The first time someone sees you at an event, you are a stranger, but by the third time in the same season, you are becoming a fixture. Austin’s fall calendar makes this compounding effect easy to see, since the same circles show up across ACL in early October, F1 later that month, and Austin Tech Week right behind it. Larry’s karma idea, that it can be tracked, measured, and channeled, is really a description of what familiarity does over a few weeks in the same city.
A thank-you note sent after the first event is what makes the second run-in feel like a continuation instead of a cold re-introduction. Larry credits a single thank-you note with landing Nike as a sponsor, a small action producing a large, compounding result over time. Reciprocating fast matters more than reciprocating big, since returning a favor within the same week does more for the relationship than a bigger favor returned months later.
This is Franchise thinking applied to yourself, since you are not a new pitch at every event but the same proven format showing up again, slightly improved each time. By the second event, you can skip the introduction entirely and go straight to the actual conversation, since the trust groundwork is already laid.
By the third event, people start introducing you to other people, which is the actual payoff of familiarity: you stop generating your own leads and start receiving theirs. This only works if you show up consistently across the season rather than picking one big event and disappearing until next year.
Forgiving small friction matters too, since if someone forgets your name at the second event, the right move is to correct it warmly and move on. Three events in one Austin season is not luck: it is three chances to compound the same relationship instead of starting over three times.
Details: Watch Larry on karma and follow-up
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