#david baltaxe

When we first started talking about Pannl many months ago, both halves of my brain activated to the potential.  First, as typical for me in entrepreneur mode, I recognized the aspects that resonated with me, personally.  Beyond simply being social, I love the energy that comes of meeting and talking with interesting people about interesting things.  It’s a “constructive high” – not simply exuberance from being stimulated intellectually, but energized by new understandings that I can leverage.

I’ll give you an example:  The other day, I participated in a meeting with the leaders of a new association called the Advanced Energy Economy.  While their pitch was interesting, what was compelling was the conversation that emerged as the group of Clean Tech entrepreneurs and business leaders around the table served up, knocked down, stretched out, chewed on, and passed around issues and ideas.  When we got up, everyone of us – whether we agreed with each other’s positions or not – were energized and had ideas for what else we could do.  Man, if you could only bottle this feeling. 

I’m not saying that Pannl has the magic formula for bottled euphoria – and certainly I’ve been in enough boring conversations to know that just pouring ostensibly smart people into a room isn’t a recipe for a great hour – but I do believe that the shared energy of interested people is a foundation we can build on.  And what we’ve seen and heard over the first two dozen or so pannls that have taken place around Los Angeles, and in our subsequent surveys with participants (and their posts on this blog and elsewhere), is confirmation that people see the value for themselves.

But that’s when the quant side of my brain got noisy:  Great, you’ve got qualitative reinforcement, but are people – you know, strangers, beyond your group of friends, peers, and echoing cohorts – really interested in moving offline, or has Google, Facebook, and the myriad other user-friendly faces of the Internet made the need to talk in-person superfluous, inefficient even? 

So I did what any quant guy would do:  I asked about 900 people what they thought.  Seventy percent of respondents to my survey (fielded online, last month, North Americans, aged 18 and up) agreed or strongly agreed that conversations with small groups are richer when they occur in-person than online.  That number goes up to 72 percent when talking about conversations with individuals.  (There are significant differences among different age brackets, but not as much as you’d expect.)  Taken with the mounting statistics about increasing perceptions of loneliness and societal disconnect, the numbers provide a compelling backdrop to Pannl as a network for real-world conversations.