An evening where you have a short, proper conversation with everyone in the room instead of one long one with whoever you arrived with. It is free, it takes about two hours, and nobody is selling you anything.
Thu 1 Oct · 21:00 Speed Friending · Lisbon TBC Save me a place →Written for the person wondering whether to walk in on their own. That is most people, the first time.
A few seconds at the door and that is the admin over with. Nothing to install, nothing to print, no queue, no name on a clipboard.
Your phone quietly tells you who you are meeting next, and tells them the same. No hovering at the edge of a room working out who looks approachable, and no walking up to a closed circle of strangers.
Long enough to get past the weather and find the thing you have in common. Short enough that a conversation which is going nowhere is not something you have to escape.
Nobody has to invent an excuse or wait for a gap in the conversation. Leaving is not rude here, it is simply what happens next — which most people find is the most relaxing part of the whole evening.
In your own time — during the evening, on the way home, whenever. There is no clock on it and you can change your mind. Nobody ever sees your answer. Not the other person, not the host, not anyone in the room.
Only where it was mutual, so there is no rejection to send and none to receive. Everybody else simply does not come up. Months later they are still there, with a note of what they do — which is the point of the whole thing.
No name badges to fill in, no icebreaker games, no going round the room saying what you do, and nobody making you stand up in front of anyone. If you have been to something that did those things and hated it, this is deliberately not that.
Plainly, because this is the part people are right to ask about.
People reasonably assume an app like this tracks where they are. This one does not, and that is worth being specific about rather than reassuring about.
At the end of the event you see only the people who said yes about you and whom you said yes about. Both halves have to be true.
If you say no, they never find out. If they say no and you said yes, you simply do not appear in each other's list — there is no rejection to receive and none to send. That is the whole point of doing it this way rather than swapping contact details across a table while somebody is watching.
And there is no clock on it. Answer between rounds, in the break, at the end, or on the way home — and change any answer as often as you like until the event closes. Saying no asks you once more before it takes, because a “no” tapped in a hurry is the one thing here nobody can undo for you.
When it is mutual, you each get the other's email. Nothing else is shared, and nothing is posted anywhere.
We are in Lisbon. Everywhere else needs somebody who lives there, because a room full of people has to be organised by a person who can be in that room.
Find a venue that wants the trade, pick an evening, and run the room — welcome people, keep the rounds moving, ring the bell. About one evening a month, plus a couple of hours around it.
All of this: sign-ups, the door code, seating and the rotation worked out for you, the printed sheets, the badges, the matching afterwards, and someone on the end of an email who has run it before.
A city opens when somebody is there to run it — not when we decide to expand. That is deliberate: a directory full of people you could never actually meet would defeat the entire idea, so we would rather open slowly and have every city be real.