not as a security feature, but as a social one. A verified room is a room where people stop auditing each other and start actually talking.

The Tyranny of the Big Room

Even a well-intentioned, honestly-priced, reasonably-curated event can be destroyed by a single number: headcount.

The maths of large rooms is quietly brutal. A hundred and fifty attendees, two hours, and conversations that need a few minutes each merely to get past the weather: you will meet, at most, a dozen people, selected almost entirely by the accident of where you happened to be standing. The room’s theoretical richness — eleven thousand possible pairings! — is marketing arithmetic. Your actual experience is a random walk between clusters, at a noise level that neuroscientists would classify as hostile to thought.

Robin Dunbar’s decades of research on human social capacity is usually cited for the famous number of about a hundred and fifty stable relationships — the outer band of people we can meaningfully keep track of at all. Less quoted, and far more relevant here, are his inner layers: the roughly five closest bonds, the fifteen, the fifty. Depth of connection demands cognitive and emotional bandwidth, and that bandwidth is savagely finite. A room of a hundred and fifty strangers does not offer you a hundred and fifty opportunities. It offers you a hundred and forty misses, structurally guaranteed.

Contrast the physics of a small room. Eight founders around a dinner table can sustain a single conversation — a real one, with disagreement and laughter and follow-up questions — for three hours. Everyone leaves knowing everyone, not as card-holders but as people: how they think, what they are wrestling with, whether the chemistry is there. The propinquity effect, one of social psychology’s most durable findings, tells us that bonds form between people who repeatedly, physically encounter one another in shared context. A big room minimises exactly that — maximum bodies, minimum encounter. A small one is engineered for it.

This is not an argument that scale is useless; it is an argument that scale and connection are different products, endlessly sold under the same name. Conferences have their place — for learning, for signalling, for the serendipity of the corridor. But if the outcome you want is relationships, the room size that produces them is closer to a dinner party than a trade fair, and no quantity of lanyards changes that.

Nothing Is Built for the Morning After

The final failure is the one almost nobody designs for, and it is where whatever value the evening created goes to die: the conventional event has no follow-up architecture. The room dissolves at ten o’clock, and every fragile, promising thread inside it dissolves too.

Consider what we ask of a new connection under this model. Two people share fifteen decent minutes. To become anything, that spark now requires one of them to initiate a cold-ish follow-up, propose a time, negotiate a venue, survive two reschedules, and actually show up — an obstacle course of small frictions, faced alone, with no shared context to lean on beyond “we met at that thing.” Almost nothing survives it. The connection didn’t fail; the infrastructure around it simply never existed.

The research on how relationships actually form makes the cost explicit. Jeffrey Hall’s 2018 work at the University of Kansas found that friendship is a function of accumulated hours — on the order of fifty shared hours before an acquaintance becomes a casual friend, and far more before anyone becomes close. Professional trust obeys the same arithmetic; it is friendship with a commercial dimension, not a separate species. Now hold that finding against the networking event’s actual offer: fifteen noisy minutes, once, with no mechanism for a second encounter. The conventional format does not merely fail to build relationships. On the evidence, it never even reaches the starting line.

The events that genuinely work — and long-lived formats have always half-known this — are never really events at all. They are rhythms. The monthly dinner. The weekly run club. The standing breakfast. Recurrence quietly does what no single evening can: it supplies the repeated exposure, the accumulating hours, the deepening context. The mere-exposure effect means familiarity itself breeds warmth; the third encounter with the same person is warmer than the first for reasons that require no effort from anyone. A one-off event asks strangers to complete a relationship in a single sitting. A rhythm lets one begin properly — which is to say, slowly.

The Anatomy of a Room That Works

Invert every failure above and a different kind of room assembles itself — and the encouraging news is that nothing about it is exotic. It is small: closer to eight than eighty, sized for one honest conversation rather than forty performed ones. It is curated: someone accountable has thought about who is in the room and why, and has said no. It is verified: everyone present is a real, accountable human, so the due-diligence reflex can be switched off at the door. It is anchored in a shared experience — a dinner, a hike, a supper club, a gallery evening — because strangers bond over a common object far faster than they bond over mutual self-promotion; the activity does the social heavy lifting that small talk cannot. And it recurs, because the room’s real product is not the evening. It is the second meeting, and the fifth.

This is precisely the blueprint behind SPARK’s curated experiences: small-format, verified rooms built around doing something genuinely worth doing, with the follow-up path — a shared community, a next occasion, a one-tap plan across our partner venues — designed in rather than left to chance. I will not pretend neutrality; we built SPARK because we believe this format is not marginally better but categorically different. What I can offer as evidence is the number we hold ourselves to: as I write, our members have completed 892 real-world meetings, each one tracked, because a room that cannot tell you whether it worked is a room run on hope.

The blueprint is portable, and you can apply it as a filter in any city tonight. In Singapore, it is the difference between the mega-mixer and the chamber-of-commerce roundtable or the eight-seat founder dinner — our guide to the city’s networking scene maps which formats reward the evening. Bangkok’s professional circuit has the same split between spectacle and substance, which is why our Bangkok networking guide steers deliberately towards the small and the recurring. And in Auckland — a city whose business culture already runs on trust and tight circles, and where SPARK launches next — the small-format logic is practically native, as our Auckland guide explores.

One more thing deserves saying plainly, because founders in particular are prone to treating all of this as optional. Your network is not a nice-to-have alongside the real work; for reasons I set out in why founders need real-world networks, it is load-bearing infrastructure for the company itself — the co-founder, the first believer, the person who talks you off the ledge in month eleven. Which makes the broken networking event more than an annoying evening. It is a systematic failure of the machinery that is supposed to build the most important asset you have. That machinery deserves better design.

So: the next time an invitation arrives, ask five questions of it. Who curated this room, and against what standard? How many people will be in it? Will I be verified — and will they? What will we actually be doing together beyond holding drinks? And is there a next time built in? Two or more noes, and you already know how the evening ends. You have been to that event. You do not have to keep going.

Looking to meet interesting people in real life? Download SPARK or join our verified community.

FAQs

Why do most networking events feel like a waste of time? Because they are optimised for attendance, not outcomes. The organiser’s incentives are satisfied at the door, so the format defaults to oversized rooms, unfiltered guest lists and performative card-swapping — and dissolves with no mechanism for follow-up. The disappointment you feel is an accurate reading of the structure, not a failure of your networking skills.

What should I look for in a networking event that actually works? Five things: a small room (nearer eight people than eighty), genuine curation by an accountable host, verified attendees, a shared activity that gives strangers a common object beyond self-promotion, and a built-in rhythm of recurrence. An event that scores well on those is engineered for connection; one that scores poorly is engineered for headcount.

How is a SPARK experience different from a conventional networking event? SPARK experiences are small-format, curated gatherings within a verified community — every member is a real, accountable human, which changes how openly people talk (our approach is detailed on our safety page). Each experience is anchored in something worth doing in its own right, and the community around it supplies the follow-up architecture — the second and third meetings — where relationships are actually built.

Founder’s Note

The idea for SPARK’s experiences did not arrive in a strategy session. It arrived at the end of yet another networking evening, standing outside yet another venue, holding a stack of cards belonging to people I would never see again — and realising I was not annoyed at the event. I was annoyed at the design. Somewhere between the ticketing platform and the sponsor banners, an entire industry had forgotten to ask whether the room worked.

We decided to build rooms that could answer that question. Small ones, curated ones, verified ones — rooms measured not by how many people entered but by what left with them. It is slower, harder and stubbornly unscalable in all the ways investors are trained to dislike, and it is the best decision we have made.

My ask of you is modest. Decline one big room this month. Spend the evening instead with six or eight people deliberately chosen — through SPARK, or around your own dinner table. Then compare what remains of each a month later. I am confident about which one you will still be able to name.

— Sunny Khurana, Founder & CEO, SPARK