Why You Need to Take 50 Coffee Meetings

It's very obvious, but also very hard. Hard because it isn't measurable in the short term, and hard because many engineers aren't wired for it. That said, technology leaders have to eventually overcome the introspection that made them successful in the first place.

It is easy to see how some of the greats in the tech industry do it. Look at Ron Conway - he is a perpetual networker, and one of the highest impact people around. Steve Jobs is another, creating his famous reality distortion field. Look at Demo Day - isn't this the culmination of a lot of networking on top of great product work?

One of the interesting aspects of social networking theory is that it is the people more removed from us who can help us the most. The people we are tightly linked to don't know that many people that we don't. The folks less tightly linked have the incremental connections we can't access ourselves.

Coffee anyone?

The danger here is confusing activity with progress.