Graeme Barlow is getting pretty good at hosting dinner parties. The serial entrepreneur and CEO of Iversoft has been hosting one or two a month for almost a year and a half now. His latest stop? A swanky evening at Edmonton’s Iberian-inspired Sabor.
“This is about telling your story and connecting with humans and making friends.”
Graeme Barlow
Barlow brought his Founders Dinner series, an invite-only networking dinner for North American founders, to Edmonton on Feb. 10, with another stop slated for Calgary on Feb. 12. The series, which hosts 20 to 30 founders per dinner, is part of Barlow’s FounderLink initiative, a platform for business owners to connect, network, and access support from other entrepreneurs.
Dinners include a pre-meal conversation, a guided share session, and a seating plan that ensures people make new connections. There are only two rules: no politics and no sales.
“The philosophy there is…that everyone’s a founder, everyone knows how to sell, and there are 1,000 venues to sell in. This is about telling your story and connecting with humans and making friends,” he said. “It’s a similar idea in a world of hyperpolarized politics…this is not the place.”
It’s not just about breaking bread at these exclusive sitdowns; Barlow is actively trying to build community among his peers to combat the isolation he said often comes with being a founder.
“Building community is so important because the whole journey of being a founder, business owner, CEO can be the most rewarding thing in the world, but it can also be the most isolating, terrifying, and soul-destroying,” Barlow said of the pressures he sees in managing a business and the people who rely on it.
“It can be a very lonely journey, and I think creating community is so powerful for people,” he said.
While social connection may underpin the dinner series values, Barlow said there are also practical benefits to attending. Each dinner’s guest list is handpicked by staff and vetted to ensure that 50 percent of guests are late-stage founders or those who have exited a company, 25 percent are in the growth-stage, and 25 percent are early-stage founders. Barlow said that curation separates Founder’s Dinner from other founder-centric events by creating a balance of experience and insight.
There are only two rules at Founders Dinners: no politics and no sales. Images courtesy FounderLink.
“A frustration of mine was that if you go to a lot of the coffee meetups or less structured events, there might be 50 people there. You meet maybe 10 founders and then 40 service providers, insurance brokers, lawyers, bankers, sponsors,” Barlow said. “On the flip side, you have great founder events, but it’s 100 early-stage founders all looking at each other saying, ‘I’m lost and terrified.’”
Barlow said he sees Tuesday and Thursday’s dinners as a way to engage the community in traditionally less-served locales.
“We’ve had founders fly from Edmonton to Vancouver for the sole purpose of attending a dinner, saying they wish they had events like these in Edmonton,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh, well, you’re not that far away. Why don’t we just show up in the city and try to host one?’”
BetaKit asked Barlow for a list of attendees, but he declined to share who got the golden ticket this time around.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy FounderLink.