Stop matching people who look alike

Open almost any event app and look at who it suggests you meet. Same industry. Same job title. Same interests. It feels relevant, and that's the problem: the tool is optimizing for people who look like a good match, not for meetings that are worth an hour of your event.

The similarity trap

Two heads of procurement at similar companies have plenty to talk about. They also have very little to trade. Neither is buying what the other sells, neither can hire the other, and if they really wanted to meet, they'd probably have found each other already.

Similarity is easy to compute from a profile, so it's what most matchmaking falls back on. But attendees don't expense a flight and three days away to meet their mirror image. They come to find the person who has what they're missing.

Match what one needs with what the other offers

The introductions that turn into something usually follow a few familiar shapes:

A buyer with a problem, and a vendor who solves it.
A founder raising, and an investor looking at their space.
An operator who solved a problem last year, and a peer facing it right now.

None of these pairs look alike on paper. That's the point. We call this complementarity: what one person needs, the other can offer.

It has to work in both directions

A match that's perfect for one side is a sales pitch for the other. So we look at every introduction from both ends and ask whether each person gets something out of it. A strong reason on one side can't make up for a weak one on the other.

A good introduction is one both people would thank you for.

That also means we sometimes suggest fewer introductions than a directory would. We think that's the right trade: an attendee who gets four great meetings remembers the event; an attendee who gets forty so-so suggestions ignores all of them.

Ask, don't guess

You can't match needs to offers without knowing what people need. A profile tells you who someone is; it doesn't tell you what they're looking for this week. So we ask. Attendees spend about three minutes telling us who they want to meet and what they can offer.

When someone hasn't told us, we don't pretend. We won't call an introduction complementary on the strength of a job title. We'll stick to what we actually know — a shared background, a common thread — or tell the attendee we don't have enough yet.

What this means for organizers

Fewer, better introductions. Every one comes with a plain-language reason, written from what the two people told us, so attendees know why they should take the meeting. And because both sides have a reason to show up, more of those meetings actually happen — which is what you'll want to see in the report afterwards.