6 ms·

I don’t have any connections

117 points by awwstn 13y ago

joshfraser 13y ago
Some of my best personal & business relationships started with a cold email and a random coffee meeting.
- nate 13y ago
  One thing I'll probably cover in the future is one of the things that have made these cold emails and random meetings successful is simply being clear about what I want. I've made the mistake many times of simply saying "I'd love to chat for 15 minutes". Even "I'd love to get your feedback" isn't enough usually. Specific questions like "I'd love to hear how you'd design this" or "What would you do next here to get more traffic" or "Would you try this with a collaborator and see if it makes your life easier" generates better hits and more useful conversations.
ArekDymalski 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that for many people even such cold email can be intimidating. On rational level they know it's the necessary thing to do, but the fear of rejection drags them toward "I'm not ready yet. I'll mail them a week later when I build/write/learn more".
- nate 13y ago
  I hear you. And you are definitely right. It can be intimidating. Those cold calls, I still can't get the nerves out when I've done those. But emails, you don't actually have to feel any rejection :) I have never gotten someone to reply negatively to an email I've sent them. The worst ever, and it's rare, is someone simply saying "Thanks, but no." Of course there's lots of ignores. But even ignores, I've followed up on and gotten replies like "Thank you so much for reminding me about this! I meant to reply but got busy when I received your note."
- qwerta 13y ago
  For self-founded entrepreneur procrastination is the worst enemy.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  Read Improv Wisdom. Take an improv class. Practice makes perfect.
- mnavada 13y ago
  I agree, or you lose hope in the process. You're not going to get a reply the first time or even the 100th time, but if you believe that it works and keep modifying your approach in the email, it can work. I've tried sending cold emails and I got a reply after the 12th time. I try to tailor the email to each person. It's more time consuming and I can't send them as often as I want, but I find this more effective.
beat 13y ago
Making contact with people isn't the hard part, I don't think. Motivating them to help you is the hard part.
- nate 13y ago
  Thanks a ton for the comment on this and reading the article! But see, I don't think motivating someone to help you is really that hard. As I mentioned in there, there are so many places where there's oodles of people who'd love to help. Want to ask Alexis Ohanian something? Pay attention to when he hosts another AMA on Reddit. Or use Clarity or Public Beta. Or really just email them. I answer a ton of questions I get over email. There are a couple reasons though sometimes I don't reply to an email "looking for help": 1. The email is thousands of words long. I don't have time to read that. Very few people do. Keep these intros and notes and questions to 5 sentences or 500 characters, or try your hardest to get close. 2. Ask something. I get too many emails looking for help, but when you read the email, there's isn't actually a question inside. What do you need help with? Be specific. "Feedback" is way too open. You want Feedback on design, or features or marketing or what? It's best to focus me on something so I can save time figuring out how I can actually help you. And if you really want to use some extra encouragement to get people to help you, flattery gets you everywhere. Mention what you've been reading of theirs. Quote their stuff on Twitter.
  - beat 13y ago
    Yep. People generally want to help, but they're also mindful of their bandwidth (especially the successful, busy people who can offer the best help). So ask for help, but don't waste their time.
  - bigtunacan 13y ago
    Totally in agreement. I've emailed business owners relevant questions to projects I'm working on and 8 times out of 10 they reply back. I keep it short, to the point, and thank them up front for their time. Also, I see too many people that say something like, "No one wants to help me." Everyone WANTS help; to get help you need to give some. Start networking like crazy, find out what someone else needs and provide that. It takes time and dedication, but you will be reciprocated.
osetinsky 13y ago
I think a lot of the problem when it comes to making new connections is unwarranted shyness. If you know the other party is open to new messages/meeting requests from strangers (which they sometimes are!), it becomes less intimidating to reach out. Online dating sites like OkCupid have dealt with this problem really well by creating a community of people open to receiving messages of a particular kind from strangers. It's totally appropriate to ask a stranger out on OkCupid. It isn't so appropriate on Facebook. I'd really appreciate people checking out my first web application, called Treatings (treatings.co). It's a community of professionals open to meeting strangers over coffee to discuss their work. No one is guaranteeing meetings with anyone, but everyone is open to meeting requests and the possibility of being treated to coffee/a drink by a stranger interested in their background. treatings.co/activity
deleted 13y ago
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onepost51515 13y ago
Heh. A rant, if I may: I lived in a small town in northern Canada until I was 17. I had had an interest in programming since I was 11, but the job most relevant to "computers" you could get up there was repairing them at BestBuy. My parents weren't particularly rich, and didn't encourage me to strive for high academics or anything of the sort; in fact, the only thing they really wanted me to do was to get a driver's license, so I could have a fallback job as a truck driver. I hadn't a single role-model for the "white-collar dream" I found myself pulled into from playing with Linux and reading Slashdot. I just knew I couldn't manage it living where I did. At 17, I finished high-school and, with virtually no separation, moved to a more reasonably-large city (Vancouver) and began taking courses at a community college. I believed, at the time, that taking my first two years at a "cheaper" school would be good for my future student-loan-debt load, and optimized for this instead of, say, networking opportunities. The community college was full of unmotivated students just trying to squeak by, teachers who knew less about CS than I had learned from the Internet, and in the end, I didn't feel motivated enough† to make the grades to manage a transfer into the CS program of the "state" university (UBC.) My student loans cut off, and I dropped out. I started attempting to do software-dev contracting. (It's very hard to get full-time employment as a developer without a Bachelor's, whether or not you're an autodidact with 8+ years' experience in some technologies.) I moved from one gig to another, never really finding that fabled "word of mouth" that would let me lever one contracting job into another. I always worked alone, and remotely; I was never hired onto a team. I looked on eLance a lot. I still haven't made, in all this time (I'm 23 now), a single "programmer friend" who would qualify as a connection, nor met a programmer in person from whom I've learned a single fact, rule, or concept I wasn't already familiar with, or been introduced to any neat new technology. This isn't bragging about my talents--rather, just painting a picture of the bottom-of-the-barrel places I've been hanging out. I'm sure I would feel out-of-my-depth (in the best way) sitting in any arbitrary coffee shop in Silicon Valley‡, or in any even-somewhat-modern startup here or elsewhere. If you want to talk about lacking connections, first imagine the closest thing to a "programmer" in your Facebook friends list being your friend from high-school who does accounting at an oil-and-gas firm. Imagine everyone in your family saying that the one time you got paid $50k was "a fluke and won't happen again; you should just work at a gas station like your mom and your aunt do" (leaving alone the fact that you don't have enough customer-service experience to be considered for that job in a competitive market.) Imagine having no major portfolio pieces you can show off, despite years of coding, because you've alternated between struggling to survive on a total dry-up of income with no savings (no time for side-projects), and doing programming jobs for capricious clients who take your backend system and give up on the idea before hiring a front-end guy, relegating your efforts to only be examinable through API calls and doodles of wireframes. (And while you're at it, imagine having a few friends in the US, who have perfectly good job opportunities available for you with their companies, but who can't help you out until you go back and finish school--which you can't, at least yet, afford to do.) But there is that app I made two years ago that I still have in closed beta, the browser-based-collaboration-environment one with an active community even when I don't check in on it for weeks at a time. No time to remodel it into something good enough to launch to the public... but it lets me call myself a startup founder nevertheless. I'm just in stealth-mode, that's it. Heh. --- † Having undiagnosed ADHD may have had something to do with that as well. I imagine, having detected and compensated for that flaw, I would be quite better at slogging through that remedial-feeling workload if I had to do the same now. ‡ I'd love to move there, actually... if I had American citizenship. Or an undergraduate degree to legally qualify me for an H1B or TN work visa. Blocked on all fronts, there.
aleprok 13y ago
I know connections between people can be quite awesome and important. It is even more awesome if they can discuss about something important and give their opinion and listen to your opinion without starting a fight. When there is a problem it is good to have someone to ask help from. I maybe have one true friend and we mutually keep our friendship active. Then there are those who may drink coffee or have a beer with me now and then, but we never really talk about anything important. Then there are those so called social media friends who really do not care what you do. Then there are these few people who use my kindness quite often for help as they have found I will most likely help them anyway I can. Seriously I have tried to keep in contact with people who may some day become great people. The problem I have is that I lose motivation to stay in one way contact when the other does not seem to care a shit how my days go even though I try all kinds of things to get them active even though I am not in need of any kind of help at the moment, but in future I might be. It's not like I want to be liked, but maybe a call to a bar and have fun once would be nice. Why it always has to be me who initiates almost every damn discussion or happening where I could take part in this tiny circle of my so called friends. These days I don't even care to try and just let them be and answer them if they have a problem. When talking about these connections with famous people you could take advantage of I often do not even press the send button because I've realized my own stupidity after explaining my problem in the email. I'm not looking for help. I'm just stating that lonely people can solve problems and have fun too, though if someone would see me having fun alone they probably would say I'm going nuts. Good Friday from Finland.
- BSousa 13y ago
  So, how was your day?
  - aleprok 13y ago
    Thanks for asking. It was fine after driving few girls from bar to their homes and getting back home to sleep until 10 am and then I went and did chemistry exam at university. After that I played little GTA 5 and then I went and took ~10 kilometer bike ride in this cold Finnish autumn. While on the bike ride I took a break at a student restaurant in the town and drank few coffee cups alone. Once I got back home from the bike ride I have just been lazing off and been thinking what to do the whole next week as autumn holidays from university started today. So how was your day?
mindcrime 13y ago
Cold emailing / cold calling definitely works. But it's a Good Idea to do your homework first. Here's a little tip I learned some time ago, and have been working on implementing lately: Say you want to sell something to Foobar, Incorporated. But you have no warm contacts there. OK, you can go to Hoovers.com, or use LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc. and get names, contact info, etc. BUT... and here's the "tip" part... on LinkedIn you can also find people who used to work for Foobar, Inc. and contact them first. Why? Because there is a good chance they'll offer to talk to you (people like to be helpful and it makes them feel important) and they have little to lose (they don't work there anymore), but yet they can still give you TONS of valuable inside information (depending on how long they've been gone) to help you establish credibility when you do call. Example: The info on LinkedIn, Hoovers, etc. can be outdated. So let's say you have a list of 15 names of people at Foobar, Inc. Some of those people probably aren't there anymore, or have changed titles, etc. When you talk to an ex employee, you can run through the list with them and find out what's going on. You also get a chance to ask things like: "Who is the real power broker over there?" or "Are there any big landmines I should know to avoid walking into"? or "What are the main strategic issues management is grappling with there"? etc. Of course, not all ex employees will want to talk to you, but for any reasonably sized company, you should be able to find a few. And, you do have to be aware that they, in turn, have their biases and misconceptions, etc., and so you can't take everything they say as Gospel truth. But go through the exercise with a couple of people and you should be able to get pretty clear picture. Now when you call somebody at Foobar, you can start off sounding very credible: "I know companies like yours often deal with issue X, and may have tried solutions like Z that didn't work... I'd like to talk to you about another way of solving that problem..." Where you learned about "X" and "Z" from those "ex employee talks".
inthesea 13y ago
I'm not sure if I'm alone here but I just lack social skills. It's like everyone but me has this secret book of how to interact with people. I'm not autistic or anything but I had little social life when growing up. I was actually rather popular at the Internet but that didn't translate well to real life. I'm now trying to catch up in my early twenties. I meet interesting people every day but connecting with them non-superficially is the hardest part. I am too shy to talk about anything and I have low self-esteem. I literally start to mumble when telling a story if I don't know the person well. So far rationalizing about it hasn't helped. It's a wonder I managed to get a few friends.
- akjetma 13y ago
  If somebody said to me what you just posted, I would want to talk to them. I feel the same way. It's often jokingly pointed out that two introverts will never engage each other. I think that in addition to being funny, it's also true.
- jason_tko 13y ago
  This is something I see pretty often. I'm a business co-founder, so this stuff is pretty much my bread and butter. An idea I've been kicking around is some kind of "Social Skills Primer" type product, probably done by video for ease of explanation and to capture/explain nuance. I haven't fully decided on doing this yet, but would that be interesting to you, do you think? As a side note, I would highly recommend reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.
nraynaud 13y ago
I'm still a bit wary of this kind of advice, because it's mostly pushing against the technological meritocracy. The loudest in the room gets the light, the most outspoken is raised as an example. All this effort is still not spent building the right product. I live in France, where the tradition is that money, marketing and sales people run the company. The only successful startups here now are selling advertisement, optimizing advertisement (or whatever retargeting is), dealing personal data and other user-bothering technology. Nobody is optimizing mousetraps or producing media content anymore. But hey, they worked their connections while you where making smoke in the lab.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  And knowing people or coming from money is the technological meritocracy?
  - pgeorgi 13y ago
    No, "technological meritocracy" is just bait for geeks to work long hours on low money and stock options. What this article proposes is to counter connections and money with being the loudest - realistic, yes, but depressing.
- beat 13y ago
  Creating a startup isn't primarily technical. It's about business stuff - marketing, hiring, customer support, all sorts of soft skill things. All the clever code in the world won't make a startup succeed without the other stuff. So really, "technical meritocracy" isn't what makes for successful startups. I think the concentration of technical founders in these parts gives us an unbalanced view.
- babebridou 13y ago
  You forgot another company runner in France, and a very important one: the procurement people. These guys make it incredibly difficult to build new businesses. In their mind contracting a company with less than a hundred people is heresy.
mnavada 13y ago
We recently secured a small investment from an angel investor without prior connections. Having graduated from an Ivy League 12 years ago, I realized that more than school affiliation, it was our team, product, vision, and perseverance that made a difference. I used to regret not networking more in school, but quickly realized that in the startup world, you have to be a problem solver. No time for regrets or to crib about the present. Thanks for this article. I'm going to distribute this to my team.

117 points by awwstn 13y ago

joshfraser 13y ago

Some of my best personal & business relationships started with a cold email and a random coffee meeting.

nate 13y ago
One thing I'll probably cover in the future is one of the things that have made these cold emails and random meetings successful is simply being clear about what I want. I've made the mistake many times of simply saying "I'd love to chat for 15 minutes". Even "I'd love to get your feedback" isn't enough usually. Specific questions like "I'd love to hear how you'd design this" or "What would you do next here to get more traffic" or "Would you try this with a collaborator and see if it makes your life easier" generates better hits and more useful conversations.

ArekDymalski 13y ago

I'm pretty sure that for many people even such cold email can be intimidating. On rational level they know it's the necessary thing to do, but the fear of rejection drags them toward "I'm not ready yet. I'll mail them a week later when I build/write/learn more".

nate 13y ago
I hear you. And you are definitely right. It can be intimidating. Those cold calls, I still can't get the nerves out when I've done those. But emails, you don't actually have to feel any rejection :) I have never gotten someone to reply negatively to an email I've sent them. The worst ever, and it's rare, is someone simply saying "Thanks, but no." Of course there's lots of ignores. But even ignores, I've followed up on and gotten replies like "Thank you so much for reminding me about this! I meant to reply but got busy when I received your note."
qwerta 13y ago
For self-founded entrepreneur procrastination is the worst enemy.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Read Improv Wisdom. Take an improv class. Practice makes perfect.
mnavada 13y ago
I agree, or you lose hope in the process. You're not going to get a reply the first time or even the 100th time, but if you believe that it works and keep modifying your approach in the email, it can work. I've tried sending cold emails and I got a reply after the 12th time. I try to tailor the email to each person. It's more time consuming and I can't send them as often as I want, but I find this more effective.

beat 13y ago

Making contact with people isn't the hard part, I don't think. Motivating them to help you is the hard part.

nate 13y ago
Thanks a ton for the comment on this and reading the article! But see, I don't think motivating someone to help you is really that hard. As I mentioned in there, there are so many places where there's oodles of people who'd love to help. Want to ask Alexis Ohanian something? Pay attention to when he hosts another AMA on Reddit. Or use Clarity or Public Beta. Or really just email them. I answer a ton of questions I get over email. There are a couple reasons though sometimes I don't reply to an email "looking for help": 1. The email is thousands of words long. I don't have time to read that. Very few people do. Keep these intros and notes and questions to 5 sentences or 500 characters, or try your hardest to get close. 2. Ask something. I get too many emails looking for help, but when you read the email, there's isn't actually a question inside. What do you need help with? Be specific. "Feedback" is way too open. You want Feedback on design, or features or marketing or what? It's best to focus me on something so I can save time figuring out how I can actually help you. And if you really want to use some extra encouragement to get people to help you, flattery gets you everywhere. Mention what you've been reading of theirs. Quote their stuff on Twitter.
- beat 13y ago
  Yep. People generally want to help, but they're also mindful of their bandwidth (especially the successful, busy people who can offer the best help). So ask for help, but don't waste their time.
- bigtunacan 13y ago
  Totally in agreement. I've emailed business owners relevant questions to projects I'm working on and 8 times out of 10 they reply back. I keep it short, to the point, and thank them up front for their time. Also, I see too many people that say something like, "No one wants to help me." Everyone WANTS help; to get help you need to give some. Start networking like crazy, find out what someone else needs and provide that. It takes time and dedication, but you will be reciprocated.

osetinsky 13y ago

I think a lot of the problem when it comes to making new connections is unwarranted shyness. If you know the other party is open to new messages/meeting requests from strangers (which they sometimes are!), it becomes less intimidating to reach out. Online dating sites like OkCupid have dealt with this problem really well by creating a community of people open to receiving messages of a particular kind from strangers. It's totally appropriate to ask a stranger out on OkCupid. It isn't so appropriate on Facebook. I'd really appreciate people checking out my first web application, called Treatings (treatings.co). It's a community of professionals open to meeting strangers over coffee to discuss their work. No one is guaranteeing meetings with anyone, but everyone is open to meeting requests and the possibility of being treated to coffee/a drink by a stranger interested in their background. treatings.co/activity

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onepost51515 13y ago

Heh. A rant, if I may: I lived in a small town in northern Canada until I was 17. I had had an interest in programming since I was 11, but the job most relevant to "computers" you could get up there was repairing them at BestBuy. My parents weren't particularly rich, and didn't encourage me to strive for high academics or anything of the sort; in fact, the only thing they really wanted me to do was to get a driver's license, so I could have a fallback job as a truck driver. I hadn't a single role-model for the "white-collar dream" I found myself pulled into from playing with Linux and reading Slashdot. I just knew I couldn't manage it living where I did. At 17, I finished high-school and, with virtually no separation, moved to a more reasonably-large city (Vancouver) and began taking courses at a community college. I believed, at the time, that taking my first two years at a "cheaper" school would be good for my future student-loan-debt load, and optimized for this instead of, say, networking opportunities. The community college was full of unmotivated students just trying to squeak by, teachers who knew less about CS than I had learned from the Internet, and in the end, I didn't feel motivated enough† to make the grades to manage a transfer into the CS program of the "state" university (UBC.) My student loans cut off, and I dropped out. I started attempting to do software-dev contracting. (It's very hard to get full-time employment as a developer without a Bachelor's, whether or not you're an autodidact with 8+ years' experience in some technologies.) I moved from one gig to another, never really finding that fabled "word of mouth" that would let me lever one contracting job into another. I always worked alone, and remotely; I was never hired onto a team. I looked on eLance a lot. I still haven't made, in all this time (I'm 23 now), a single "programmer friend" who would qualify as a connection, nor met a programmer in person from whom I've learned a single fact, rule, or concept I wasn't already familiar with, or been introduced to any neat new technology. This isn't bragging about my talents--rather, just painting a picture of the bottom-of-the-barrel places I've been hanging out. I'm sure I would feel out-of-my-depth (in the best way) sitting in any arbitrary coffee shop in Silicon Valley‡, or in any even-somewhat-modern startup here or elsewhere. If you want to talk about lacking connections, first imagine the closest thing to a "programmer" in your Facebook friends list being your friend from high-school who does accounting at an oil-and-gas firm. Imagine everyone in your family saying that the one time you got paid $50k was "a fluke and won't happen again; you should just work at a gas station like your mom and your aunt do" (leaving alone the fact that you don't have enough customer-service experience to be considered for that job in a competitive market.) Imagine having no major portfolio pieces you can show off, despite years of coding, because you've alternated between struggling to survive on a total dry-up of income with no savings (no time for side-projects), and doing programming jobs for capricious clients who take your backend system and give up on the idea before hiring a front-end guy, relegating your efforts to only be examinable through API calls and doodles of wireframes. (And while you're at it, imagine having a few friends in the US, who have perfectly good job opportunities available for you with their companies, but who can't help you out until you go back and finish school--which you can't, at least yet, afford to do.) But there is that app I made two years ago that I still have in closed beta, the browser-based-collaboration-environment one with an active community even when I don't check in on it for weeks at a time. No time to remodel it into something good enough to launch to the public... but it lets me call myself a startup founder nevertheless. I'm just in stealth-mode, that's it. Heh. --- † Having undiagnosed ADHD may have had something to do with that as well. I imagine, having detected and compensated for that flaw, I would be quite better at slogging through that remedial-feeling workload if I had to do the same now. ‡ I'd love to move there, actually... if I had American citizenship. Or an undergraduate degree to legally qualify me for an H1B or TN work visa. Blocked on all fronts, there.

aleprok 13y ago

I know connections between people can be quite awesome and important. It is even more awesome if they can discuss about something important and give their opinion and listen to your opinion without starting a fight. When there is a problem it is good to have someone to ask help from. I maybe have one true friend and we mutually keep our friendship active. Then there are those who may drink coffee or have a beer with me now and then, but we never really talk about anything important. Then there are those so called social media friends who really do not care what you do. Then there are these few people who use my kindness quite often for help as they have found I will most likely help them anyway I can. Seriously I have tried to keep in contact with people who may some day become great people. The problem I have is that I lose motivation to stay in one way contact when the other does not seem to care a shit how my days go even though I try all kinds of things to get them active even though I am not in need of any kind of help at the moment, but in future I might be. It's not like I want to be liked, but maybe a call to a bar and have fun once would be nice. Why it always has to be me who initiates almost every damn discussion or happening where I could take part in this tiny circle of my so called friends. These days I don't even care to try and just let them be and answer them if they have a problem. When talking about these connections with famous people you could take advantage of I often do not even press the send button because I've realized my own stupidity after explaining my problem in the email. I'm not looking for help. I'm just stating that lonely people can solve problems and have fun too, though if someone would see me having fun alone they probably would say I'm going nuts. Good Friday from Finland.

BSousa 13y ago
So, how was your day?
- aleprok 13y ago
  Thanks for asking. It was fine after driving few girls from bar to their homes and getting back home to sleep until 10 am and then I went and did chemistry exam at university. After that I played little GTA 5 and then I went and took ~10 kilometer bike ride in this cold Finnish autumn. While on the bike ride I took a break at a student restaurant in the town and drank few coffee cups alone. Once I got back home from the bike ride I have just been lazing off and been thinking what to do the whole next week as autumn holidays from university started today. So how was your day?

mindcrime 13y ago

Cold emailing / cold calling definitely works. But it's a Good Idea to do your homework first. Here's a little tip I learned some time ago, and have been working on implementing lately: Say you want to sell something to Foobar, Incorporated. But you have no warm contacts there. OK, you can go to Hoovers.com, or use LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc. and get names, contact info, etc. BUT... and here's the "tip" part... on LinkedIn you can also find people who used to work for Foobar, Inc. and contact them first. Why? Because there is a good chance they'll offer to talk to you (people like to be helpful and it makes them feel important) and they have little to lose (they don't work there anymore), but yet they can still give you TONS of valuable inside information (depending on how long they've been gone) to help you establish credibility when you do call. Example: The info on LinkedIn, Hoovers, etc. can be outdated. So let's say you have a list of 15 names of people at Foobar, Inc. Some of those people probably aren't there anymore, or have changed titles, etc. When you talk to an ex employee, you can run through the list with them and find out what's going on. You also get a chance to ask things like: "Who is the real power broker over there?" or "Are there any big landmines I should know to avoid walking into"? or "What are the main strategic issues management is grappling with there"? etc. Of course, not all ex employees will want to talk to you, but for any reasonably sized company, you should be able to find a few. And, you do have to be aware that they, in turn, have their biases and misconceptions, etc., and so you can't take everything they say as Gospel truth. But go through the exercise with a couple of people and you should be able to get pretty clear picture. Now when you call somebody at Foobar, you can start off sounding very credible: "I know companies like yours often deal with issue X, and may have tried solutions like Z that didn't work... I'd like to talk to you about another way of solving that problem..." Where you learned about "X" and "Z" from those "ex employee talks".

inthesea 13y ago

I'm not sure if I'm alone here but I just lack social skills. It's like everyone but me has this secret book of how to interact with people. I'm not autistic or anything but I had little social life when growing up. I was actually rather popular at the Internet but that didn't translate well to real life. I'm now trying to catch up in my early twenties. I meet interesting people every day but connecting with them non-superficially is the hardest part. I am too shy to talk about anything and I have low self-esteem. I literally start to mumble when telling a story if I don't know the person well. So far rationalizing about it hasn't helped. It's a wonder I managed to get a few friends.

akjetma 13y ago
If somebody said to me what you just posted, I would want to talk to them. I feel the same way. It's often jokingly pointed out that two introverts will never engage each other. I think that in addition to being funny, it's also true.
jason_tko 13y ago
This is something I see pretty often. I'm a business co-founder, so this stuff is pretty much my bread and butter. An idea I've been kicking around is some kind of "Social Skills Primer" type product, probably done by video for ease of explanation and to capture/explain nuance. I haven't fully decided on doing this yet, but would that be interesting to you, do you think? As a side note, I would highly recommend reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

nraynaud 13y ago

I'm still a bit wary of this kind of advice, because it's mostly pushing against the technological meritocracy. The loudest in the room gets the light, the most outspoken is raised as an example. All this effort is still not spent building the right product. I live in France, where the tradition is that money, marketing and sales people run the company. The only successful startups here now are selling advertisement, optimizing advertisement (or whatever retargeting is), dealing personal data and other user-bothering technology. Nobody is optimizing mousetraps or producing media content anymore. But hey, they worked their connections while you where making smoke in the lab.

dkuntz2 13y ago
And knowing people or coming from money is the technological meritocracy?
- pgeorgi 13y ago
  No, "technological meritocracy" is just bait for geeks to work long hours on low money and stock options. What this article proposes is to counter connections and money with being the loudest - realistic, yes, but depressing.
beat 13y ago
Creating a startup isn't primarily technical. It's about business stuff - marketing, hiring, customer support, all sorts of soft skill things. All the clever code in the world won't make a startup succeed without the other stuff. So really, "technical meritocracy" isn't what makes for successful startups. I think the concentration of technical founders in these parts gives us an unbalanced view.
babebridou 13y ago
You forgot another company runner in France, and a very important one: the procurement people. These guys make it incredibly difficult to build new businesses. In their mind contracting a company with less than a hundred people is heresy.

mnavada 13y ago

We recently secured a small investment from an angel investor without prior connections. Having graduated from an Ivy League 12 years ago, I realized that more than school affiliation, it was our team, product, vision, and perseverance that made a difference. I used to regret not networking more in school, but quickly realized that in the startup world, you have to be a problem solver. No time for regrets or to crib about the present. Thanks for this article. I'm going to distribute this to my team.