AI Scales Work. Trust Scales in Person.
Early Movers Are Building the Infrastructure AI Cannot Replace
Anthropic, the company building Claude and currently valued at roughly $1 trillion on private secondary markets, just posted a job for an Events Lead, Brand. Salary range: $320,000 to $400,000. They have 10 more event roles open behind it.
A lot of people read that as a contradiction. The company whose entire commercial premise is that software can do more of what humans used to do is paying near-half-a-million dollars for someone to plan dinners, summits, and live demos. If AI is so transformative, why are they staffing up like a luxury hospitality group?
It is not a contradiction. It is the thesis. AI scales work. Trust scales in person. And it is a thesis that Alumni Ventures has been operationalizing for some time, long before this particular news cycle gave the rest of the market a permission slip to say it out loud.
The Job Descriptions Tell You What the Salary Doesn’t
Most coverage of the Anthropic role has fixated on the number. The actual job descriptions, across Anthropic and the broader industry, are the real signal.
Anthropic’s is not simply a brand role. The job description ties the position directly to “direct business impact,” “unaided awareness,” “AI provider mindshare,” and “customer affinity.” It calls for a 15-year experiential operator who can run the full spectrum from “intimate thought leadership gatherings” to “large-scale brand activations at industry tentpole moments,” build “Event in a Box” toolkits to scale the playbook, and bring the brand to life in “three-dimensional spaces.” The audience set covers developers, enterprise executives, and policymakers: the highest-stakes possible. 1-4
Now read what Blackstone is hiring for. The world’s largest alternative asset manager, with $1.1 trillion in assets under management, is currently recruiting a dedicated AVP of Event Hospitality with an explicit remit to lead “premium events and hospitality experiences across golf and other global sporting verticals,” collaborate on Private Wealth hospitality program strategy, and build relationships with sports organizations, hospitality partners, venues, and agencies. The compensation band sits at $105,000 to $175,000, significant for the function and notable because it is a dedicated headcount investment at a firm that could outsource all of it. 5
The world’s largest AI lab and the world’s largest alternative asset manager are both building in-person infrastructure at the same time. That is not a coincidence.
For those of us in the business of connecting investors to venture capital, the Blackstone hire is the more instructive signal. It is proof that at the highest levels of asset management, IRL relationship infrastructure, including dinners, sports hospitality, and private wealth events, is treated as a strategic capability, not a discretionary perk.
And they are not alone. Skift Meetings recently catalogued the full cluster: OpenAI hiring an enterprise field marketer at up to $252,000, Perplexity at up to $165,000, Databricks at $264,000, Runway at $200,000, plus Cursor and Lovable building events functions in parallel. 6
Organizations competing for the attention of high-value buyers are investing in the surfaces AI cannot replicate.
The Whole Market Is Betting on In-Person. The Data Confirms It
According to EventTrack 2025, the industry’s most comprehensive annual research report The world’s largest AI lab and the world’s largest alternative asset manager are both building in-person infrastructure at the same time. That is not a coincidence. 7-8
For those of us in the business of connecting investors to venture capital, the Blackstone hire is the more instructive signal. It is proof that at the highest levels of asset management, IRL relationship infrastructure, including dinners, sports hospitality, and private wealth events, is treated as a strategic capability, not a discretionary perk.
Cultural icon, Gary Vaynerchuk, aka Gary Vee shared his view on this topic in a recent Linkedin post, titled, “The Tools Get Commoditized. Humans Don’t.” His theory on ‘Experience-Maxxing’, is that IRL matters more than ever. And his award winning firm, Vayner X, is betting the farm on it. 9
We Made Our Bet Before the News Cycle Did
That is the strategic position at AV, full stop. In-real-life programming, with our teams, with our customers, and with our portfolio companies, is not an add-on to how we operate. It is core to how AV works.
It is a capital allocation decision: in-person programming gets a real budget and dedicated headcount. It is an organizational decision too, as our investment teams, our member-facing teams, and our portfolio companies all participate in the same physical surface. And it is a market call, a bet that as AI commoditizes more digital interaction, the asset that appreciates is time spent in the same room.
In practice, our in-real-life strategy comes down to four jobs in real life (IRL) has to do for the business:
- Segment for relationship depth. Do more with our most important investors.
- Education. Use in-person to teach the AV approach to venture investing. The AV Academy is the live expression, these in-person bootcamps run as a workshop that gives our community members the opportunity to think and act as venture capitalists, leaving them with the confidence to assess and make investing decisions.
- Conversion. Use in-person to help prospective members close the gap between online interest and committed capital.
- Clubs and communities. Treat invite-only, recurring rooms as a real product category. The Dingo Mafia, our invite-only investing club for Australian expats, is another. Many more are in development.
Digital Gets You to the Door. In Person Closes the Deal.
A meaningful number of prospective AV investors do exactly what people do when they buy a car. They shop online. They research extensively. They watch the videos, listen to the podcasts, read and study the emails, and follow along on social media. By the time they have engaged with us digitally for a few weeks or months, they know what we do, they like what we do, and on paper they are sold.
Then they pause. Because the next move requires them to commit real capital to a venture portfolio, and at that decision threshold, digital trust takes them only so far. They do not need more information. They need to walk around the car. They want to see that there is a real dealership, with people who are accountable for what happens after they sign.
That is what the AV Open House is. It is not a sales pitch. It is a high-level overview of our strategy, how we get into great deals, our philosophy of venture investing, our product line, and the importance of building a custom investment plan. The follow-up is a conversation with someone on our team they have already met in the room.
Online builds interest. In person builds commitment.
Will Guidara draws this distinction sharply in Unreasonable Hospitality, the New York Times bestseller that chronicles how he turned Eleven Madison Park into the number one restaurant in the world. Service is executing the transaction correctly. Hospitality is making someone feel something.10 Our Open Houses are designed to do both: give people accurate, useful information and make them feel that the decision they’re considering is one that an organization of real people will stand behind.
AI Makes Authentic Human Presence More Valuable, Not Less
There is a counter-narrative that says AI will eat events too: better personalization, AR/VR, AI agents handling logistics, synthetic conferences. Some of that is real. But it misses the deeper economics. Three forces are pushing value toward IRL precisely because of AI, not in spite of it.
- Home
Authenticity gets repriced:
When anyone with a Claude or ChatGPT subscription can produce a polished thought-leadership post, the marginal value of one more polished post falls toward zero. What appreciates is anything that is provably human and provably present: a panel where the moderator goes off-script, a hallway conversation that ends in a term sheet, a kitchen course at a three-Michelin-star restaurant that nobody else in the dining room knows you're having. Those cannot be cheaply faked. That scarcity is the asset. - Home
Decision velocity outruns digital trust-building:
When the technology is moving faster than buyers can read, in-person becomes the only bandwidth high enough to compress months of evaluation into a single afternoon. Anthropic's job description is built to close exactly that gap. They describe the mandate as creating "tangible problem-solving through live demonstrations and technical deep-dives." As is our Open House program at AV. - Home
Recognition becomes scarce, and recognition is the product:
Think about the last time a frequent-flyer airline crew came up to you mid-flight, knew who you were, and acknowledged you. It changes how you feel about the brand instantly. Guidara calls this the difference between service and hospitality. In a world saturated with algorithmic personalization, real human recognition becomes genuinely scarce: a name known before you say it, a follow-up that references something specific from your last conversation, a dinner with the people who actually run the firm. That is not sentimentality. That is product strategy. It is why Blackstone is investing in sports hospitality for its private wealth clients. It is why AV is investing in Diamond Club programming, Concierge Services, and owner dinners for ours.
Four Sessions In, the Room Is Telling Us Something
Since May we have run four sessions of AV Academy bootcamps, in New York, Boston, Chicago and Menlo Park. 10 more are scheduled before the end of the year.
The most useful data from those sessions is not the attendance count. It is the questions. People are not sitting quietly through a presentation. They are interrogating the model. In one session a participant asked why a fund holds 20 to 30 companies instead of 500. Across the three cities our teams have fielded pointed questions about whether a retirement account’s gains return to the account or to the individual, how the five-year rule survives an IRA-to-Roth conversion, the difference between a SAFE and a convertible note and which events trigger tax, MOIC versus TVPI, and our point of view on publicly traded venture vehicles. These are not idle questions. They are the questions of someone deciding whether to commit capital.
That is the whole thesis, observable in a single afternoon. Someone who has followed AV online for weeks already knows what we do. What a video cannot give them is the chance to push, to ask the uncomfortable fee question out loud, “why invest in venture if 20% comes off the top,” and watch someone on our investment team answer it without flinching. The sessions routinely run long, not because we over-scheduled, but because the questions keep coming. The Boston room was noticeably more skeptical than New York. Some attendees traveled two hours each way to be there. That is not passive interest. That is demand.
The questions people ask in the room are the diligence they would never finish online. The room is where the deciding happens.
And we are refining as we go. What ran long in Boston got tightened for Chicago, and what we learn in Chicago will sharpen the next one. Running these city by city, in person, is the discipline that keeps scale from diluting the experience. It is the same principle behind every room worth being in.
The Best Practitioners Already Solved This Problem
The philosophy above is not mine alone. It is shared, co-signed, and being built collectively across the AV organization. But I have been living a version of this thesis a lot longer than I’ve been at AV, and I think the personal experience is worth sharing. It gets at something the market data cannot.
A few years ago I had the chance to dine at Eleven Madison Park in New York, at the time the number one restaurant in the world. I got the reservation through my friend Rich Roll, the ultra-endurance athlete and podcaster, who knew the right people. I walked in with high expectations and left with something I didn’t expect: a completely revised understanding of what experience design is actually capable of.
Two moments have stayed with me. The first: before I said my name, before I showed a reservation, someone on the floor greeted me as Mr. McKenzie. Not loudly, not with ceremony. Just quietly, immediately, as a fact. The room knew I was coming and had prepared for me as a specific person, not a guest number.
The second: partway through the evening, I was quietly invited back to the kitchen for a course served by the chef. It was clearly a special experience, extended to a small number of tables. But here’s what made it brilliant: nobody in the dining room knew who was going and coming, or when. Nobody was watching. Nobody felt left out. The exclusivity was genuine but invisible. The experience was personal without being performative.
I read Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality after that visit and everything clicked into place. What I had experienced wasn’t luxury in the traditional sense. It was intentionality at an almost irrational level of detail. His central argument is that anyone, in any industry, can choose to be in the hospitality business: the business of making people feel genuinely seen and cared for. The book has sold over a million copies. He has since released The Field Guide, published April 2026, a practical step-by-step companion for putting those principles to work. I am currently working through it.
The original book is the why. The Field Guide is the how. Both belong in the hands of anyone building events or community at scale.
The concept that lodged deepest is what Guidara calls “scaling the unscalable”: the idea that the moments people remember most are the ones that feel like they were made specifically for them. The operational challenge is not choosing between scale and personalization but figuring out how to deliver both simultaneously. That is a harder problem than it sounds. And it became the central design challenge of the most ambitious event program I have ever built.
I Built This Once. The Principle Travels.
From 2012 to 2016 I served as Global Events Manager at lululemon. My team produced SeaWheeze, a half marathon and Sunset Festival concert in Vancouver that became one of the most sought-after race weekends in North America. The draw sold out in minutes. Runners flew in from around the world. The Sunset Festival, held the evening after the race, became a cultural event in its own right.
What made SeaWheeze different was not the race itself. It was the deliberate architecture of every moment surrounding it. We mapped the full guest journey from the very first touchpoint, often a conversation in a lululemon store where an educator would mention the event to a runner who had never heard of it, through registration, training plan delivery, equipment decisions, travel logistics, airport arrival, hotel check-in, race-day experience, and the after-party. Every single touchpoint was designed.
The operating principle was simple to state and hard to execute: design the experience for one person, then figure out how to operationalize it for 10,000. It meant the runner arriving at the airport saw lululemon branding at baggage claim. It meant the check-in felt like a welcome, not a queue. It meant the race itself had energy and production values that made people feel they were participating in something that mattered, not just completing a distance.
And the Sunset Festival, thousands of runners, many still in race gear, celebrating together as the sun went down over Vancouver, was the moment that made people come back the following year and bring their friends. Not because it sold something. Because it made people feel something they wanted to feel again.
We designed for one person. We delivered it for 10,000. That is the only version of scale worth building.
I read Guidara’s work after my time at lululemon and recognized immediately that we had been trying to do the same thing from a different starting point: take something that feels intimate and personal by nature, and refuse to let scale dilute it. The operational tools are different at a restaurant versus a race weekend. The design principle is identical.
lululemon Just Validated the Thesis With Their Calendar
SeaWheeze ran from 2012 through to its last edition before a multi-year hiatus. After six years away, lululemon has announced the full revival, half marathon plus Sunset Festival, on Aug. 8, 2026, in Vancouver.11 DJ John Summit headlines the festival. The draw is already closed.
The return of SeaWheeze is not a nostalgia play. It is lululemon making an explicit bet that in-real-life brand experiences, even expensive and logistically demanding ones, are worth building again in 2026. Part of what is driving that bet is the same force driving every other signal in this piece. The rising cost and declining effectiveness of digital-first marketing, as AI-generated content floods social feeds and paid attention becomes more expensive, is pushing brands back toward physical surfaces. lululemon built its brand in stores, in run clubs, and on race weekends. It is returning to that playbook because it still works, arguably better now than it did before.
lululemon. Anthropic. Blackstone. VaynerX. These are not similar companies. They do not share an industry, a customer, or a business model. What they share is a conclusion: the most valuable thing you can give a person who already knows who you are is a room, a reason to show up, and an experience worth remembering.
AI scales work. Trust scales in person. And the companies figuring that out first are building a durable advantage.
The Risks Are Real
In the spirit of intellectual honesty: the bear case matters. AI-generated avatars, synthetic video, and increasingly capable agents will absorb a meaningful share of one-to-many communication. Routine webinars, generic networking mixers, and low-differentiation conferences are likely to be hollowed out, not enhanced. Rising experiential budgets also have to clear ROI bars that are getting more sophisticated, not less.
The thesis here is not “all IRL goes up.” The gap between great IRL and mediocre IRL widens, and the great experiences get repriced upward. Guidara makes a version of this point too: the answer to a world with more noise is not more events, it is better ones. That is a more demanding bar for operators, and a more interesting one for investors.
The Companies That Figure This Out First Are Building a Durable Advantage
“Human in the loop” started as a technical phrase about AI safety, referring to the idea that a person should remain involved in the critical decisions a model makes. It is becoming something bigger. It is becoming a description of where economic value lives in an AI-saturated economy.
Anthropic is paying $400,000 for a human in the loop of its brand and enterprise go-to-market. Blackstone is building a dedicated hospitality function to keep its highest-value private wealth clients in the loop of a relationship, not just a product. lululemon is bringing back SeaWheeze because 10,000 runners crossing a finish line and dancing at sunset in Vancouver is something no algorithm has yet figured out how to replace. At Alumni Ventures, our entire model, spanning syndicate calls, member dinners, Academy workshops, investing clubs, and Diamond Club programming, is built around humans being in the loop of capital decisions that matter.
Guidara’s invitation, in both the original book and the new Field Guide, is simple: decide to be in the hospitality business. Not the events business. Not the marketing business. The hospitality business, where the job is making people feel cared for, seen, and glad they showed up.
I have been trying to build that across three chapters: at lululemon at 10,000-person scale, as a guest at the best restaurant in the world learning from practitioners who had solved the problem more completely than anyone, and now at AV with a portfolio of programs designed to make our investors, our operators, and our founders feel exactly that way. The strategy we are executing is collective, inherited, and continuously being refined. But the conviction underneath it is personal, built from years of watching what happens when you refuse to let scale be an excuse for indifference.
The most valuable surfaces are the ones with chairs, glasses, name tags, and people in them. That is where AV is investing.
We Are Not Speaking in the Abstract
AV is actively building events, Academy sessions, open houses, and investing clubs across the country. If you are a founder building in the experience economy, whether that is hospitality tech, premium events, members’ clubs, IRL community platforms, or the infrastructure that powers them, we should talk. And if you are an investor who wants to experience what “trust scales in person” looks like in practice, come to a room with us.
References:
1. Greenhouse job posting (all JD quotes verbatim): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5194529008
2. Salary widely reported at up to $400,000 (not stated in JD): https://meetings.skift.com/2026/04/29/why-anthropics-400k-event-job-matters/
3. Inc. Magazine coverage: https://www.inc.com/ali-donaldson/ai-goes-irl-anthropics-400000-events-job-shows-how-hot-experiential-marketing-has-become/91336422
4. Additional Anthropic event roles: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs
5. LinkedIn job posting ($1.1T AUM and all JD quotes verbatim): https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4370752815/
6. Skift Meetings (OpenAI, Perplexity, Databricks, Runway, Cursor, Lovable): https://meetings.skift.com/2026/04/29/why-anthropics-400k-event-job-matters/
7. EventTrack 2025 press release (74% Fortune 1000 / 57-55% B2C-B2B / 80% in-person trust): https://www.newswire.com/news/74-of-fortune-1000-marketers-to-increase-experiential-spending-in-2025-22458227
8. ATN Event Staffing citing EventTrack 2025 + PQ Media ($128.35B global spend): https://atneventstaffing.com/experiential-event-marketing-statistics-2025/
9. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tools-get-commoditized-humans-dont-gary-vaynerchuk-agile/
10. Original book: https://www.amazon.com/Unreasonable-Hospitality-Remarkable-Difference-Difference/dp/0593418573
11. lululemon SeaWheeze official site: https://www.seawheeze.com/