I get a nontrivial fraction of value out of parties and conferences by “doing the rounds”. I.e. I say hello to all the people I have standing relationships with, briefly meet the people they are with, give them an opportunity to bring up anything they wanted to talk to me about, or any important news they wanted to share, and bring up things I wanted to talk to them specifically about. The median conversation length here is like 5-10 minutes, but once or twice per event I end up talking for longer.
I think the key things that make this valuable is that it maintains a relatively large set of relationships at a higher level of trust, and also gives each conversation a very gradual ability to escalate in length and complexity (as opposed to scheduled meetings which always take a fixed amount of time).
I get a nontrivial fraction of value out of parties and conferences by “doing the rounds”. I.e. I say hello to all the people I have standing relationships with, briefly meet the people they are with, give them an opportunity to bring up anything they wanted to talk to me about, or any important news they wanted to share, and bring up things I wanted to talk to them specifically about. The median conversation length here is like 5-10 minutes, but once or twice per event I end up talking for longer.
I think the key things that make this valuable is that it maintains a relatively large set of relationships at a higher level of trust, and also gives each conversation a very gradual ability to escalate in length and complexity (as opposed to scheduled meetings which always take a fixed amount of time).