In November 2025, venture capital firm Slow Ventures hosted an “Etiquette Finishing School” at the Four Seasons in San Francisco. Three hours of curriculum covered the perfect handshake, public speaking, office style, a fashion show with models demonstrating appropriate business attire for different occasions, and a closing lesson on high end dining. Hundreds of founders applied. Fifty were accepted. The Wall Street Journal covered it. The story went everywhere and for absolutely good reasons.
A second class followed in New York City March 2026. Their modern etiquette handbook sold 700 copies in its first month. This is a cultural change worth paying attention to, and not for the reasons most people think.
The argument behind being more likable
The premise behind the Slow Ventures initiative is pointed: tech is no longer the scrappy underdog, and the anti-etiquette aesthetic that once signaled disruptive brilliance has become a tired cliche. Founders who show up with intentional respect and confidence now have a distinct competitive advantage in a world where everyone else tends to be over relaxed about the way they dress. And that may no longer work, as being liked can mean being trusted.
Sam Lessin, Slow Ventures general partner, framed it directly: “tech is no longer playful and cute. It is taking people’s jobs and changing environments.” Everyone is threatened by it, which means founders need to show up as respectful rather than intentionally disrespectful.
This is a good observation. It is also, for those of us who have operated across international markets for the past two decades, not new at all.
What global markets already knew
Anyone who has negotiated in the Gulf, cultivated institutional relationships in Europe, or worked with sovereign wealth funds understands something that Silicon Valley is just beginning to learn: the quality of your presence in a room is not separate from your credibility as an operator. It is part of it.
The countries and institutions writing the largest checks have always evaluated the person across the table before they evaluate the proposal on it. Whether it is a minister of finance in Riyadh, a family office principal in Milan, or a pension fund trustee in London, the assessment of whether to trust someone begins well before the first slide appears on screen. The quality of the handshake. Whether you arrived having done the reading. Whether you can hold a conversation that does not begin and end with your own product. Whether you know something about French or Italian wines.
American tech culture spent a decade treating this as nice to have but not essential. The rest of the world never did.
The cost of hiding behind a screen
There is a broader problem underneath the etiquette question, and it is one that a three-hour finishing school will not fix. A generation of professionals now defaults to Slack messages instead of phone calls, Zoom links instead of lunch, and email threads instead of the kind of conversation that actually builds trust. The tools are useful. The habit is expensive.
Social competence is a perishable skill. It looses strength when it is not practiced. And the irony is that the same founders enrolling in etiquette school have spent the better part of a decade building products designed to reduce the friction of human interaction, which also reduces its depth. You cannot learn to read a room from a Brady Bunch grid of muted faces. You cannot AI tone, energy, or genuine interest through a chat thread.
The most consequential meetings in business still happen in person. The relationships that move capital, open markets, and survive market downturns are built face to face. That has not changed because the calendar moved to Calendly.
Why European, and specifically Italian, business culture got there first
Italy is a useful case study because the codes are so explicit and so old. The concept of bella figura, the idea that how you present yourself in public is a form of civic and professional responsibility, is not a social affectation. It is a functional operating principle that runs through everything from how a meeting is opened to how a disagreement is expressed.
Italian professionals do not separate behavior from competence. They treat the ability to read a room, to pace a conversation, to show up having considered the other person’s position in advance, as core professional skills rather than soft ones. This is not charm for its own sake. It is trust infrastructure. And trust, in international markets, is the asset that everything else is built on.
This is the insight behind what practitioners of Italian business culture call the Italian Advantage: that the social codes embedded in how Italians conduct business, from the structure of a negotiation to the ritual of a shared meal, are not decorative. They are functional. They encode centuries of experience in how to build durable relationships across cultural and institutional lines.
The finishing school curriculum, handshakes, attire, social fluency, is teaching founders the surface layer of what older business cultures have embedded at a deeper level. Learning the rules is a start. Understanding the culture that produced them is a different undertaking.
The market implication
For anyone operating at the intersection of finance, technology, and global markets, the shift Slow Ventures is responding to has a direct business consequence. Capital is increasingly concentrated in institutions and geographies that place significant weight on relational trust. The Gulf, Europe, and much of Asia operate on long-cycle relationship models where a single breach of protocol, a rushed meeting, a missed social signal, can close a door that takes years to reopen.
The tech sector’s belated interest in etiquette is not just a cultural curiosity. It is a signal that founders and executives are beginning to recognize the cost of operating as though the rules that apply everywhere else do not apply to them.
They always did. The market just took a while to start investing in it. As it turns out, being genuinely present and genuinely likable is what makes both people and companies more competitive. No app has figured out how to automate that yet.
