LinkedIn Post: Can You Actually Fill a Room?

Source: /opt/gcv-portfolio/captions/PEnNJerUxUk.en.vtt — GCV community-summit talk, ~00:00:05–00:00:56 (water + electricity / fill a room) + ~11:53–12:10 (human-attention close)

If you can keep the lights on and the water running, you have everything you need to hold a community summit.

That's not an exaggeration. Bring three or four or five people into a room and you've got a place to make something happen. The easiest way to get a person to actually do something is to get them in person, make an emotional connection, sit them next to people who want what they want.

There's a test hiding in here. Somebody can say they're famous all day long. Fine. But can they actually fill a room? Can they hold an event? That's the test. Fame is a claim. A room full of people who showed up is proof.

I've run summits in the digital and physical spaces. With Jonathan Green we did the five-day business summit, authors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. And the thing I keep coming back to is the same one: a summit is really just a measure of how much human attention your organization can actually hold.

So the most important question at the end isn't how it looked. It's who did we meet, what did we do with it, and how did it translate. Because if you're cultivating a lot of human attention for no reason, you're just wasting your time.

Anybody can claim a following. Very few people can fill a room on a Tuesday.

Next time you want to know how strong an org really is, don't ask for the numbers. Ask them when their next in-person event is, and whether anybody showed up.

draft from corpus — based on Brandyn's GCV community-summit talk (PEnNJerUxUk.en.vtt)