Hustle Events Transform

A story about how Sam Parr evolved his event format to be more inclusive and successful.

"We used to do this thing called 'Pizza and Forties' where I would interview someone and they would drink a 40-ounce beer. When the 40-ounce beer was done, the talk was done. But women were saying 'there's all dudes here,' so we created a wine version called 'Cheese and Wine' that had way better engagement.

We saw there was clearly an opportunity, so we created '2X' (named after XX chromosomes - I stole it from Reddit). We'd get 15 or 10 women from tech and business, not that many were well known, and they'd each have 10 minutes to tell a story. We charged $25 per ticket, but made tens of thousands from sponsors.

We could pull this off almost weekly in different cities. We had one employee running it with contractors. We wouldn't supply much - maybe free wine. The business model was simple: tickets paid for the event costs, and sponsors were pure profit. It worked particularly well because it served an underserved community and had a B2B component.

The whole thing was far easier than people thought. We just used Splash, which is basically Eventbrite. Nothing special, but it worked. I always knew I could fall back on this to make a living because it was so much easier than people thought."