Darren Herman is starting a cool series of 8 person wine table salons to discuss various tech-geek subjects (these salons are appropriately named darrenSalon). I attended the first one last Tuesday, and the topic of conversation was Apple. It was a fruitful discussion. (I should be shot for that pun).

Seriously though, it was great. Darren’s post about the event provides good coverage of what we talked about and the key points, so rather than being an echo to his summary, I’ll just focus on the experience of participating.

I really appreciated a networking event that allowed the participants to have a real, substantial conversation. Too often, I go to networking events in New York at a bar where everyone sprays everyone else with business cards, and sometimes you get a quick couple minutes on people’s projects, but you never have a really meaningful in-depth conversation. darrenSalon’s are a great reaction/solution to that problem.

I’ll be curious to see how darrenSalon’s scale while keeping the attendee numbers low (8 felt just right). One solution is to do events more frequently, but I’m sure Darren would get tired quickly. Perhaps it won’t scale… perhaps that’s not the point, but I get the impression that Darren would like to see it grow, so I think it will be fun to watch from that perspective.

I think anyone can join (though I’m not certain), so if you like what you’re reading, sign up here.

Also, Darren did a summary podcast if you’re interested in hearing more details.