They're quite cleverly leveraging the invites to give them exponential growth, so it has exploded this month - it looks like everyone is being given 2 invitations. I'm London based and signed up for the waitlist in maybe September last year and then forgot about it - someone I know bumped me up at the weekend (which doesn't cost an invitation). Within 2 days of my joining I'd say about 10 other people in my contacts have joined too. I'd say it's less big names and more FOMO.

Interestingly the person who bumped me up appears to have had an outsized effect on which rooms I see.

TBH I don't know, it seems to be mostly tech and tech policy people, but the hype with people mentioning it on LinkedIn et a. has gotten to the point where mainstream media is covering it.

One thing I've noticed: If one of my contacts signs up for the waitlist, I can give them access w/o using up one of my two invites, so it might be that they just relaxed the exclusiveness on that front to push it.

It started from berling tech scene with the recent success of german entrepreneurs in US.