Krubner and Fabrik NYC Make Communication Count: How to Talk to People

Communication is quietly becoming the fault line in modern companies. Product cycles are faster, capital is tighter, expectations are sharper, yet the moments that decide outcomes still hinge on something far less engineered. A pitch that misses by an inch. A hire that looked right on paper and wrong in practice. A strategy that sounds sharp in a doc but collapses in conversation. The gap is no longer about access to tools or information. It is about whether people actually understand each other when it matters.

On April 16 in Tribeca, that tension gets dragged into the light. “How to talk to people: friends, strangers, customers, investors, employees, or the general public” is not dressed up as a summit or diluted into a networking night. It is a tight, seven-voice session at Fabrik NYC, 12–16 Vestry St, where communication is treated less like etiquette and more like infrastructure. Hosted by Lawrence Krubner in partnership with Fabrik NYC, the format is simple and unforgiving: seven minutes per speaker, then questions that do not let you hide behind theory.

The room pulls a specific kind of operator. Founders actively hiring and pitching. People leaders designing systems that have to hold under pressure. Investors watching for signals that a team can actually function. Operators who know that being right is useless if no one understands you. This is not a passive audience. It is a room full of people who are mid-decision, comparing notes in real time, measuring what works against what sounds good.

Farzad Khosravi steps in with hiring science that challenges the instincts most teams still trust. Kira Halevy reframes storytelling as a tool that moves behavior, not just attention. Keesha Jean-Baptiste names the quiet contradiction between what companies say they value and what they fund. Lindsay Glogower gets into the mechanics of HR systems that grow without calcifying. Izzy Becker brings the body into the conversation, where presence, posture, and perception decide outcomes before words finish their job. Tijana Buric pushes on organizational design, framing Human Design as a possible operating system for what comes next. Alexandra Zendrian rounds it out, with details still under wraps, which says just enough about how this lineup thinks about timing.

Lawrence Krubner is not curating for spectacle. With roots as co-founder and former CTO of Starchive.io and years spent building in Cognitive AI, the throughline is clear. This is about understanding people with the same seriousness we apply to code. The addition of Si Señor Mezcal, alongside wine and beer, is not decoration. It is lubrication for the conversations that happen after the ideas land, when strangers become useful.

What sits underneath all of this is a quiet shift. In a market obsessed with leverage, the highest return is starting to look suspiciously analog. The teams that win are not just faster or smarter. They are clearer. They know how to say the thing in a way that changes what the other person does next. That is not soft. That is control. And rooms like this are where you can feel who actually has it.