Reading Room

The origin

There was no regular space where people could meet as technologists and technology-adjacent folks to read over texts pertinent to our daily lives. In a time when we were facing what I think was a wave of mass doom vibes, we created a space where people could come together once a week and read texts that either fill them with hope or prompt them to think more critically about the type of work they do and its impact.

The arc of these events was about answering this question: if we were all to be successful, how would the world have changed for the better?

The spark, the specific moment we decided, was around early March, when Jihad and I were like, “Hey, we want to start running these.” We started off at 1242 Market Street from the Alif connection. The first version had maybe 15 or 20 people, and over time it grew to about 50 people.

My main priorities

• Managing sponsorship relationships with Native, specifically with Jihad.
• Ensuring the essays were printed.
• Curating the essays based on what was being read as part of the curriculum.
• Selecting hosts and inviting co-hosts, such as Maja Wilbrink, among others.
• Arranging help with the slide decks for presentation.
• Securing a partnership for the space for at least 15 sessions.
• Coordinating with our creative director to create the brand and social media presence for the Reading Room.

The turning point

I think around the fourth one is when I knew it was starting to work. We had invited Maja to really come in with her audience, bringing in people who have their own audiences to bring life to the thing. Collaborating with Maja also brought along other great collaborators, like Vincent Li and others. We were able to get this group of technologists and curious-minded folks by mixing up the group and uplifting members who were coming regularly by giving them the opportunity to present.

I think I knew it was working in the sense that it wasn’t just about the types of rooms. If I told you about the types of rooms, sure, I could tell you we had VCs come in, Google engineers, Anthropic engineers, OpenAI, and all that. The beauty of it was that the success came from two things:

• People would stay late and discuss late into the evening, even after the event ended. You’d still have the room feel full and alive even when the programming was done, so you knew they loved the experience.
• People started hanging out with each other after the Reading Room. They would go out to dinners together and invite each other to things. There was one gentleman in particular who came up to me and said, “Yo, I have no friends in San Francisco, and this is a safe haven for me.” I knew that was something, and we did something right by doing that.

I think the things that went wrong along the way were really light. To be honest, we started running out of exactly what to read. I was in charge of curation, and I didn’t know what the standards were or how to keep them. By creating a core group, almost like a council from the reading group, we worked together to ask, “What type of readings are we interested in? What do we want to see?” That was what really, really helped with curation and engagement. People felt like they were going to read something they were interested in, so it was incredible.

We also started to have these bigger rooms, where we’d have 40 or 50 people on the list versus our more modest 20 or 25. Initially, it was easy to just split people into groups of 8 or 10, but we realized the sweet spot was actually 4 to 5 people per group. Rotating the groups halfway through kept things fresh and engaged over time.