Hi Y'all,

I ran my first ever AI event in Houston at the Ion. We had 300+ people show up despite some crazy weather. We had food and drinks. It was a party. Let me share with you my takeaways.

6 days before our event at The Ion, our caterer stopped answering.

Late August is a restaurant in Houston, and I had signed with them 4 weeks out. Deposit paid August 4th. Stephanie was my contact and everything was locked.

Then 2 emails and a couple of days of silence. So I drove the escalation myself, went to the parent restaurant, and found a manager named Marcus.

Marcus had never heard of us. Stephanie was gone, and the order had never been passed to anyone. Food and beverage for 300 people simply did not exist in their system.

We fixed it in a day. But if I had assumed that a signed agreement meant the work was in motion, 300 people would have walked into a room with nothing to drink and eat.

I planned this event for months, it was completely outside my skill set, and I want to hand you what I learned while it is still fresh. If you have been thinking about running one, this is your checklist.

I told you in January that this was the year I would build community. Here is the reasoning. AI makes it trivially easy to produce more of everything. More content, more outreach, more polish. It also makes it easy to disappear into a screen and call that momentum.

The scarce thing now is real relationships. Being in one, with people who are actually building, where nobody can fake the conversation.

So Leon Coe, who runs the Houston AI Club and has run far more of these than I ever will, and I put together the first AI Operator Spotlight at The Ion.

Charles Jessup on rolling AI out to 100,000 people at Raytheon, the good and the bad. Chuck Yates on Collide, which is the most interesting AI company in Houston right now and is doing it inside oil and gas, the industry everyone assumes moves last.

That lineup was not only about the content. Chuck, Charles, Leon, the Ion and I each had a network that would carry the invitation. We picked people who would fill the room by existing.

About 300 came on a Thursday night, and 80% of them had never set foot in The Ion before.

Running events is Leon’s craft, not mine, and the best part of the whole project was getting to borrow his brain. 3 things he said stuck with me…

Getting the right people on stage dictates everything downstream. Who shows up. How easy your marketing is. Whether the night has energy at 6:45.

Lock the lineup first and the rest of the work gets easier. Get it wrong and no amount of promotion, catering, or design saves you.

2. Build the event you want to go to

Leon and I selfishly wanted to hear practical AI stories at the enterprise level from people we admire. That was our entire filter.

We followed our own curiosity to those 2 speakers, and it turned out a few hundred people were curious about exactly the same thing. Design for the room you want to sit in.

3. Focus on how you want to make people feel

This is the one I keep thinking about. When you get on stage, worry more about how you want people to feel than about what you are going to say.

Entertain them. Tell a story with real stakes. Use slides only for visual cues and nothing more. Do not spend your prep time on decks.

Here is the full project plan I used, so you do not have to build one from scratch.

Til next time,

-Ali

About Me: I’m Ali Mamujee. I run Allenix, where we build AI revenue systems for B2B companies between $3 million and $25 million with complex sales cycles. Football is officially back and I am living peak life. Texas is playing Ohio State today and my Texans play the Bills tomorrow. Pinch me.