Why traditional Networking is a false mistress

Tl;Dr - In this post, I'll try to convince you that when we outsource "networking" to others, we lose our chance of finding a unicorn.

Co-working spaces and hacker meetups are great for a number of reasons - free coffee, tea, beer, wine, pizza, talks, table tennis. You name it and both these venues provide them in some fashion or other.

Another reason why people - entrepreneurs - gravitate towards these is they give you a chance to network.

To explain this in language techies well understand, when you meet someone at a co-working space or a hackathon, the meeting is contextual. You are both at the same place and time for a reason, just like the ad google serves up is there next to your search results for a reason - namely context. This is exactly the context based advertising model on which Facebook and Google have built multi-billion dollar companies.

This is seductive to people with an engineering or product mindset. The average developer-entrepreneur convinces themselves thusly - "Hey, if the context exists, converting a contact into a relationship has to be easier, right?"

While broadly true, this hurts the average entrepreneur in a subtle way. Yes, they are now able to time box and geo-fence their time for networking to the cowering space or the hacker meetup but outside those time boxes and geo-fences, we lose our "acquiring" mindset.

What is an "acquiring" mindset you wonder.

When you are networking, you are trying to acquire a friend, a believer, some mind space in the other person's head. You are not necessarily trying to acquire a convert or a customer. Even if you are trying to get to know the other person as fellow human being, you trying to acquire some goodwill from the other person.

Businesses live and die by how much head space they can occupy in the minds of the general population. This process of acquiring mind space can only be honed by regular repetition.

In a way, traditional networking context is akin to riding a bike with training wheels. Use co-working spaces and hackathons to build some networking muscle but to give your startup or business the best chance of success, you have to network out in the real world.

The key to mastering any new skill is deliberate practice in different contexts. Traditional networking gives you one context. It is on you to find as many other contexts for building relationships outside networking.

To bring it back to language hackers understand, if all you knew was Adwords, you'd never tap the power of referrals and word of mouth and brand building.