March 2026
A closed-door builder session
For OpenAI and Relevance AI. 137 applications against a nine-question qualification form, 34 declined, and 93 of the approved room already shipping AI in production or prototype.
you, of all people.
You already know what needs building. The question is who sits with you while it happens.
I'm Andrew. I build rooms to a brief, and I build the operating systems that run the weeks around them. This page is just the table between us.
the record
- 46
- events hosted or co-hosted since March 2024
- 2,604
- registrations across 26 documented events
- 1,712
- individual people
- 439
- organisations
- 305
- applications declined against stated criteria
- 24.7%
- came back to a second room
- 9×
- spread in corporate composition between rooms, by design
Twenty of the forty-six sit on calendars whose exports could not be retrieved, so every figure here is an undercount. Quoted as “across 26 documented events”, never as a total. The working aggregates are available on request.
you might be
the marketer who has to stand at the door and watch what happens, and cannot promise anyone what the room will look like.
the executive who knows this matters and is tired of AI strategy that ends without a single working build.
the founder who has rebuilt the deck four times and still can't get operations off their own plate.
Different jobs, same problem underneath. Sit down. There's time.
what has actually happened
Three rooms, five months, one operator.
The work is not event production. It is composition — given a brief, assembling a specified room and then reporting what actually arrived. The clearest way to show that is three rooms that have almost nothing in common.
March 2026 · thirteen days later
A reading group
Mechanistic interpretability, with an Anthropic researcher, and a read-the-paper prerequisite. 61% personal domains, 7% students. Almost the exact inverse of the room before it.
August 2026
A founder-and-investor coffee
For Vercel. 109 applications for 46 places, nine named funds in the room, 58% corporate domains — the most corporate room in the entire record.
Same operator, same city, three entirely different rooms — because the room is the deliverable.
the part nobody here wrote
Almost everything on this page is self-authored, which is worth saying out loud. One thing is not. Events don't reach Luma's Sydney city page by buying placement — they get selected, and the selection is made by someone at Luma with no stake in whether the night goes well.
Of the twenty-one rooms in this record with twenty or more registrations, thirteen were selected — the same independent judgement, repeated across eighteen months. Where it landed, it carried 16–42% of that event's registrations. It is the closest thing here to somebody else's word, and it is already on the record.
And not every room lands. In April 2026 a session built for sales professionals filled with founders and engineers instead: of 135 respondents, roughly 25 held a sales title. The cause was measurable — 60 of those registrations came from open platform discovery and 12 from targeted outreach, and organic discovery cannot fill a role-specific room. That finding is now priced into how I quote any brief that names a job title.
photo — at the table
I've spent two and a half years convening the AI and startup scene in Sydney: forty-six rooms, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Vercel, AWS, Databricks, Antler, Folklore Ventures and King River Capital. Before that and all the way through it, I built the systems that run my own working life.
I sell what I use. The inbox that triages itself, the briefs that draft themselves, the task list that cuts 427 items to 10 every morning. It's running right now, one section down.
The name of this page is the thesis. Most people quietly count themselves out of this technology. Executives do it. Students do it. The work, in every form it takes, is proving them wrong.
my own system, live
This is the operating system I run my life on. Yours would look like your work, not mine.
free, no email, no call
Is an event even the right tool for the job?
Most briefs arrive with the tool already chosen and the job never stated. Eight questions. It is allowed to tell you not to run an event, and it is allowed to tell you to run one with somebody other than me.
0 of 8 answered
Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs entirely in your browser and I never see your answers. If it says don't run an event, that's the answer. Take it and go.
two dossiers
What it costs.
These are list fees from the issued schedule, reference NRL-SF-2026-01. They are real numbers, not ranges designed to start a negotiation. Each service is scoped to be commissioned on its own: no minimum, no retainer, no continuing obligation either way.
activations
dossier 01A6Flagship, end to endfrom $18,400
One multi-session or multi-day event, designed and delivered whole: programming, suppliers, participants, stage, and the post-event report.
A5Mid-scale, end to endfrom $6,800
One event up to 150 attendees, designed and delivered end to end, with supplier co-ordination and reporting on who actually arrived.
A3Host, MC, or moderation$2,400 / session
Your event, my hosting — up to three hours, including preparation, participant research, and question design.
A1Activation design$2,400
Concept, format, programming, speaker brief and a complete run sheet — documentation your team can execute without me in the room.
Not for you if you want a logo wall and a lanyard scan. And a room of 150 strangers is not 150 qualified people; the filter is the part that makes it worth a number.
ai operations
dossier 02C5The operating systemfrom $24,000
Capture, triage, decision record, commitments and follow-through for one principal and their office — built into the working week and handed to a named internal owner.
C4One workflowfrom $10,400
The single most painful process in your week, built as working software, documented, and handed over. Extend later, or don't.
C1Operations review$3,200
Two weeks watching how you actually work, ending in a build map with a cost and an elapsed time against every recommendation. The recommendation may be that nothing be built.
C6Standing engagementfrom $7,500 / month
Keeping a delivered system alive as your requirements change, with scheduled advisory sessions. Three-month minimum. I hold a cap on how many of these run at once.
Slow if your data is a mess. I'll tell you that in week one, not week six. And if a review ends without three things you can act on alone, there's no fee.
Teaching sits alongside both: a taught session for up to forty people ($2,600), a workshop designed and licensed for your own staff to run for twelve months ($4,800), or a program quoted per cohort. The full schedule — every service, every condition, every exclusion — runs to five pages and is issued on request: ask for NRL-SF-2026-01.
one thing worth arguing about
The question is not what an event costs. It is what a qualified person in the room costs. The benchmark for a B2B trade-show lead is over $800, and a curated executive dinner runs $1,000 to $3,000 per qualified meeting. These rooms come in between $90 and $150 a head, with the composition reported against the brief you set. If that gap seems too large to be true, ask me to show the working — that's a short meeting and I'd rather have it early.
Want to talk it through?
And if nothing in the dossiers is your problem, don't write. Run the eight questions above instead — they're free, they're honest, and they're yours whether or not you ever hire anyone.