the deal flow that shows up because you weren't trying to get anything

there's a casual, recurring evening a few of us run, nothing formal, just a rotating group of investors and operators showing up for a few hours. this week's version had real fund managers, real operators, people who genuinely do deals, sitting around doing something that has nothing to do with pitching anyone anything.

i used to think of networking as a thing you did with intent, a list of people to meet, an agenda for what you wanted out of the conversation. this recurring night works because it's the opposite of that. nobody's there to close anything. and that's exactly why real relationships form there in a way they rarely do at an actual pitch event, where everyone's guard is up because everyone knows why everyone else is in the room.

i can point to specific deals and introductions that trace back to a night like this, months later, from a conversation that had nothing to do with the eventual outcome. that's the part that's hard to explain to anyone optimizing purely for efficiency. the return on an evening like that doesn't show up for months, sometimes longer, and it never shows up in a way you can attribute cleanly, so it's tempting to cut it from the calendar as unproductive. i think that's a mistake. generosity first relationships compound the same way capital does, just on a longer and less visible timeline.

the same week, a separate conversation surfaced a small but telling operating shift: a move toward keeping shared documents open by default instead of locking everything behind a password, reserving the lock only for genuinely private information. it's a small thing, but it rhymes with the networking point. openness, given without expecting an immediate return, tends to come back around in ways you can't predict in advance and definitely can't schedule.

what's one relationship in your world right now that isn't producing anything yet, that you're tempted to deprioritize because you can't measure it?