She spent five years as the first operations director for CultureCon, helping scale the event from 500 people to more than 5,000 alongside founder Imani Ellis. She's since expanded her world into media with While Entertaining and Soirée School, and will publish her debut guidebook, Your Turn to Host, with Artisan in June 2026.
Her framing is simple: hosting isn't a soft skill, it's a growth strategy. In a masterclass for The WIE Suite, Amber laid out the principles and the tactics behind turning a dinner, a walk, or a happy hour into the foundation of a career.
Amber names what most professionals overlook: connection built through digital noise — cold DMs, LinkedIn requests, conference badge scans, rarely produces trust. Connection built around a shared table does. Hosting, she argues, lets people meet each other as humans first, which is precisely what makes the business conversation that follows more honest and more durable.
The application is broader than most people assume. A dinner party for prospective clients. A happy hour for fellow founders navigating the same stage of growth. A recurring walking club with a business partner, where the relationship deepens step by step instead of pitch by pitch. None of it requires a large budget or a big guest list. It requires intention.
At the center of Amber's framework are three words that govern every gathering she builds.
Taste is a point of view. It's the personal preferences, stories, and curated details that turn an event from generic to memorable. It's the thing that makes a room feel like you rather than a template. Taste is what people remember and what they tell other people about.
Trust is built through repetition, not a single great night. It comes from showing up consistently, sharing values openly, and giving value before ever asking for something in return. Reciprocity, in Amber's world, isn't a transaction, it's a rhythm.
Time is the principle most people underestimate. The right timing, she noted, is often more important than the pitch itself. Relationships built over months and years create space for opportunities to surface naturally, on their own schedule, without being forced.
For anyone intimidated by the idea of hosting, Amber's advice is to start small and low-stakes. A dinner for four at a restaurant that reflects your taste. A themed potluck, organized around a specific category so guests know exactly what to bring and the night has natural structure. A coffee meeting. A walk.
Guest lists matter more than most people think. Amber suggests inviting friends to bring a plus-one, a small move that widens the room, introduces new dynamics, and keeps conversation from flattening into the same five people talking to each other every time.
Amber has also lived on the other end of the spectrum. As operations director for CultureCon, she worked alongside founder Imani Ellis to build the systems behind the event's growth from 500 attendees to more than 5,000, growth built directly on the strength of professional relationships rather than paid acquisition. Her lesson from that experience: as an event grows, the format changes, but the "north star" i.e. the personal brand and point of view behind it, cannot. The gathering can get bigger. The taste that made it feel intentional in the first place has to stay exactly the same.
She's equally clear-eyed about where social media fits into this. It's a secondary tool, not the strategy. Its useful for visibility, but not where the real relationship work happens. That work still lives in high-touch channels: LinkedIn messages, email, a follow-up text after a good conversation.
Behind the gatherings is an operating system most people don't see. Amber tracks her network in detailed spreadsheets including contact information, business category, personal interests, and critically, the date of last contact, so that outreach is never only happening when she needs something. As the business has grown, she's built out her team in sequence, starting with a social media intern and adding event producers and assistants as the work demanded it.
For Amber, the gathering itself is only half the work. What happens after is where the relationship actually deepens. A book or a movie recommendation mentioned in passing at dinner, sent the next day. An invitation to be someone's plus-one at an industry event. A one-on-one coffee suggested off the back of a conversation that clearly wasn't finished.
The instinct, she says, is to look back at what was actually discussed at the gathering and find the natural "part two". That’s the follow-up that proves you were listening, not just networking.
Amber's larger point is one that reframes how ambitious people think about relationship-building altogether: the pitch is not the moment that matters most. The table is. Taste draws people in, trust keeps them close, and time is what turns a good night into a career-defining relationship.
