I went to one of those expat networking nights about eighteen months after I arrived in Dallas.
Big venue. Name badges. A DJ who hadn't read the room. Forty-odd people from twelve different countries, all doing the same thing — scanning for someone who looked approachable, opening with "so where are you from", and then running out of things to say by the third exchange.
I left after an hour with three business cards I never followed up and a mild headache.
It optimises for the wrong thing. Volume over compatibility. Attendance over atmosphere.
The thing is, I understood what those events were trying to do. Proximity. Critical mass. Put enough displaced people in a room and something will catch. It's a reasonable theory.
But it treats loneliness as a numbers problem when it's actually a quality problem.
The first-six-months circuit
The expat meetup circuit — and there's a whole industry built around it — is largely designed for people in their first six months. Fresh arrivals who need any connection. That's a real need and fair enough.
But if you've been here a few years, built a life, and you're looking for something that actually goes somewhere? Those rooms have very little to offer.
I also noticed something else. The people running them had no particular investment in who showed up. The model only works at scale. Curation is the enemy of scale, so curation doesn't happen.
Which means you get a room full of people who are lonely in different languages, hoping someone else will solve it.
A table, not a room
I didn't want to build that. I wanted the opposite — fewer people, more intention, a table instead of a room. The kind of environment where a real conversation has space to happen because someone has done the work of making it possible.
That's a harder thing to build. Curation takes effort. Saying no to people takes nerve. Keeping group sizes small means turning demand away instead of leaning into it.
But it's the only version worth building. Everything else is just a bigger version of the problem.
A table, not a room.
Franzus Social is a curated dinner club for Kiwi and Aussie expats. Small groups. Vetted members. No name badges.
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