An accidental encounter and the sponsorship that followed. Told by Hareth Shibani (EP 132).
Al-Hareth Al-Shibani and Tariq Elmeri met by accident on Lake Como. Neither had planned to be there to meet the other. Both happened to be in the area for separate reasons in the same window. The conversation that followed surfaced an overlap between Tariq's media work and Al-Hareth's training and workspace ventures inside Libya.
The accidental conversation evolved into a sponsorship. Hive Space — the workspace infrastructure Al-Hareth was building in parallel with the Libyan Development Program — became a sponsor of Damiri's Season 9. The structure of the deal is incidental to the point of the story. The point is the conditions under which the deal became possible.
Al-Hareth uses the Lake Como encounter as the working example of an argument he makes throughout the episode about relationship-building. The most consequential introductions, in his experience, are not engineered. They happen because two people, both doing work that interests strangers, are physically present in places where strangers can collide. The LinkedIn era undervalues this. The phone is not where the deals get made. The deals get made when the two people are in the same room — including, sometimes, the room being the shoreline of an Italian lake.
The story sits alongside the episode's broader argument about dakhīl — being an outsider in two countries — by suggesting that the outsider, freed from the local network's gravity, is sometimes in a better position to make the accidental encounter count.
See: Hareth Shibani