Meet the Neighbor: 35 People, One Room in Ashdod, and Zero Agenda
Hub Ashdod
About 35 executives, founders, investors and public figures from completely different industries sat in one room in Ashdod, and nobody came to sell anything. This is what happened.
When I started looking for people like me, I discovered that some of them live a few streets away. And there was no chance we would have met.
On Tuesday, October 20, about 35 people who would never have met on LinkedIn sat together at Hub Ashdod. An innovation manager from the defense industry. A former economic attaché from Geneva. Fund partners. AI leads from fintech and infrastructure companies. Researchers, scientists, founders, independent consultants and public-sector professionals. Some are from Ashdod, and some came from far away, from Tel Aviv and the Sharon region.
The advantage of a diverse room
Most networking events are built around a single industry. Cyber people with cyber people, fintech with fintech. Everyone knows the same people and talks about the same problems.
Here it is the opposite. A doctor who founded a medtech company sits next to a marketing lead from the cyber world. A municipal official talks with an investor. A representative of the Ministry of Economy meets a robotics founder. The problem one person has been stuck on for a year is sometimes something the other solves every day, just in a different industry.
The most interesting connections are not inside your own box. They are exactly where two worlds that were not supposed to meet, meet. Yaron Flint calls this the hidden overlaps, and that is the advantage of this room.
What happened in the room
Udi Volkov opened with an overview of influence campaigns in the age of AI, and of how political persuasion becomes ammunition.
Roi Levana took us behind the algorithms of LLMs, and into the question of what the models say about us, right before the elections. I left with a frustrating feeling about the situation, and with the understanding that there are people working to change it.
Why no agenda
Nobody came to sell. At a time when everyone is looking for a fractional project, an investor or their next role, a room where nobody asks for anything is the one that creates opportunities.
Yaron, who sat with us in the room, distinguishes between miners and harvesters. Miners come to dig out immediate value from every connection. Harvesters plant without expecting anything in return, and they are the ones who find in the end.
Before the meetup I sent several dozen personal introductions between participants, so that everyone would walk into the room already knowing someone. Some of those conversations continued after 21:00.
What's next
The "Meet the Neighbor" forum meets roughly once a month in Ashdod, in partnership with the Kivunim Young Adults Center and Ashdod.tech. Thanks to Etti and Yogev from Kivunim for hosting us, and to everyone who came.
A small task for the week: think of one person from an industry completely different from yours, whom you met recently and asked nothing of. Send them something today that will help them.
And if you want to be in the room next time, join the community here.