Hype vs. reality, before you decide.

See how the last hype wave ended before you bet on the next one.

Vienna, monthly

A monthly evening in Vienna for people who build, run and live with tech. We look at what happened after dot-com, offshoring and the metaverse, and use it on the AI decisions your company is making now.

Register for evening one

Hosted by Krisztina Orosz

You’ll be the one who runs it.

Someone upstream has a deck: a new platform, a reorg, a team swapped for a tool. From where you sit you can see what it misses. But “I have a bad feeling about this” rarely beats a confident slide. Come with a past case and sharper questions, and you’re in a different conversation.

Every tech wave sells big promises. We check what’s actually under them, so change pays off for people and the bottom line.

Dot-com

What survived the crash, and why it did.

Offshoring

Which moves came back onshore, and which ones stuck.

The metaverse

Where the budgets and the headcount went.

AI

Open cases. Forecasts are labelled as forecasts.

We’re building a ledger of companies that cut people for a new technology and later hired them back. It keeps the bets that paid off too.

Each case says what was promised, what happened, and what it cost to undo. Members add cases from their own industries. Where we’re guessing about what comes next, the page says so.

One question per evening.

We announce the question in advance. The evening opens with a guest we don’t name beforehand, who spends 20 minutes on one tech bet they lived through, whether it worked or failed. Then the room takes it apart, mostly in small groups, and you leave with something you can use at work the next morning.

Evening one, Thu 28 January 2027: “What did the last big tech wave at your company promise, and what did it actually deliver?”

Chatham House rules

Pitches stay outside

So do recruiters

Chatham House means you can use what you hear, but you don’t say who said it. That includes the guest.

What you take home

  • A hype-proof checklist for any decision that arrives with a vendor deck attached.

  • A pre-mortem: assume the rollout failed, then work out why.

  • A business case that counts the full cost of replacing people and systems.

  • A task-by-task breakdown of a role, before anyone claims a tool can do it.

  • Words for pushing back to the people above you.

A community of people who build, run and live with tech. Vienna, monthly.

Engineers, product people, ops, finance, HR: anyone who’ll still be living with a tech decision a year after the launch email. You don’t need to code. The people here will tell you how their version went, and the more you understand the tech, the harder you are to wave away.

If you sell AI tooling, this is the wrong room.

Portrait of Krisztina Orosz

Hosted by Krisztina Orosz

Leading product in B2B tech, based in Vienna. Most of her work sits between teams: how product, sales and customers hand work to each other, from launch processes to renewal forecasting. She has organised tech communities for years, and started Borrowed Hindsight so the people who will run a new system have evidence when it gets decided.

Questions people ask first

Isn’t this just hindsight bias?

Hindsight bias is believing you saw it coming. We use what happened to ask better questions before the next decision, and anything we’re forecasting is labelled that way.

Who’s speaking?

We don’t say in advance. Speakers talk more openly that way, and they can choose to be named afterwards.

Is this anti-AI?

No. The ledger keeps the successes next to the failures. We want the people who will run a new system to have a say, and evidence to back it.

Do I have to speak?

No. Listening counts.

What language is it in?

English. Questions in German are welcome.

Save me a seat.

Evening one is on Thursday 28 January 2027, 18:30 to 21:00, in Vienna. The venue is on the Luma page. It’s a small room with 25 seats, and we approve registrations so the room stays with people who build, run and live with tech.

Register on Luma

Can’t make it? Register anyway to join the waiting list, or follow the Borrowed Hindsight calendar on Luma to hear about the next evening.