And here we are. Off to a new LOBBYLetter with you guys, its 6:31am. Switching between the writing of this letter and the Christmas presents I didn’t do yet.
BUT, as a present for you. I just wrapped the biggest mistake I made: going all-in on my own industry.
At some point, without really noticing it, I went full hospitality.
From the same conversations, same references, same panels and same words.
Surrounded by smartest people. Talented people. People doing things right.
And that’s exactly when something started to fade. That slightly naive way of asking stupid questions that sometimes lead to better answers.
When you spend 100% of your time with people who do the same job as you, your ideas slowly start to sound… correct. Polished. Accepted. Predictable.
You don’t challenge the rules anymore. You optimise inside them. And optimisation is definitely the enemy of originality.
At the beginning, what made LOBBY different was that I didn’t come only from hospitality. I was borrowing from music, design, surf culture, art, car culture, publishing. I was looking sideways and not straight ahead.
The problem is that industries are echo chambers with a rewarding consensus and they punish friction.
Stay too long inside one, and you start building for peers instead of building for people.
The dangerous thing is that it feels productive.
Meetings. Awards. Recognition. Invitations.
But your ideas stop surprising you first. And that’s the real red flag.
The places that move us, rarely come from people who followed the industry playbook perfectly. They come from hybrids. From cultural cross-pollination. From someone who brings a foreign logic into a closed system.
That’s why I now actively protect distance.
I read outside my field, spend time with people who don’t understand what I do and
I get inspired by ecosystems that have nothing to do with hospitality on paper.
Not to escape the industry. But to come back with something it didn’t see coming.
If you’re launching a project:
don’t become one of the industry too fast.
Keep a foot outside and keep your taste polluted by other worlds.
Stay slightly illegitimate.
That’s where the oxygen is.
And that’s where the good ideas still hide.
We’re going deeper with:
The real danger: when our references become our competitors
Industries are schools. We should never enroll full-time.
The moment our ideas stop being risky, they stop being valuable
Why outsiders build better experiences?
And by the way, we updated our website & portfolio