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The networking is the personal insurance policy by your cofounders against startup failure. The people connections built during networking events will land these cofounders leadership/management positions at other companies if and when startup fails instead of being unemployable or starting at the bottom. The founders, typically technical co-founders, that don't network has no such insurance in place and tend to go back to work for someone else as software engineer rather than upper level technical management positions like VP Engineering.

The problem with this line of thinking is that smart companies:

1) Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking --- they are going to hire them based on merit

2) The people in charge of smart companies aren't at networking events because networking events are a waste of time

Startups are a way to "level up" your career only because you can skip years of moving up a corporate ladder by starting at the top and building a successful company below you. This doesn't mean that by being a CTO of a 3 person company you are all of the sudden eligible to be a CTO at a big, successful company. The process of being CTO at your 3 person company and growing it into a big, successful company is what makes you eligible for that position at a different company.

The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking.

>> The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking.

This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architect at a Fortune 50 company, Manager of Development at a big ad agency). Last year, when I was looking for work, those titles were pretty much entirely disregarded by the employers I applied to. Almost every one of them told me they never trusted titles from other companies and tried to get me to join as a mid-level engineer.

Every time I had a friend inside the company, however, I was routed to senior-level jobs that actually matched my experience. I've spent time keeping up those friendships with occasional notes and lunches. If I had just assumed that being really good at my job would be my best insurance, I would not have found the opportunities I did.

Yes, seriously, never trust titles from other companies. I've been in places where everybody was the "manager" or "architect" of something. Test manager, release manager, system manager, configuration manager, etc etc. Most titles barely had any responsibilities at all and were given even to fresh grads as they joined the team. Essentially it didn't mean anything and in reality all 15 managers were just plain developers.

This was not even a startup where people get a cto-title just by happening to be there. This was a group inside bigco.

For most people on the business end of things, networking is your job.

There's a whole world out there that technologists like us rarely pay attention to, which mostly consists of building relationships with other people whose only job is networking so that when their company is looking to purchase, they think of us. Familiarity is a remarkably effective distortion on our evaluation of what is "good", and many technologists who didn't realize this ended up building something that nobody ever heard of.

The reason YC (and other top startup advisors) say to ignore this isn't that it's unimportant, it's that you can fairly easily hire all the people whose day job is networking once you have a product that people want on its own merits, while if nobody wants your product, you'll have to hire them at fat prices to get anywhere. It's a matter of negotiating leverage: show up at the table with something people really want and you will find plenty of people willing to help sell it, while if you spend all your time trying to sell what nobody wants, it will never become something people want.

Being good at your job is very important, but ignoring networking is something you do at your own peril.

This doesn't mean "you should go to lots of networking events" -- many of those are a waste of time. But you should build relationships with people, because relationships are a massive influence on hiring, even at smart companies. Also, relationships give you ways to experiment with new projects, learn stuff, and test your own ideas.

Lots of people ignore this and do good work, but don't get recognized. Others do average work, but have powerful networks and advance strongly in their careers. While I favor meritocratic hiring, it isn't wise to advise people that networking is irrelevant.

> 1) Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking --- they are going to hire them based on merit

Sorry, I have to disagree. Understanding the "merit" of a leadership/management role has way more to do with who you know than your merit. Management ability is almost entirely subjective.

"Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking" -- Agreed with sibling posts; relationship-building is extremely important for anyone who wants to be in a leadership role. People will trust you and listen to your ideas when they know you, after all.

"1) Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking --- they are going to hire them based on merit"

So even if that were true (which is questionable, at best), they won't hire you if you are not on their radar. One way to get on their radar? Know them / meet them.

>is that smart companies

They are (probably correctly) betting that > 80% of the people they meet at these events aren't that smart. Birds of a feather and all that.

The tricky thing about this is that networking is often the right move if you're playing to do well rather than to win. If you're looking for a mid- to upper-management role at an established company, networking is great. If you're going into an established, competitive market with no intentions of "winning" the market (and becoming a monopoly), then networking can get you customers, it can get you distribution partners, and it can get you funding. Just not lots of all of the above, and you will have to fight hard for each.

Most business founders come from an environment where this is what has worked for them their whole career. That's how you get a job on the business side of things, and it's how you do your job on the business end of an established company.

The take-away, I think, is to know which game you're playing and make your moves accordingly. Being a great research engineer is one game; being an engineer at a startup is another, and moving up the ranks in a big company is another one entirely. Doing sales for a big company is a different game from doing customer development for your own startup, which is different from doing business development for either. Building a lifestyle business in a competitive niche is very different from doing hard tech research, which is very different from solving a problem that seems crazy in an area nobody else will go near. If you apply the rules of one game to the situations of another, you're unlikely to get good results.

(A corollary of this is to make sure that all your startups' other decisions are lined up with the game it is playing. I've seen a number of startups with ideas & personal goals that are clearly in the "lifestyle business" camp, but then they make decisions about markets, fundraising & hiring that put them in the "we're gonna be Google" camp, and unsurprisingly this tends to end poorly.)

That last parenthetical bit really hit home for me. My first 'real' job was at a 'startup' exactly like that. The product, and its market, was really just about good enough for a small lifestyle business, but in lots of other ways we acted as if we were destined for the Fortune 500.

So true. This was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made with my first startup. I was in a city outside of silicon valley, so there was a lot of pressure to have a lot of meetings and go talk at local conferences. I also thought that conferences in my market would be a good sales channel. In reality, it didn't. Most people at conferences just want to be entertained or distracted from their daily jobs - not a great mindset to try and sell them something. I also had no idea how incredibly distracting meetings with potential, and even current, investors can be. Lesson learned was to only talk to potential investors when you are specifically fundraising, and keep time with current investors to regularly paced meetings and updates, unless a immediate situation requires otherwise.

This one hit so close to home for me too. Your comment is what I would have written except my cofounder was a non-technical guy. In the future I am going to voice my concerns a little more forcefully.

Twice in the past, I have been "the guy" that one of the investors brought in to walk around and do a look-see. Among my recommendations, one of them, both times, was to fire every top level manager that wasn't you. There is no reason that current and potential future investors can not be kept in the loop with a one-page email once a week or once a month.

Despite my personal record for failing to do so 5 times out of 10, the core recipe is not that hard: build a product that solve a problem that people would be willing to pay to have solved and get them to hit the "buy" button.

IF you have something of value, all that social stuff can help monetize it. First, you need to build a thing. If you have no thing, all that stuff is either hot air or basically con artistry.

Women in business face special challenges. Failing to deal with them at all can be catastrophic. But getting too focused on that piece can also be problematic. It can be challenging to figure out which is which.

Thankfully, with the exception of PR, I loathe all the things in #2. I'll do them when I have to, but that's it.

Of course, it's REALLY hard to do PR when you don't have a product people love, really easy once you've got that. Keeping it fresh and top of mind is a challenge for many founders though.

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