Ten seats · civic San Francisco

ahava haus

See the table

Ahava carved as four letters in a square

Hebrew · אהבה · a·ha·VAH

to love, to give

Four letters: alef, heh, bet, heh. The root is ahav, which means to love and means to give.

Ai, the Chinese character for love, carved in stone

Chinese · 愛 · ài

a roof over the heart

At the center sits 心, the heart, and directly above it 冖, a roof. Above that a hand reaching down, below a slow foot arriving.

The house, carved inside a figure of circles

San Francisco · the house

meaning, connection, coherence

A house in civic San Francisco where ten people at a time build meaning, connection, and coherence.

Reading the table…

The table · Friday, September 18

ten seats,
one table

TENET sits at the center and means holds. It reads the same in both directions and appears twice, crossing itself, so a word about holding runs down both axes of the square. Someone cut it into a wall at Pompeii, and people carried it as a charm for centuries after. At this table the holding passes around. Every seat gets the key.

10Open

0Taken

Come hold one for a night.

Ten points joined in a decagram around the number ten

Why ten

some things only exist when ten are present

Ten is where separate people start acting as one body. A minyan is a quorum of ten. A person can pray alone any time, and certain prayers only happen when ten are in the room, so Judaism is explicit that some things are closed to you privately. A conversation works the same way.

Dive deeper

Why a house

place is the solution

We kept having the same conversation in different rooms. Founders, funders, researchers, artists, civic people, circling one question with nowhere to keep circling it. What we were missing was a room. A regular one, with a door that closes and a host who cooks.

Why we congregate in tens

at ten the count
returns to one

The Pythagoreans drew ten as a triangle: one, then two, then three, then four. They called it the tetractys and swore oaths on it, because at ten the count completes and begins again at one. A dinner behaves the same way. Under ten it stays a hangout. Over ten, the table splits and the host begins performing. Ten is the ceiling on one conversation everyone can hear.

Ten seats force us to choose, and choosing is most of the work.

Questions we sit with

Trust and connection

What makes a room safe enough that people say the true thing?

Hover or tap a question

AdmissionA book, artwork, or poem that expanded your worldview more than anything else has.

ArrivalTea, then the elixir bar. Nothing scheduled for the first hour.

The tableThree questions: what human needs go unmet, what institutions would meet them, how we solve for meaning.

InheritanceYou go home with somebody else's book, their card still inside it.

RulesChatham House. No pitching, no phones on the table, no plus ones.

How a dinner runs

five hours,
one question

We give the evening a shape and almost no schedule. The part people write to us about afterward is the inheritance, when the book you brought leaves with somebody else.

Who is at the table

range over
seniority

We invite people building institutions, moving capital, running research, making art, and holding pieces of civic San Francisco together. We look for range over seniority, and we want somebody at the table who will disagree with everyone else.

Take a seat