Ever-expanding circles of friends

"Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together." -- Woodrow Wilson My circle of friends is changing in ways I'd never imagined. Earlier this year, Rosa Say found out I was going to London and introduced me to Adrian Trenhom, another friend of hers who lives near London. Though we know her quite well, neither Adrian nor I have ever met Rosa face-to-face (she lives in Hawaii, so you can imagine we'd love to go visit her).

Anyway, Adrian and I got together at St. John's Bread and Wine this summer, and we each brought a friend. I brought along my colleague, Christopher Morgan, as I was traveling around with him that day. Adrian brought James Governor, who happens to be an industry analyst in the industry Chris and I work in. As previously reported, we got along very well, and decided it was something we wanted to repeat.

This week, I visited London again. Chris, James, Adrian, and I all decided to get together at St. John's for a bit more wine and friendly talk. This time, James added a couple more people to the session - Neil Hare-Brown and Babur Mirza, who work for an information security company in London. James assumed (rightly so) that Chris and I would have compatible business interests with Neil and Babur (we met bright and early the next morning for breakfast to discuss this - very cool).

Click on the small version of the photo here to open a Flickr page that has annotations with a few bits of trivia about each of us. And, you can find out what kind of wine we voted "best" for the night.

This meet-up is a great example of how online relationships can turn into terrific off-line relationships.

And it all started with Rosa, my favorite connector.

Related Posts

• Aloha, London Style

• Here's to new friends

Comments

[Matthew Cornell]

I liked hearing your story - thank you. I'm also getting a much greater appreciating of the power of networking. Last week was a good example: I had the pleasure of dining with Buzz Bruggeman (http://buzzmodo.typepad.com/buzznovation/). Damn I wish I had brought my camera! Thanks for the blog.