The day after Thanksgiving, I got an invitation from General Catalyst to join a small dinner for leaders working in enterprise and infrastructure software in New York.
I said yes.
The email itself was short. A partner from the firm would be in town the following Thursday, they were gathering a group at eight, and the location had not been settled yet. My answer, sent from my phone, was that I would be happy to join.
It is easy to dismiss a dinner as something adjacent to the real work. In 2013, the real work for me was very tangible: storage queues, data centers, hiring, monitoring, capacity, and getting Shutterstock’s systems ready for the next phase of growth. But the community around that work mattered too.
Infrastructure leaders tend to carry problems that are hard to discuss in public detail. The useful conversations happen when people can compare patterns without turning the room into a vendor pitch or exposing something they should keep private. How are you organizing the team? What are you buying and what are you building? Which failure changed your mind? Where is the market going before the products catch up?
Those conversations sharpen judgment. They also create a network that can help with a hire, a product introduction, a technical reference, or simply the reassurance that another team has fought the same weird battle.
By this point I was starting to have more opportunities to tell the Shutterstock infrastructure story outside the company. Earlier that month I had spoken about OpenStack in Hong Kong. A New York dinner was smaller and less visible, but it was part of the same shift. The work inside the data center was connecting me to a broader group of builders, investors, and operators.
I did not know where every introduction would lead, and I was not attending with a transactional checklist. I was curious. The company was growing quickly, the enterprise infrastructure market was changing, and there were smart people nearby who cared about the same systems.
That was enough. I put the dinner on the calendar and went back to the work.