On a Tuesday evening in late November we hosted twenty people for dinner in a private room above a restaurant in Zurich. Six weeks later, four of our portfolio companies were in term-sheet conversations with investors who had been in that room. Here is exactly how we structured it — the parts that obviously worked and the parts we will change next time.
The room
Eight founders, ten investors, two operators. Investor-heavy rooms are status games. Founder-heavy rooms turn into pitching marathons. The 40/50/10 ratio gives every founder three or four serious investor conversations over the course of an evening without anyone feeling pitched at.
We invited investors who had each written at least one hardware robotics check in the last twelve months. That detail mattered. Dinners where the investor list is 'interested in robotics' produce a lot of interesting conversation and very few follow-ups. Dinners where everyone has recently deployed capital produce deals.
The format
- Arrival drinks, no name tags (intentional — forces actual introductions)
- Seated dinner, assigned seating, each founder between two investors
- One 90-second opening from each founder between courses, not before dinner
- A single structured topic for the main course — we used 'what breaks between Series A and Series B in hardware'
- Open floor for dessert, founders and investors free to move
- Hard stop at 10:15 — we have never regretted ending an event early
What we removed versus previous dinners
We removed the panel, we removed the slides, and we removed the sponsor acknowledgement. Every minute we reclaimed went to founder-investor table time. The dinner went from one that felt like a conference side event to one that felt like a working meeting.
The single change that mattered was killing the panel. The moment you put three people at the front of the room everyone else stops thinking and starts listening. We did not want an audience — we wanted eight parallel conversations.
The follow-up flow
The morning after, each founder received a short dossier: a one-line summary of every investor at the dinner, their recent check history, and a specific suggestion for whom to follow up with first based on what we had observed during the evening. That document took our team about six hours to assemble. It is, in retrospect, the single highest-leverage output of the whole event.
Four term-sheet conversations in six weeks is not a guaranteed outcome — our previous dinner produced one. But the pattern we are starting to trust is: small rooms, active investors, short opening remarks, early end. Everything else is decoration.