A networking weekend costs real money, dinners, drinks, sometimes a ticket to the event itself, and pretending otherwise leads to a bounced budget by Sunday. Larry Chiang’s house money idea, the 70/20/10 split pulled from The Richest Man in Babylon, is really a budgeting rule wearing a networking hat. The version for a big weekend is simple: know your number before you leave the house, and treat it as spent the moment you commit to the weekend, not as a running tab you check on Monday.
Because you’re not negotiating from a place of needing this exact weekend to work, you can walk away from a bad conversation without it costing you anything but time. A dinner at a place like Fogo de Chao is a line item, not a gamble, when it’s already inside a budget you set on purpose. Larry’s force a monetary response thinking applies to the spend itself: it should be a small, deliberate outlay designed to lead somewhere, not just a good time charged to hope.
Trivial arbitrage is his proof of concept for this, buy something for fourteen dollars, sell it for sixteen, and see that the mechanism works before you scale it up. The same logic applies to a weekend budget, spend on the coffee or the dinner that’s likely to open a specific door, skip the round of drinks that’s just socializing for its own sake.
October in Austin makes this concrete, with ACL, the F1 weekend, and Austin Tech Week all landing within about a month of each other in 2026. Three networking-heavy events that close together can wreck a budget that wasn’t planned in advance, or fund three months of relationships if it was.
Set the number, spend it on purpose, and track what it produced afterward the same way you’d track any other investment. A networking weekend without a budget isn’t generous, it’s just undisciplined.
Details: Watch Larry on house money
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