On Forgettable Dinner Parties

On the scale of historic dinner parties, the Last Supper with Jesus and Rabbi Akiba’s Passover Seder in Bene Brak rank quite high. Jack Dorsey’s dinner at Zuni Cafe in San Francisco with three friends does not. But that did not stop Alyson Shontell from writing a sickeningly and effusively fawning post in Business Insider about it.

But this is not a piece about how bloggers are not journalists. It is how Ms. Shontell missed the essence of what makes a good story. The meal provides the backdrop for a good narrative, and the guest list is just the cast of characters.

Jesus probably partook in hundreds of communal meals with his Apostles. The Last Supper was uniquely epic for multiple reasons, namely the institution of the Eucharist and Jesus’s prediction of Judas’s betrayal.

The Passover Seder in question, which took place a scant century later, was important because of the all-night intense conversation and debate that transpired.

Which leads to Ms. Shontell’s reporting: She viewed a Vine created by Mr. Dorsey and annotated it in the same method Rap Genius annotates Jay-Z lyrics. If she had brought any other information to the table (besides, the fact they all ordered roast chicken), it could have been fascinating.

I’d prefer her speculate about the possibility of Pinterest, Twitter, Square, and Box planning a joint venture, and what it would look like. Anything which showed that she spent more time that simply reporting on what she saw in a Vine.

But, the truth is, if anything of substance actually had come out of such a dinner, the participants would have never shared it. No one publishes the scribbled-on napkins until after the idea is profitable. There was a must-read New York Times piece from 2007 about libraries of CEOs and their desire to keep their reading list private, so as not to let people know what influences them and what they are thinking about now.

To quote Sir Francis Bacon, “knowledge is power.” Real decisions happen in secrecy and are not broadcast on Twitter or Vine. Real businesspeople do not check in to high-level meetings on FourSquare.

In the final paragraph, Ms. Shontell asks, “Is a dinner like this hard-hitting news?” Putting aside that she did not need to include the words “hard-hitting” to state the obvious answer of “no,” it’s not even good gossip. The irony is, one didn’t have to be a business insider to learn of this; Mr. Dorsey shared the information on his own volition for all 2.3 million people who follow @jack on Twitter.

To conclude in the same style as Ms. Shontell: In his latest book “Antifragile” Nassim Nicholas Taleb opined, “[e]ntrepreneurs, particularly those in technical jobs, are not necessarily the best people to have dinner with.” It probably would have interesting to hear about the latest industry gossip, but for people who care about ideas, I’d prefer a dinner with an inner city high school teacher, a psychologist, or a porn actress any day of the week.