Pete and I met several years back - I'd been doing a bit of consulting for the Green Party of Aotearoa NZ and Pete was working for them at Parliamentary Services.
They were looking towards a system for managing their contact systems. Nandor had got a toehold for open source representation in Wellington.
Someone (probably Mark) had asked me for input on the options on the table, and realising that no-one was batting for a web-based, open source CRM option, I went to the AGM that year in Nelson to show what you could do with CiviCRM.
(Until that point, I hadn't heard of CiviCRM, but it seemed like a better philosophical fit for the org than the options they were considering - all very windows, not very open in either the web delivered or open source aspects.)
I demoed CiviCRM, and then skipped the rest of the AGM (introvert!).
Saira and I went over to stay near Farewell Spit, far away from the meetings and technology and stuff. When we came back the party had decided that CiviCRM was a good option and could they have one please. And that was how I ended up doing a lot of work with CiviCRM over the five years since.