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.
I build the room, and the week around it.
Rooms composed to a brief you write down before the gate opens. And the operating systems that run the weeks around them, for one person at a time.
I'm Andrew. You already know what needs building. 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, you assemble a specified room and then report 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.
who you'd be working with
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, on the operations page.
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 things I sell
Pick the one that's your problem.
One offer behind each door, not a menu. Both carry a written guarantee, both name what they don't cover, and both are built so you could stop using me afterwards.
Built to Brief
$8,500A room composed to a brief you wrote
You write down who should be in the room and who shouldn't, before the gate opens. I build the format, hold the gate, run the floor, and report back against your brief by segment, with the declines counted.
The guarantee
If the composition misses the brief, I run another at no charge or refund you, your election. What I don't guarantee is a headcount, because the reach is yours.
Never run one before?$1,400
Start with The Read instead. It works out whether a room is even the right tool and what size yours can actually fill, and the fee comes off whatever you commission next.
Not for you if you want a logo wall and a lanyard scan.
The first build
$8,600A map of your week, then one thing built
I work out how you actually work, map what's costing you with a price and a time against each line, then build the most expensive process in your month and hand it to someone on your team who owns it.
Two guarantees
No fee if the review ends without three things you could act on alone. And if what I build isn't running in your week when we finish, I keep going at no charge until it is.
First working result21 days
Ten business days to the map, then the build. Fixed scope, fixed price, no second discovery phase.
Not an AI rollout. If you need the whole workforce trained, that's change management and I'll point you at someone who does it.
Smaller pieces are commissioned on their own, and the full schedule carries every service, condition and exclusion across five pages. Both are on the dossier pages, or ask for NRL-SF-2026-01. There's a cap on how many standing engagements run at once. It's a calendar, not a tactic.
one thing worth arguing about
Most event budgets get argued as a total. The number that matters is what a qualified person in the room costs, and there are published benchmarks: over $800 for a B2B trade-show lead, $1,000 to $3,000 per qualified meeting at a curated executive dinner. Against those, this is cheap. But that's the wrong reason to hire me, because the reach is yours and the arithmetic moves with your list. The reason is the filter. Anyone will take your booking and fill the room. Across this record 305 applications have been declined against criteria written down before the gate opened, and the composition gets reported back against the brief you set. That's the part you can't buy anywhere else in this city.
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. So when the room is full of the right people, or the week finally runs without you holding it up, the line I want you left with is the one this practice is named for.
you, of all people.
Want to talk it through?
I charge because I need resource to have things worth helping people with. The free half of this stays free. 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.