About
I build rooms people don’t want to leave.
Conferences, festivals, dinners at my house. Same job every time: make strangers act like they already know each other.
Twenty-two years of it. Still not bored.
A note before we go further
Technology keeps making everything faster, cheaper, and infinitely reproducible. Almost anything can be manufactured now, including the appearance of taste.
And people still show up. They book the flight, take the day off, sit down at the table anyway.
They want to belong. Discover something. Meet someone unexpected. Eat together. Laugh. Be surprised. Feel something.
The easier everything gets to fake, the more the real thing is worth. That is the territory I work in, and I have never been more sure of it than I am now.
The work
I design live experiences and the businesses underneath them.
Content, room, revenue model, and the part at the end where somebody tears up and can’t explain why. Twenty-two years of it: launching and scaling events inside large organizers, then building experiences for Fortune 500 teams who wanted more than a ballroom.
Every project starts the same way: what does this room have to do, and who has to leave different than they arrived. The program, the space, the budget, the run of show, all of it answers to that.
Oh, and I have very strong opinions about post-event surveys and name badges. I hate them. Don’t come at me.
A few things worth knowing
- Founded
- RacquetX, a racquet sports festival, and Robyn Duda Creative.
- Teaches
- The Experience Experiment, a college course at Muhlenberg. Workshops at Emory and GSU. I’d like to do this more.
- Writes
- For Entrepreneur and Rolling Stone, and frequently on Substack. Next, a magazine for the people who make moments.
- Believes
- Beauty is in the details: the moment people expected, next to the one they didn’t know they needed.
- Works
- In sprints, not marathons. The recovery is part of the plan.
- Lives
- In a wellness community in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia, with a dog named Rocki.
For the humblebrags and twenty-two years of grinding, go to LinkedIn.
The invitation
Bring me the interesting stuff.
- The event that doesn’t exist yet.
- The brand that needs a world around it.
- The dinner everyone will still talk about next year.
- The industry that needs a room.
- The idea that’s almost there, but isn’t quite working.
Not ready to write yet? I think out loud on Substack.