The Party We Almost Threw

There was a moment where we were genuinely in contention to throw a 150,000-euro party in Berlin, which sounds like the opening of a bragging story and is actually the opening of a deflating one.

It came down to a public vote—one of those sponsored competitions where the winner gets a fully funded event and the losers learn something about the relative size of their audience. Ours turned out to be smaller than that of a cocaine-enthusiast club crew from Munich and some operation from Hesse whose entire campaign strategy appeared to be industrial-scale spam. Both had us beat on the only metric that mattered: people willing to click a button.

There’s a specific sting to losing something you never quite had. The party didn’t exist yet—it was a concept, a pitch, a vision of what a Berlin night could be if someone handed over the budget and stepped back. And yet not having it felt like something real being taken. That’s the trick of these competitions: they get you invested in a hypothetical future, then cancel it anyway.

Berlin survived without us, as Berlin tends to do.