More than 5,000 people gathered in Las Vegas for AVANCE Global this week. Across three days, they moved through 200+ sessions, heard from 350+ speakers, and explored nine tracks spanning capital, entrepreneurship, sports, media, real estate, leadership, and culture.
Those numbers tell us the scale of the gathering. But decades of research can tell us something more interesting: what happens when that many people actually come together.
Proximity Changes What Becomes Possible
There is a reason a room full of people can accomplish something a directory of the same people cannot.
Researchers Sen Chai and Richard Freeman studied scientific conferences as examples of what they call “temporary colocation,” bringing people from different organizations into physical proximity for a limited period. Their research found that conference attendance changed subsequent collaboration patterns, including among participants who had never previously worked together.
The mechanism is deceptively simple: proximity reduces the friction required for knowledge to move between people.
At AVANCE, that proximity happened at unusual scale. Ninety-seven exhibitors, eighteen corporate sponsors, eleven strategic partners, and thousands of attendees occupied the same ecosystem for three days. The value isn’t confined to scheduled meetings. It also lives in the introduction after a panel, the conversation over dinner, or the person someone meets because they happened to stand nearby.
Strangers Can Expand Our Opportunity Networks
Sociologist Mark Granovetter introduced the “strength of weak ties” more than fifty years ago: people outside our closest circles can connect us to information and opportunities our immediate networks don’t possess.
In 2022, researchers put that idea through an enormous causal test. Experiments involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users, two billion new connections, and 600,000 job transitions found that relatively weak social ties can increase job mobility, with moderately weak connections proving particularly useful.
That reframes what networking at a gathering like AVANCE can mean.
The person with the greatest effect on someone’s career may not be the longtime colleague they came to see. It could be the founder from another industry, an executive two seats away, or someone introduced through a mutual acquaintance.
A new connection is valuable precisely because it can lead somewhere the existing network does not.
Gathering Can Strengthen the Community Itself
There is another effect that has little to do with exchanging business cards.
Social psychologists have studied what happens when large groups gather around a shared identity. Research on collective events has found that perceiving a shared identity can increase feelings of connection, recognition, and closeness among people who may otherwise be strangers.
A 2024 experimental study found that sharing an emotionally intense experience can strengthen social bonding even when participants’ emotional responses aren’t perfectly synchronized.
That matters in the context of AVANCE. Putting Latino founders, investors, executives, creators, athletes, and leaders in one place doesn’t only expand individual networks. It makes the network visible to itself.
For three days, success isn’t encountered as an isolated story. It becomes a room full of examples, across industries and generations.
Research on role models offers a related clue. Field experiments in education have shown that even brief exposure to relatable role models can alter perceptions of what careers feel attainable and, in some cases, subsequent choices. The settings are different, but the underlying psychological idea is useful: who we see succeeding can influence what we imagine as possible.
The Bottom Line
AVANCE can count what happened in Las Vegas: 5,000+ attendees, 350+ speakers, 200+ sessions, and nine tracks.
Science helps explain what those numbers can set in motion.
Proximity creates collaboration. New connections expand access to information and opportunity. Shared experiences strengthen social bonds. Visible examples of success can expand perceptions of possibility.
The conference may have lasted three days.
The network it brought together doesn’t have to.
