Pounding the digital pavement (Make sure to wear comfortable shoes)

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” -Unknown

A speaker at an entrepreneurship meetup I attended recently pointed out that one of the many valuable skills for a founder to have is the ability to form relationships with people who will add value to your business. He pointed out that this doesn’t always mean someone who will give you money or work with you directly, but rather someone who can give you insight or advice, or especially introduce you to other relevant people.

You can find a lot of advice about general best practices when it comes to networking, but I think my favorite tip is to always offer to help. For me, putting this advice into action was difficult because, as confident as I am about my idea, I realized that at this point in my career I still amount to a bacteria at the bottom of the fish tank of Silicon Valley. But eventually I figured out that this doesn’t mean I can’t provide value to people who are farther along in their startup career than I am.

One day while I was working in film casting in LA, I realized what separates the few great actors from the many many bad ones: the great ones can remove all shred of ego from their intention while they are on screen. The great ones are just there to be a channel for the raw emotion of the scripted story, while the shitty ones are there because they want attention, they want approval, they want to be famous. And the reason this matters is because humans are so good at perceiving intentions (whether consciously or subconsciously) that performances given by actors who are motivated by their ego ring false compared to those that aren’t.

So all that to say, when you are talking with someone about their work in a networking setting, don’t just go through the motions of acting interested like we are all conditioned to do. Mean it. Do things like offer to email them feedback on their demo video and actually do it. When you are first starting out, you likely aren’t established enough to be seen as an “expert” yet, so giving your offhand input probably won’t mean too much unless you can come up with some brilliant insight that they haven’t thought of yet. So you have to be super diligent about finding every opportunity to be useful to them in some way.

One example of this from my personal life happened a month or so ago. I was chatting with a guy at a meetup who has already had a few moderately successful ventures and was currently in the middle of launching a new mobile app. He mentioned off hand that he hadn’t found a good prototyping platform, and luckily I knew about a few from my own experience. Like I always do at the end of these conversations I asked for his card and promised to email him the names of the two sites that I mentioned. This was great because it gave me a way to reach out to him that wasn’t just me asking him for help. The good news about the tech startup world is that everything is pretty interconnected, so if you make it a point to try and know as much as you can about new products and the general goings-on in the industry, you will be far more able to make relevant points in these types of conversations. Always have an opinion about what works and doesn’t work with the latest and greatest tech things out there. There isn’t one new idea that doesn’t share DNA with something that already exists, and being able to make these kind of connections is a superb skill to have.

One last point I will make about networking is that you have to accept the fact that it’s a numbers game. I don’t have an exact breakdown on how many times people promise to “definitely email me” after we have a 10 minute conversation about our various projects and actually follow through, but it’s pretty low. So suffice to say that successful networking is also about quantity. You have to reach out to a lot of people if you want results. And it is imperative to have a system of keeping track of these connections. Log each and every person who you meet, tweet, or email. If you don’t, it will be impossible to manage your contacts. And if you don’t feel like you have a problem keeping track of the people you’ve reached out to it means you aren’t reaching out to enough people.

Here’s what my spreadsheet looks like:

I’ve found that it’s helpful to identify what your basic needs are as a startup, and categorize each contact you make based on which of these needs they can potentially help you with. For example, my two basic needs right now are finding a technical co-founder and raising money. So these two areas are the primary focus of my networking efforts. But I still make time to cultivate relationships with people who may be able to help me in other areas- such as UI/UX advice or time management.

It’s important to strike a balance between following up and being patient.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent an entire morning sending emails and then the rest of the afternoon like this.

Email antsy-ness has even changed the way I look at weekends.  To borrow more football coach wisdom, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Next time: how to (hopefully) not be a douche on Twitter

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