Redeem now - What started as a pandemic-era park meetup has turned into a sprawling events empire.
- Despite throwing events attended by thousands, Andrew Yeung has never made a cent off his parties.
- His parties have struck a chord with young techies who are dying for human connection.
The sun is setting on a crowd that, even by the standards of a Brooklyn roof party, would be considered eclectic. Guests include an Argentine filmmaker who's heavy into Jewish mysticism, a ghost writer for C-suite executives, a supermodel college dropout turned AI technologist, a political consultant who arranges visas for tech CEOs, a blockchain entrepreneur with a novelty soap business, a Belarusian expat responsible for Minsk's first tech incubator, the founder of a dating app just for oral sex, and an upstart art dealer who claims an enviable collection of Basquiats.
They've all gathered at the personal invitation of a 27-year-old Google product lead named Andrew Yeung. Of course Yeung is nowhere to be found in the crush of thirsty young professionals besieging the bar or among the piles of libidinous revelers getting handsy in the pool cabanas.
He's not being offered mushroom chocolates by a baby-faced UX designer or getting pitched on a sex-free sex party happening in Gowanus next month. He's definitely not in the corner with the art stars smoking out the CMO of a global branding agency who, by the looks of it, hasn't been stoned in decades. All of which happened to me that night.
He's above it all, literally. Leaning over the railing of a water tower looking down over the thousand or so partygoers he's assembled with an expression that could be described as content but not necessarily happy. "I prefer to watch from up here," he said. "I don't like being the center of attention."
Despite that, attention seems to be all Yeung is getting these days. He is the unassuming impresario who's turned his nights-and-weekends hobby of hosting tech meetups into a sprawling events empire, and become a minor Twitter celebrity in the process. He says he was recently "recognized" in an Equinox locker room. "It's very strange to meet someone wearing nothing but a towel," he said.
'A different vibe'
Over the past three years, Yeung, who lives in New York, has thrown nearly 200 events, attended by more than 15,000 people. Events range fom the monthly rooftop mixer in Brooklyn, to the more intimate, invite-only Junto Club (named after a secret society founded by Benjamin Franklin), to a SXSW garden party in Austin, a Beyond Basel party in Miami, a tech social in LA, and an motley assortment of bar crawls, club nights, fireside chats, boat outings, spin classes, and scavenger hunts.
Sometimes he convinces the venue to let him use it for free, other times he'll rustle up a few hundred bucks from a sponsor to cover the cost. Sometimes he'll get alcohol donated, other times it's a cash bar. Sometimes there's fire dancers, other times a man in a dancing banana suit.
But despite throwing events attended by thousands, Yeung has never made a cent off his parties. He's never taken a finder's fee for the countless introductions he's made, or charged for his newsletter which reaches more than 20,000 subscribers.
One of the main reasons Yeung doesn't make money off this side hustle is because he can't. The terms of his visa stipulate that he can only derive income from his day job at Google. And the decided lack of a go-to-market strategy may be part of what makes his parties feel so special. People getting together simply for the purpose of having fun does feel strangely radical for the tech industry; an oasis of authenticity in a desert of phoniness.
"You don't understand until you go, there was just a different vibe," said Cliff Lerner, a former Bumble board member who's currently building a social connections app. "The best way to say it is nobody was an asshole," he said.
"It showed me that this can be something that you go to and it's not just cold shaking hands and exchanging business cards," said Melissa Glazar, a growth marketing specialist. "It can be something that feels authentic and purposeful and fun."
"You go to a ton of these events and it's very transactional," said Lior Cole, a Cornell dropout who's working on an AI powered fashion app. "Everyone wants something from you. But at his events, I've actually come out with people who ended up being friends that I'm going to have for the rest of my life."
Of course the events are inevitably transactional on some level. After all, Cole says that the lion's share of her cap table is made up of people she met at Yeung's parties, Glazar found her current job at a party, and Lerner uses the events as testing grounds for his app's new features.
But there is something undeniable about Yeung's parties. I've been to six of them now, and each time I seem to know more and more people there. The crowd full of familiar faces that I'm actually excited to see. It starts to feel not unlike a community, a word that gets thrown around a lot in Silicon Valley, though rarely meaningfully.
Yeung is acutely aware of the risk of losing whatever it is that makes his parties feel special. At one event last October at a nightclub in San Francisco, an attendee pulled out his laptop on the dance floor and was attempting to onboard people onto his new app. Yeung was livid, according to people who were there.
"You're either closing that or leaving, that is not the vibe here," he is reported to have said.
The modern day Great Gatsby
Despite the attention, Yeung himself remains an enigmatic figure. He tends to slip out around 9:30 pm, just as the party's ramping up and before anyone knows he's gone. One attendee I spoke with called him a modern day Great Gatsby. Another said he was the Keyser Soze of tech because "everyone has heard of him but not many have met him." Though of course, Yeung, being born in 1995, didn't get that reference. I've heard theories that he's a mysterious billionaire angel investor, the scion of a powerful family with close ties to the CCP, or even an AI chat bot who doesn't really exist at all.
Yeung was born in Hong Kong, the only son of Monica and Sunny Yeung. Monica was a full time mom who doted on Andrew, Sunny was an executive at the Levi's corporation for more than 30 years.
The family moved often and Yeung, despite being a natural extrovert, struggled to make friends. Being of an obsessive nature, he poured more than 5,000 hours into Runescape, an online fantasy multiplayer game where he could build a virtual community, one that wouldn't need to be dismantled each time he was uprooted.
Sunny impressed upon his son from an early age the importance of material success, constantly admonishing him to "build something for yourself, always think bigger."
And there was nothing bigger in his father's mind than a tech job in the United States. Andrew, despite being a mediocre student at The University of Toronto, was nothing if not single minded. He sent out thousands of messages on Linkedin, did 180 virtual coffee chats, and completed 42 interviews before getting a job at Facebook, which allowed him to move to New York. His father asked him why it wasn't Google.
He did eventually make the jump to Google, when Facebook decided not to sponsor his green card. This was the height of the pandemic and Andrew was slowly going crazy in a 300-foot studio apartment. The extrovert in him was still searching for the community he'd never had.
So he decided to apply his single-mindedness to the task of making friends. He messaged hundreds of people on Reddit and Fishbowl and Hinge. And in September 2020, he posted that he was hosting a meetup in Central Park. About fifty people showed up. It was the first Andrew Yeung party. The parties have moved out the park and into the rooftop bar, but in a way they retain some of the energy of that first spontaneous park hang.
'An individual of extraordinary ability'
Despite the bacchanalia present at his events, Andrew doesn't drink. As recently as four months ago, he said he was having about 25 drinks a week. Tequila shots were a customary greeting for him. Now he never touches the stuff.
"I think a lot about, like, personal branding," he said, "a headline that sounds cool is this guy, he's thrown hundreds of parties and he loves the nightlife scene, but he doesn't drink alcohol. I just feel like that has a ring to it."
Andrew's cultivation of brand isn't just about vanity. It's also about the requirements of the O-1 visa, which would allow him to make money off his parties. He's in the middle of a years-long process of convincing the Department of Homeland Security that he qualifies as an "individual of extraordinary ability." It's part of the reason he spoke to me.
"Press doesn't hurt," he tells me with a smile.
Until then, he remains officially a working stiff. He's never had a formal conversation with his employer about his extracurricular activities, though he did once run into his manager at a party. While Google may have a claim on his time between the hours of 9 and 5, every other waking moment, he says, is spent planning parties. For years his identity was defined by the company he worked for. When someone asked him, 'what do you do', he'd say 'I work at Google'. "Now I just tell them, 'I connect people'," he said.
A few weeks ago Andrew was invited by the dean of The University of Toronto to host an event at his alma mater. His parents, who live in Canada now, showed up to the party. Andrew says his dad, who had always told him to build something for himself, was happy to see what his son had built.
"Just in the last 12 months, is the first time he's said he's proud of me," Andrew said. "He believes in me, he tells me, 'do whatever you want, quit your job, whatever you build is going to be amazing.'"
His parents stayed at the party in Toronto for about 20 minutes. His father shook the Dean's hand and his mother chatted with a few VCs. When they asked her how long she'd known Andrew, she just replied: 'a long time'.
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