Ask HN: Isn't networking usually a waste of time?
There are so many 'startup' networking events everywhere now. But shouldn't the founders be home working on their product than "connecting the dots" with mediocre startup wannabes? Has anyone found them of any use?
75 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadAlso, I prefer to meet new people through my existing network through intros and friend of friends rather than startup network events.
I'm sure we've all met that guy who might legitimately have a mental problem. You can usually tell early on because their idea is something really out-there. I'm talking on the order of "make an engine that works by blasting lightning out of the back", as just one example from my own experience.
The problem is that they tend to not know the difference between polite chit-chat and real interest, so any level of interaction above straight-up ignoring them makes you permanently their "buddy".
I'm sympathetic to their plight and I want to be polite and not cut people completely out of the conversation. They don't deserve to be treated poorly, they don't deserve to be ridiculed. But I'm also not a charity or a community outreach program for people with high-functioning autism. I'm not there to be their babysitter so everyone else at the event can get their worth out of it. I'm there for the event.
I don't know what it's like for you in SV, maybe you have better filters for these kinds of people, but out here on the east coast, there has been at least one in almost every meetup I've been to.
I really like it when the events include a brief, round-circle intro period. Some general behavioral signs that I try to avoid:
1) bodily or facial ticks, like hand contortions.
2) obvious poor hygiene, like greasy, dandruffy hair or food stains around the mouth or on the shirt, very wrinkled clothing, shirt only half tucked.
3) very bad fashion sense, i.e. dirty sneakers with khaki pants (AKA The Ugliest Pants Known to Man) and a polo shirt (AKA The Ugliest Shirt Known to Man), or cargo shorts (pulled up too high) and conference swag t-shirt at an event where everyone else is wearing dress shirts and jeans.
3) lack of direct eye contact when speaking.
4) a sense of near-panic (different than garden-variety nervousness, you get the feeling this person is going to bolt at any second if someone says something wrong) when speaking.
5) either talks far too loudly or far too quietly for the situation.
6) (as previously mentioned) a project idea that verges on fantasy.
7) Near-complete lack of useful skills, or mentions attending "code bootcamp" to "get into programming". This applies to anyone, even normal people who pass all of the previous points, just to avoid a different type of time-burglar.
I know this sounds insensitive and discriminatory, but... yeah, it's discriminatory. That's the point. I'm trying to discriminate between people who will completely waste my time and those who won't.
Indeed. What is often forgotten, is that it also has an associated cost. Sometimes that cost can turn out to be a lot higher than we expect.
The problem is that people have different incentives. Some people want to build a great product, and some people want to get VC funding and sell for tons of money. Silicon Valley has taught me that these two incentives are surprisingly not aligned.
With the low barrier to entry for tech products and the millions of VC funding being thrown around, the amount of "wantrepreneurs" has been steadily increasing, and therefore it's reasonable to be cautious about networking.
I absolutely agree with this. I do a lot of freelance content marketing/SM work and networking and meeting people is a huge part of building my business - the more people I know, the more we can connect each other with other people.
Personally I find support through my non-startup friends as well, but sometimes they will become sick of hearing about startups swings.
From a health perspective, it's also nice to get out and have some human contact once in a while. I do my best work when I'm not even at a computer.
On the other hand, networking in the course of day-to-day work can be invaluable. I call this "making friends at work". I've gotten my last several jobs through friendships that have endured past the shared work environment.
However, don't get carried away. The scene is huge and not every event is worth going to. In addition, going to events is only a compliment to the real work.
Well before the VC pitch, the real epiphanies and ideas get written on the back of a bar napkin. This has been the case for generations of engineers, just like the wearing of beards, not just wave of the startup gold-rush.
Sure, 99% people you meet will not help your startup grow - but you go out for these events for the 1% which. As a tip - it's crucial to __prepare__:
- Always check in advance who is attending - Spot people who are relevant to what you're doing - Actively take steps to meet those people and engage with them - Come with an agenda - ask yourself "what is my end goal interacting with this person".
If you just randomly come to events unprepared you usually gain much less than if you prepare just 20 minutes in advance. I'm always baffled at how many people come unprepared and have no idea who attends the events they come to and why.
General rule: the more exclusive the event, with 1-on-1 hang-out being the most exclusive and Meetup.com being least exclusive, the better.
But, yeah, otherwise, (1) be a shark (at first) and (2) don't forget that real networking is based on actual friendship / respect.
Even conveying your agenda before talks starts in a presentation helps a lot to grab attentions.
C.S. Lewis said this more eloquently in _The Inner Ring_ http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php
If you are networking at a "How to get rich" motivational seminar you are going to have much less success than if you are networking at an A16Z event. So placement matters.
I know this first hand because years and years ago I would go to the Northern Virginia Technology Counsel mixers and venture forums and MIT entrepreneurship forums around D.C. and it was generally filled with people who wanted you to sign an NDA to talk about their idea or were looking for a tech co-founder - and sometimes the rare angel would show up for dealflow.
Fast forward to last year after some chance introductions, and I started attending the Cooley capital calls and local angel mixers. These events were 10000x more productive in terms of finding partners, access to money, finding mentors etc...
Assuming you can actually squeeze your way into these groups, you still have to have a purpose - for example trying to get funding, or looking for a co-founder or lawyer or whatever. Otherwise you are wasting your and everyone else's time.
I met several mentors who have already traveled the startup path, and they guided us, and gave us their precious advice. These mentors are people who live, breathe and have experienced what you intend to do for next few years.
Their 5 minutes with you is more worth than hours with your bar buddy or highschool friend as far as startup advice/direction is concerned.
I partnered with a guy in that startup weekend who had this "idea" in his mind since few years. That guy has thought about this idea from every possible direction for months/years. But it was still childish. No where close to what VCs would love to see them pitched. No where close to what enterprise decision makers will buy. No where close to getting the user base for his B2B model.
Then the meeting with Mentors happened. Idea went from primitive to slightly more focused. Another mentor shaped the idea from selling and making money perspective. Third mentor helped prepare the pitch and perspective on what VCs/Judges would question and how to address them.
The idea went from unpolished to very fine sellable/workable idea which would make money in enterprise space if executed successfully. All that with just 15 minutes of time with each mentor.
Its important to hang out with people who are way smarter than you and in the same space where you want to excel and these events provide you with that opportunity.
As always overdoing anything is not fruitful.
* Disclosure: I've been an organizer for Startup Weekend Austin for the past few years and a mentor at those and many others.
I firmly believe that the weekend itself is just a vehicle, not the goal. I don't care of zero businesses or even ideas come out. At the end of it, you just spent 48+ hours with people who are passionate and willing to work hard to get something done.
And even if you failed, you met some people, had a few meals, and lost a weekend.. not a job or livelihood.
There's a lot to learn when talking to others who are doing something similar to you. You'll hopefully learn from their mistakes and not make the same ones yourself. Also, if you're doing it right, it's fun.
Obviously if you do nothing but go to networking events you'll never get anything done, but there's a balance.
I'm glad not to be the only one who got frustrated at OP's words. People easily notice this kind of attitude. They may not tell straight in your face, but will avoid you and keep you away from good opportunities. Hopefully it's not serial.
That is to say, if all you do is work on your thing, you're not finding customers, so you need to do something other than working. If you're in a more service-oriented field, networking is one of the easier ways of finding customers (in that, it's probably the only way that reliably works. You'll probably not find many customers just through online means, and they will probably be bad customers at that.)
I understand your frustration with these sorts of networking events, but it's not networking that is the problem, it's the type of event that you're trying to do it at that is wrong. You're not going to find customers among a group of other starving startup founders. They don't have any money and they won't be interested in using your thing anyway.
You have to get out of your comfort zone and go somewhere where there aren't any people like you. That's the entire point. If they were like you, they wouldn't hire you, they'd just do it themselves. If you were like them, they wouldn't hire you, as you wouldn't provide anything different than they already know.
So don't go to startup networking events. Go to other industry's conferences.
As a rather introverted person, it's hard for me to go to a lot of these, but going to ones where there's interesting things being discussed either in tech or business has been worthwhile. One of the big lessons I've learned is that everyone's startup is mediocre until it turns out not to be. Being polite and helping folks at these things have helped me more than assuming folks are wannabes.
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
(Edit: Originally, incorrectly thought this was from Feynman)
[0] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
But it must be corrected to the reality that Hamming was working at AT&T labs at their peak productivity times. Networking certainly is extremely important, the question is: Is networking with the people on a networking event usefull at all? Because not all people are equal.
The "tangential stuff" is the essential 20% of the business that takes 80% of the effort to implement.
The stuff "the world is" is what you see and get celebrated for - which looks like 80% but takes actually only 20% of the competence and energy to realize.
This is why those talking the most - those who make the big plans and work out the "strategies" make the most money and the fastest career - but the engineers who are doing the actual work - who make those ideas real do not get much credit.
When I network, my ROI horizon is 6 months or more. In my personal experience, if I need something right now (find an angel to give me $250K, find a developer to write my MVP), it won't work. However, people I met 6 months ago, who I found interesting (but had no particular need for at the time), turn out to be a life saver.
Don't be selfish: network for others too. If the person you are talking to is looking for something specific, and you happen to know someone who could help, offer to make the introduction (assuming both parties pass your quality threshold).
Quality of events matter: if you are a new entrepreneur and doesn't even know what vesting or 83(b) is, you need to chat to people to catch up to the average level of entrepreneurs around where you are. At some point, you will "graduate" from those events. You can tell because when that happens, you can help pretty much everyone at that event with confidence. When that happens, you need to move to higher quality/more selective events. Pro tip: if there is no such event near you, start one.
[1] http://thestartupconference.com [2] http://colunchers.com
1: Pick your networking events carefully 2: Get good at walking away from clowns 3: Learn to work the room.
I can't emphasize the comment about clowns highly enough. These are the people who give you a good chuckle when their back is turned. Sometimes all you need to say is something like, "well, I need to meet a few more people, good luck on XYZ," smile, and go to the next guy.