When Ankit Shah graduated from college and moved to the Bay Area in 2013, he didn’t know a single person there. Hungry for connections, he asked his Facebook friends to ask their Bay Area-based friends if they’d like to have tea with him, a stranger.

“I was very nervous that people would be like ‘who’s this weirdo on the internet?’” Mr. Shah said. “But sure enough, my friends started tagging their friends in the comments — some even shared it on their own page — and eventually, there were more people interested in getting tea than I could keep up with.”

Mr. Shah recalled the first group that joined him for tea: “Six dudes, a mixture of the hyper-intellectual and goofy, artistic types.” But rather than covering standard small talk questions, their conversation went deep right away, eventually unpacking “what it means to be embarrassed.”

Five years and 1,000 “teatimes” later, Mr. Shah, now 27, has turned that personal project into an international movement called Tea With Strangers. It now has hosts in 15 cities to do exactly what Mr. Shah did: invite five strangers to chat for about two hours over tea.