The problem.
The conference economy — Davos, TED, Forbes summits, Global Shaper hubs — produces excellent rosters and bad relationships. You meet thirty interesting people in a hotel lobby across four days and forget twenty-eight of them by month’s end. Anyone who has been to two of these events knows it. Nobody has organized the contradiction away because the conference is the product.
What WeMeshUp is.
The product is the room, not the lobby. Eighty people, vetted across the recognized rosters — Forbes 30 Under 30, TEDx, Global Shapers, Davos attendees — co-located for three to seven days in a venue designed for slow conversation. A castle, a coliving house parked outside a tentpole event, a weekend retreat. No keynote stage. No content programming the host can't justify. Cohort dinners that run past midnight.
How it’s curated.
I personally invite or co-invite every member. The filter is two-axis — recognized roster intersection (which credentials, which years) and trust signal (who else from the cohort vouches). Once in, members can bring one annual plus-one without re-vetting. The result is a graph that compounds: someone you respected at Davos turns up at the Forbes house in Lisbon two months later because they were brought by someone you both trust.
What I’ve shipped.
- Eight consecutive years of unofficial Forbes Under 30 Summit coliving houses across Africa and Europe.
- The flagship Zamek Czocha retreat in Lower Silesia, Poland — October 2026, currently half-booked.
- Tech direction of the House of Collaboration at Davos 2026: 200+ attendee reception, 60-person closing dinner.
- An archive of seventy-plus Nefiresc events at smaller scale — the experimental layer where the WeMeshUp format was prototyped.
Selected event roster
What I learned.
The size matters more than people think. Below sixty, the room never reaches escape velocity; above ninety, it fragments into cliques you can’t reassemble. Eighty is the sweet spot in our format — small enough that every dinner reshuffles, large enough that every plus-one is interesting.
The second lesson: do not program the schedule. Curate the room, set three meals, and stay out of the way. The first three retreats I over-programmed; the fourth I cut content to half and conversation quality doubled.
How to get in.
Invitation-only. The fastest path is a vouch from an existing member; the second-fastest is a short note to florin@badita.org explaining which credential and which year. We say no a lot — that’s the entire point.