Your Bets on IRL
I have been hosting IRL gatherings in my living room since 2019. Now everyone’s calling It the future.
Written by Ipshita Kumar, VP of Brand Innovation at Hype
I have been hosting IRL gatherings in my living room since 2019. Now everyone’s calling it the future.
In 2019, I was an expat in Barcelona who found it hard to make new friends.I had a job in hospitality, some college friends, but no net new friends. The types based on like minded interests. Anyone who moves to a big city knows it’s almost impossible to find new people to connect with in any big city, let alone Barcelona.
I tried everything : Meetups. Facebook groups. InterNations. Bumble BFF but nothing landed. So, I stopped waiting for the perfect event with the perfect vibe and started using what I had: a beautiful living room, two expat roommates, and my master skill of event curation. We started hosting with DJs setting up in the living room for 30-person raves, restaurant chefs testing new menus on a focus group of 12, mixology session -- all of it out of our kitchen, rooftop, and living room - 4x a week, 12 months a year.
There’s something magnetic about being invited to a house party by a friend of a friend. It cracks open your social circle to a second degree you didn’t know existed. The next thing you know, you’re booking a weekend trip to Costa Brava with people you met three weeks ago.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn: they’ve all tried to manufacture that feeling, but we all know how weird it gets when someone slides into your DMs cold. I mean the algorithm can’t really fake a warm introduction.
IRL experiences are different though. You BYOB. You gather with 20 second-degree friends. Maybe even contribute €8–15 directly to the artist or chef curating the night in a room where you could actually be yourself. That was the whole bet: the best thing you can offer people is a space where they don’t have to perform.
I recently read that $750M + deployed in “anti-AI” bets in the last three months. Billion-dollar companies are paying premium for community leads and events directors.
And people are acting like they just rediscovered fire.
The more hours we spend behind screens, the more the nervous system keeps score. Every expat who’s moved to a new city and felt invisible knows this. Every remote worker who’s become a stranger to their own neighbourhood knows this. The body figures it out before the mind admits it. You feel it in your chest when you realize you haven’t had a real conversation in weeks!
Anyone else noticing the huge jump in demand and IRL events lately?
The more seamlessly AI handles the operational layer of our lives, the more emotional space opens up. And historically, humans have always filled that space with other humans.
What capital is finally catching up to is what our bodies have been telling us all along: we are social creatures who’ve been living in isolation pods. Voluntarily. And we’re exhausted from it.
I’ve been designing experiences since 2009 and feel like we’ve slowly been pulling away from IRL, only to rediscover it again. During and after COVID, we spent the last 5+ years optimizing our online social lives for scale. More followers. Wider reach. Better content strategy. And in doing so, we optimized the depth right out of our connections. The intimacy got outsourced & the serendipity got A/B tested away. We turned meetups and friendships into a performance metric.
So to see all of this come full circle with the investment thesis, the cultural correction, and the new mainstream craving for IRL; all I can say is I’ve been in that room and I helped build versions of it across 12 cities.
The future of connection isn’t a new idea. It’s a very old one that’s finally getting the capital, the attention, and the serious conversation it always deserved. I’m so excited to watch event designers, community managers, and experience curators take their rightful place in that conversation.
We didn’t discover the IRL fire, but maybe we should finally stop pretending we don’t need it?
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