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Timon Afinsky

@afinsky

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7744

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Business partner of @natasupernova
co-founder of @create_what_you_wish_existed
Investor 30+ companies @flohealthapp @higgsfield.ai @hmnd.ai

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“What’s the one thing you hope we can predict in your lifetime that we can’t yet?”

That was the question I asked @igortulchinsky founder of WorldQuant - at The Immortal Game chess night last night.

The Immortal Game is part of Create What You Wish Existed: private gatherings of exceptional minds, using chess as a catalyst for meaningful conversations, friendships, and opportunities.

We created it with @natasupernova and @merenzon because the best ideas, relationships, and opportunities are born through genuine human connection - and chess remains one of the most effortless ways to bring extraordinary people together.

Last night was probably the best one yet. A room of only 64 exceptional individuals. £30B+ in founder net worth. £200B+ in enterprise value created. One of the most powerful chess gatherings ever assembled.

—

A special thank you to our Title Sponsor, Dale Wood. And to my chess rival and co-host, Igor Tulchinsky.

A huge thank you to you, our dear friends, partners and co-hosts:

Naomi Campbell - global icon, entrepreneur, philanthropist

Matthew Freud - communications genius and founder of Freuds Group

David Unger - Hollywood agent and industry leader

Michael Acton Smith - founder of Calm, creator of Moshi Monsters

Lestat McCree - founder of Healf

Jospem - highest-rated player in Latin American history

Malcolm Pein - CEO of the English Chess Federation, founder of Chess in Schools and Communities

Elmira Mirzoeva - UK Women’s Blitz Champion

Isik Kececi Asur - global investor and business leader

Faisal Al Nassar - President and CEO of Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Group

Michelle Kennedy - founder of Peanut

Pippa Lamb - Sweet Capital

Leah McCourt - double IMMAF World & European Champion, BJJ World Champion

Jonas Åkerlund — musician, filmmaker, director

Till next time.

@create_what_you_wish_existed by @afinsky

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4 months ago

Good evening, everyone and welcome to another special edition of Create What You Wish Existed. 
Our guest tonight is Nick Jones. Nick - welcome!
 There’s an easy way to introduce Nick, the founder of Soho House Group.  
A members’ club born from a space whose door was too narrow to serve as a restaurant. Thirty years later, it has grown into one of the most recognisable hospitality brands in the world.
 You can read that anywhere.
 The more interesting version goes like this:

A seven-year-old sent away to boarding school - and then spent fifty years thinking about what makes people feel at home.

or
 A dyslexic teenager who left school at seventeen, for a business of servingothers that people looked down on.

or
 A man who built his life around belonging - while never quite sounding convinced he belonged himself.

or
 A man who keeps starting again. Most people build one thing and spend their lives protecting it. Nick builds something, lets it go, and begins again.
 So tonight isn’t really about clubs, or hotels, or membership.
 It’s about TASTE. INSTINCT. BELONGING. REINVENTION. 
About why some rooms feel alive - and others don’t.

One quick note before we begin -
 we don’t allow filming of the conversation itself. These evenings work because people are free to be candid, experimental, and occasionally wrong.

We’d like to keep it that way. 
And now - Nick, welcome to @create_what_you_wish_existed by @afinsky

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4 months ago

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“After forty, every man is responsible for his face.”

* Abraham Lincoln by @afinsky

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4 months ago

This was my 9th Burning Man, and Burning Man’s 40th, which felt like the right year to learn helpless happiness, happiness that finds you whether you’re ready or not.

We’re not building just a city in the desert. Inside it, each year we build the whole world.

And I keep thinking this might be one of the last Burns where radical self-reliance still means what we think it means. Once robots can drive the RV, cook the food, and read your mood before you do, self-reliance stops being about survival and becomes a choice again, what do you build once you no longer have to. The machines can take the labor. We keep to ourselves the meaning, the dust and love. No one can send AI to feel that for you.

This year I ran with three camps. @maxacamp gave me the family, the magic Deer, the fashion show that shouldn’t work and always does. @bipolarexpress.artcar turned half my portfolio into one of the best light and sound trips on playa. And at @jailofhedone , our job was stopping strangers to invent a crime, your boots are too dusty, you’re too beautiful to be free, and sentencing them on the spot for a joyful punshment. I learn that today everyone’s guilty of something and dying to confess it.

40 years in, I think I was standing in the last version of a world we still built entirely by hand, for each other, on purpose. Grateful for every heart and hand that helped build it. by @afinsky

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a month ago

Who wants to ride this unreal sandworm with me? ☄️ by @afinsky

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2 months ago

Would you ride this sandworm at Burning Man? #vertex by @afinsky

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2 months ago

Our May edition of @create_what_you_wish_existed was truly exceptional. At @the_arts_club, I sat with Sri Prem Baba, who has guided seekers, founders, and leaders across the world for more than three decades.

In a room buzzing with unicorn founders, I asked:

- We are building with AI faster than ever, but human clarity does not seem to keep up. What happens when outer growth outpaces inner evolution?

@sriprembaba answer stayed with us long after the conversation moved on.

Sri Prem Baba:

“We are living through one of the most important moments in human history, a revolution of consciousness. Across geopolitics, the economy, and every area of life, the common denominator is spiritual. It is a lack of understanding of who we are and what we are here to do. We are approaching a kind of singularity, where Human Intelligence meets Artificial Intelligence. Our greatest challenge is to develop a third dimension, - Spiritual Intelligence - so that we can handle this power. Because the real question is: WHO within us will use IT?

We have never had so much knowledge at our fingertips, yet we have never been more anxious, more depressed, or more lost. Without self-knowledge and practices like meditation, humanity will struggle to navigate this transition”.

@create_what_you_wish_existed is not an event. It is a private room where attention turns into action and conversations become outcomes. taken in Arts Club, Mayfair by @afinsky

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5 months ago

FACES @fashiontrustarabia

@afinsky
@locals_org
@create_what_you_wish_existed
@mntostudio
@anastasiabeverlyhills

#FTAxAnastasiaBeverlyHills #FTAPrize2025
#AnastasiaBeverlyHills #FashionTrustArabia
#FTAPrizePartners by @afinsky

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10 months ago

When brilliant minds gather in private, the real game begins. Every move matters.

We created Immortal Game Chess Night because we felt something was missing at the very top. The world’s leading visionaries, founders and investors have endless conferences and formal dinners, but very few private spaces where they can connect intelligently, compete seriously and drop their egos.

I co founded The Immortal Game with my friend and business partner Natalia Vodianova and Ilya Merenzon, Founder and CEO of World Chess, organiser of the world’s most important chess events.

Between us, we have spent decades building bridges across business, culture and philanthropy at the highest level, sharing the same belief in curated, high trust rooms.

This February, we hosted Immortal Game Chess Club in collaboration with Harry’s Bar, one of the most discreet private members clubs in the world.

We welcomed 64 guests.
Three Grandmasters.
Two Oscar winners.
Around $10B in founder net worth.
Over $50B in assets under management.
More than $175B in enterprise value represented in the room.

The evening was co hosted by:
• Michael Adams, “The Spider,” former World Championship finalist and England’s leading Grandmaster for more than three decades.
• Artem Sokolov, Founder and CEO of TheHumanoid.ai.

The night featured Hand and Brain matches, a live replay of the 1851 Immortal Game, rapid exhibitions and open challenges.

Harry’s Bar created a bespoke culinary experience with 18 tailored dishes and five custom cocktails designed exclusively for Immortal Game.

Thank you to the founders of the exceptional companies curated for our guests through the evening’s Goodie Bags: Healf, Decree, Niance, WholyMe, Skin Cycles, Kaicao and Vyrao.

What matters for us most is what happens when hierarchy disappears. When the board is no longer corporate, but 64 squares, judgement outranks title.

In a time shaped by AI and automation, we believe in building rooms that sharpen the human edge.

That is why we built The Immortal Game. ♟️

When is the next one?
@create_what_you_wish_existed by @afinsky

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8 months ago

May the 2026 year ahead be shaped by meaningful connections.

By conversations that go beyond the surface.

By meeting in real life, with people who see you and remind you why you began.

@create_what_you_wish_existed by @afinsky

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10 months ago

When I met @olegtinkov in 2007, I was 25. He was 39.

He had just started Tinkoff Credit Systems and walked into the room as if he owned it. Power, money, energy, even sex appeal. He carried all the leverage.

Oleg was already a proven, serial entrepreneur, not a first-time founder. He had built and sold Daria Frozen Foods to Roman Abramovich. He had created Tinkoff Beer, the brewery business, and Tinkoff Restaurants. By then, he was a symbol of success. Everyone knew his name. I felt admiration. And if I am honest, I felt envy too.

There is something unsettling about cocky, nonconformist founders like that. Outliers who do not ask permission. Deep down, many of us want to see who they become when success is stripped away. When sickness arrives. When loss comes. When they are truly tested.

What I did not know that day was that the worst had already happened to him.

Oleg spoke about it publicly for the first time years later, when I sat with him at a Create What You Wish Existed fireside chat powered by Locals.org in Paris last week.

At 20, Oleg returned from military service in Russia’s Far East. As a third-generation miner, his future seemed fixed: work in the mines, drink beer, watch football.

Two months later, he and his girlfriend were riding a bus when a Kamaz truck hit it head-on. She was slightly shorter than him. She took the impact and died instantly.

Oleg survived. Eight teeth gone. A scar on his face that would stay with him for life. That day, he learned something about fate and fear.

He could not remain in his hometown. Every street carried her shadow. He met a stranger who said he was going to Leningrad to apply for university. Oleg went with him. After that, fear loosened its grip.

When you almost die that young, failure loses its voice. You stop waiting. You stop believing there will be a better time later. You may become a fatalist. But more importantly, you start acting...

>>>> continue in comments taken in Arc De Triomphe Champs Elysses by @afinsky

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10 months ago

I’ve been obsessed with chess since I was 6 years old. Last night, I fulfilled a childhood dream - to pay tribute to the romantic era of chess, where bold risks, dazzling sacrifices, and imagination made the game immortal.

We live in a time when ideas rise and vanish faster than ever. Most are forgotten. A few endure. And the rarest - born of courage and sacrifice - change the world and make their creators immortal.

That’s the spirit we celebrated as we launched The IMMORTAL GAME Chess Club at George, Mayfair, London - a gathering of brilliant minds from chess, business, and culture, united by strategy, creativity, and play.

The name The IMMORTAL GAME comes from one of history’s most iconic matches: Adolf Anderssen’s legendary victory over Lionel Kieseritzky in London, 1851. Anderssen sacrificed both rooks, a bishop, and his queen to deliver checkmate with only minor pieces. To this day The Immortal Game remains the most romantic game ever played - proof that beauty and daring can triumph over calculation.

The IMMORTAL GAME chess club that will also be known as 1851, is a tribute to XIX century age of romanticism celebrated creativity over cold logic - a spirit we’re bringing back today.

In an era dominated by AI and automation, we believe in the uniquely human gifts of intuition, imagination, and the art of risk-taking - not only on the chessboard, but in entrepreneurship and in life.

Immortal Game is an invite-only club gathering for those who share a passion for strategy, culture, and creativity.

I’m proud to share that over $47B worth of tech founders and entrepreneurs joined us for our very first evening last night.

The Immortal Game Chess Club was created in partnership with my friend @merenzon , founder of @theworldchess , the official partner of the World Chess Championship with FIDE. Deep gratitude as well to George for their hospitality.

Last night, we raised a glass - to risk, to sacrifice, to success. To The Immortal Game! taken in George Mayfair by @afinsky

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a year ago