Geek Dinner With The Moo Crew
It’s exactly three weeks ago that we held this dinner, but I still wanted to dedicate a short blog post to it. Cause it was the first Geek Dinner I’ve actually partly organized. I’ve helped a bit with previous events, but never anything that required too much work (or stress) on my behalf. This time I arranged the venue and food, and on the day itself kept track of all the attendees and payments. You’d think it wouldn’t be too much work, but with over 70 guests (!) I was kept busy the entire dinner.
Photo by Craig Murphy
After our previous (regular) venue kind of screwed us over, we were forced to find a new location. Now finding a Geek Dinner venue isn’t as easy as it may seem, cause we need quite a lot of flexibility. For starters, we don’t want to pay for the venue, so it has to have free room hire. Then the food can’t be too expensive. Plus, we never are really sure until the day itself (and even then it remains a rough estimate) of the number of people that are coming. Which for a lot of venues is a problem, cause they want to order the food at least a week beforehand. Besides that we really need a separate room, not some balcony or back part of a pub, cause otherwise nobody can hear the speaker. So yeah, pretty specific. (Btw, if anyone knows any other good venues in central London, please let me know. Any suggestions are always appreciated.)
Photo by Craig Murphy
Purely by accident, I stumbled on the Thai Smile restaurant, situated above a pub, close to Holborn. And they did exactly what we wanted. They were even fine with me phoning the numbers through a couple of hours before it started. The food was about 8 pounds per person and almost everybody thought it was delicious (I at least didn’t get any complaints). We’re definitely going to go back there, cause they did exactly everything we needed.
The Moo crew talk was great; they hadn’t prepared a real presentation, they just explained the origins of their company and then accepted questions from all the guests. There were some cool little moments, like Moo was first called ‘PleasureCards’ and, while talking about the Moo.com url: ‘The cows were annoyed’. Ciaran’s got a short video of part of it up on Qik (quality isn’t that super, but it’s better than nothing). Cristiano also made a timelapse of the entire evening:
GeekDinner with Moo Timelapse from Cristiano Betta on Vimeo.
It was a great event and I’m glad it went so well. I was pretty much busy the whole time, but I guess that’s the price you pay for volunteering for these type of events. If we don’t organize it, who will? That being said though, do contact me if you want to help out; the more people that get involved, the more events we can organize!
One last question: what would you think of a GeekDinner hosted Chocolate Party (your “entrance fee” is a box of chocolates)?
