This is very far from dying off. A friend of mine recently started a company, and close to 100% of the money they raised was a direct result of squeezing into golf games, ski trips, and retreats with prospective investors. My salesperson friends regularly score very large deals over games of golf or similar activities.

You'd think that the merits of your product would be enough to carry your sales, but in practice, sales is primarily driven by your network, which involves getting close to as many people as possible. Turns out, it's easier to do that over golf than via formal meetings.

"golf" is just a euphemism that sometimes literally means golf, but other times means any type of social activity that can be used to build relationships. What did you hope was dying off? There will always be a need for people who have and can form strong relationships with rich people who are looking for new investments.

So are country clubs, and social clubs that organize fundraising galas and such. Joining them to make useful business contacts very probably works pretty well (I've not tried, but I've done some looking—note that the social clubs are usually exclusively for women—yes, even in 2021—but men attend the events). Tennis is still huge. Skiing. That stuff changes slowly, if at all—you and I just aren't part of it, so we can imagine it's some old-fashioned thing that's all but extinct, if we don't go looking for it.

Most of the shit from the now-ancient Official Preppy Handbook is still basically true, in fact, as far as I can tell.

The tech version of "where to meet people to make connections" is probably rock climbing gyms, right now. That'd be for barely-rich new money people connected to tech, or for programmers if you're looking to hire. Every group has their in-crowd preferences.

I think it is still important to Angels. Angels want to invest in people/teams that are "like" them. They are more likely to trust other country club types that they assume have the same background and social circles they do. A lot of Angels don't care about the money or the return, it is about having stuff to talk about over drinks or between holes on the course. "I'm in a couple of blockchain start-ups that are really promising". It is about being interesting and in the know. Viability is meaningless.

If you're in enterprise software, yes.

Try selling your CRM to the VP of Sales of a regional retailer who lives in Phoenix and NOT take him out to play golf.

You can meet people at improv club, hockey or mountain biking instead, but you still have to meet people somehow, right?

Golf was big and is now bigger. Drawing in many younger folks, too.

Some people still think the biggest deals are happening on the golf course, I think most deals over the past 18 months likely happened via zoom.