The idea of needing to impress an in-crowd enough to get an invite to join reminds me of fraternities in college (which I withdrew from half way through the process) and well-heeled yacht clubs or country clubs.
I’d much rather make friends where I can just show up and have a nice time with someone based on a shared interest (like my local cycling club, where I’ve met a few folks I hang out with regularly… or even social dance clubs for those into ballroom or Latin dance). Meetups are obviously too transient, so I join clubs with consistent regular attendees.
But maybe there are people this program will resonate with. Obviously, exclusive invite-only clubs like fraternities and country clubs are popular and I know many who joined, and even met life long friends there.
…I guess, just not me. I probably have some weird outsider-exclusion-from-popular-kid-club complex that is well beyond the scope of this comment :)
The same reason I won’t show up with a navy blazer to a yacht club social event to beg sponsorship from some commercial real estate agent with a chip on his shoulder because he has a quarter-zip polo from the club store and a member number like S29 he can use at the bar.
That being said, good luck with the company, I hope it is successful and you meet a lot of great people.
Totally get your perspective and appreciate the thoughts. In full transparency, this idea comes directly from my experience joining a fraternity and making a group of ~10 lifelong friends that I still get together with a few times a year.
We have so little in common interest wise, but we bonded over just being in the same place repeatedly. I'm not in contact with anyone from my engineering program. That says a lot to me about shared interests as a (non-)driver of lasting friendships compared to shared EXPERIENCE, but I'm just one person.
Obviously "frat culture" has an extreme negative connotation, but I will just say that not every fraternity is full of gym bros... they exist for every type of guy and I truly think the socially awkward guys I know who joined fraternities made significantly more meaningful relationship than the cool, good-looking guys who didn't.