Guild Nights
Six interesting people, one topic, at your house, catered — the highest-ROI network you can build
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
A recurring, topic-themed dinner Levesque hosts at his home for five to six accomplished people in a single domain — one guild for consumer product, one for SEO, one for growth leaders. The mechanism is simple and, he argues, criminally underused: interesting people doing interesting things actually want to spend time with each other, but almost nobody does the small amount of organising work required to make it happen.
Origin
Started by Luc Levesque in Ottawa with a group of local founders. The name comes from 'be-guild-ers' — builders — and stuck as 'Guild night'.
Core principles
- 01Interesting people want to be in a room with other interesting people — the demand exists, the supply of hosts doesn't.
- 02A shared topic is what turns a dinner party into a guild.
- 03The home, not the restaurant, is what makes it work.
- 04Remote work has made this scarcer and therefore more valuable than ever.
- 05The business value (recruiting, back channels, industry intel) is real, but it's a byproduct — the point is a richer life.
How to run it
- 1
Define the guild by topic, not by people you like
Pick a domain — consumer product, SEO, growth leadership, AI — and build the guest list around it. The common topic is what everyone rallies around and what makes the evening worth their time. Run several guilds in parallel, one per domain.
Pro tip Sometimes set the topic in advance and recruit specifically for it — e.g. 'we want to talk about AI', then find three or four people who wrote core AI code.
- 2
Cap it at six to eight
Five or six is the target; six to eight is the workable range; eight is the maximum. Levesque has tried ten and found it too many — the single conversation breaks apart.
Watch out Ten is too much.
- 3
Host at home, and cater it
Do it at your house, not at a restaurant — something about being in someone's home changes the quality of the conversation. Have the food catered or simply DoorDashed in so you're never worried about cooking and can stay in the conversation.
Pro tip Levesque doesn't cook at all; ordering food removes the only real barrier to hosting.
- 4
Run six to nine or ten, and keep it recurring
Start around six and go until nine or ten. Make it a standing rhythm — Levesque describes it as the bright spot in his month — and use your reflection time to keep asking who else is worth breaking bread with and what new guild to spin up.
Watch out It is a bit of work to organise. That work is the entire moat — which is why so few people do it.
In the wild
Living in the Bay Area, Levesque can decide a guild should discuss AI, then assemble three or four people who likely wrote some of the core code at Google or in AI. They say yes, because people want to get together and have these conversations.
→ Levesque describes learning a huge amount, and the guilds becoming a major asset for recruiting and for having back channels across many industries — while remaining, primarily, one of his favourite things in life.
Common mistakes
Hosting at a restaurant
You can do it at a restaurant, but the home setting is what makes five or six people open up into a real conversation about a mutually interesting topic.
Inviting too many people
At ten, the shared conversation fragments and the guild stops being a guild. Six is the sweet spot.
Waiting for someone else to organise it
Levesque is repeatedly surprised more people don't do this. Everyone wants to be invited; almost nobody does the organising, which is precisely why the host captures so much of the value.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators and founders who want a durable, high-signal network and are willing to do the small amount of hosting work nobody else will.
Not ideal for
People without a home suited to hosting, or those who need a purely transactional networking channel rather than a slow-compounding one.
From the transcript
“it's like the bright spot in my month that I call them guilds uh so the word beguilders Builders and that's how it originally started…”
“I'll basically have interesting people come usually five or six and we'll sit around talking about specific topics so I do one for consumer product…”
“I do think it's important that it's done at your house”
“yeah so I think the most I've done is 10 that's a bit too much um six seems to be perfect six to eight uh…”
From the episode
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft
Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor)