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Comment by konsl | Hacker News Reader

Founders should always be networking.

Eh... founders should always be talking with different, intelligent people and soaking up ideas. If that's what you mean by networking, fine. But I think the networking tptacek refers to is the type that's organized X times/mo. and for the purpose of professional development. It's those ad hoc events where this group is encouraged to co-mingle with this one.

It has its place, but just as useful at times is getting together with a group of peers you trust and exchanging notes. Having a few beers and talking about what challenges you're having, what breakthroughs you've made...

I think the tradtional idea of networking is overemphasized among a lot of startups (and sometimes dangerously so) because it's an abstraction away from the work that keeps them alive. You've got to make sure you keep a watchful eye on your schedule and don't confuse attending X and Y event for Z productivity.

I agree that "professional networking" is often a waste of time, but meeting other startups and potential users and sharing ideas has always been valuable to me. That's what I was trying to say by referring to "connecting" and not just "networking". Maybe there's a better word...

Making friends.

Agree, networking is over-emphasized. We did a lot of networking at the outset, with no particular plan or strategy, and it doesn't feel like time well spent.

Not sure I'm saying "my kind of networking meets X times per month", but I will say this: we organized monthly meetups for the professionals in our market (computer/network security), made it as all-inclusive as we could, and it's been far more valuable to us than the vanity networking we did early on.

Isn't this one of the major recurring criticisms of valley culture? That all those people do is go to parties with the same people every night?

Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant was (at least from waht I gathered from your post) that you're skeptical of vanity networking and that you favor less formal gatherings done in the spirit of meetups.

I'm with you on that.

I thought you might have been, but I just wanted to plug the idea of organizing market-specific meetups to network with customers, prospective employees, and partners --- people who can actually help your business --- do this!

SXSW trips not so much.

As someone who has gone through Y Combinator early on, I think networking was actually a bit under emphasized. A lot of networking can be useless if you don't follow up in depth; but our company has gained immeasurably by identifying people who have built and scaled businesses (technically and otherwise) and then got them to sit down for an hour or two and teach us about an area that we're weak on.

I would love an example.

>Founders should always be networking.

I don't think Wozniak did much networking. I don't know what would have happened if Jobs got mad at him because he didn't.

Yeah but would you have startup destroying conflicts over whether or not founders were bringing in investors and advisors before you had a product?

I'm not sure I'd question the commitment of people who were actively building the product either. It sounds like this startup really had some forward momentum with people getting stuff done. I'm not sure the authors expectations were reasonable, and I think he had to work fairly hard to kill this startup.

I think that courting investors and obtaining advisors is one thing, general networking is another, which is what I am referring to, and by general networking I mean building contacts/telling people about what you are doing/determining who can provide you with what.

I agree with the second part of your comment.

On the other hand, some folks take being pragmatic to an extreme, as in no order/uniformity/quality control/structure/thought into design/effort to identify possible future issues and a general just get whatever done in a hurry and push it out the door attitude . . . which is all just as bad as too much formally define roles/establish this and that and the other/talk about and plan stuff to death/posture around with this and that and the other . . .

I agree with all of that. I mean the author may have been saved a lot of hassle further down the track with failing quickly, or he might have killed a good potential company - I really can't say even though I put forth an opinion on it.

If you have good people, some funding, a demo and the start of a code base then thats a lot to lose over your expectations on networking and days of the week devoted to the startup. Even if the truth is more networking and fulltime cofounders would have helped.

You know, maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I thought we had a great thing going right up to the end. But what happened when we landed YC was that a lot of stuff came to the surface that hadn't been addressed well enough before, including a partner's belief that a lot of my effort up to that point had been worthless and he didn't trust me to do any better going forward. That was a pretty rough pill to swallow, especially after being responsible for most of the YC application, leading the three interviews we did to get accepted and building the front end for what we demoed.

I certainly may have killed the startup by emphasizing things that I thought were important, but it doesn't make any sense to think I was actively trying to kill it. My point was that I was blindsided by what happened in the end, so now I've gone back to think about how we got there and, you know, these are some of the conclusions I've drawn and of course they could still be wrong.

I got the impression you thought you had a good thing. I guess my key question would be this: Given everything the startup had going for it, do you think the conflict points (networking, time commitment, and a few others) were sufficiently important to stake the startup on?

On the one hand you could feel in retrospect that the conflict points were important enough that the startup could never have succeeding without the direction you were pushing - so you were lucky it ended swiftly. On the other hand if you think your startup had a good chance of success even if you hadn't won those battles, then you may want to look at your conflict resolution.

No, the conflict points that are being discussed here a lot were not sufficiently important to stake the startup on at the time when we were faced with having to walk away. The real point was that by the time we went to Boston to meet with PG and get some advice, my partner had decided he could no longer trust me or my judgment and wanted to leave, and I felt the same way about him. While I wish that could have been avoided, I don't think anything that could have been done at that point would have changed the ultimate outcome for this team.

After spending a few months thinking "okay, so how did it get to that point, and I didn't even realize it" I wrote my reflections. I still think the startup has a good chance of success, but not with the dynamics that were at play then.

Not always. There are times to put your head down and build (depending on team composition and what your business is doing, of course)

It totally depends on the product, but from the YC PoV, you have 3 months to build something that dazzles investors. Generally, YC discourages hunting for networking/bizdev/funding deals because you have EXACTLY ONE SHOT to impress a room full of the most important early stage investors on the planet.

But YC also requires you to be in the same location as the other startups and to attend two dinners each week, plus it encourages visiting the YC partners during "office hours".

Founders shouldn't network in place of building.

You can always network after you've got a product, but if you can't do both at once, product comes first.

Personally, that strikes me as a bit too generic for a tech startup. The value of the startup stems from the value of the technology it produces, not the value of the network of contacts one of the founders has built. While networking can be valuable, allocating resources to networking BEFORE there is a working product is a huge mistake.

I can agree from personal experience. Premature networking can kill a startup.

Edit: What I mean by this is networking at the expense of product/technology building.

Well, that really depends on what you define as value. There are plenty of tech companies out there that created tons of "valuable" code but were not successful because somebody else got the attention or was able to strike one critical deal.

As for allocating resources to networking before there is a working product, check out www.path101.com. I met these guys when they did an open brainstorming session with nothing but a preliminary pitch deck and not a line of code. Being open from very early on enabled them to find angel investors and their first employees, and when it came time to doing an alpha launch they had tons of people that had been eager to try the thing out for months.

I agree that vaporware has been successfully marketed before, however, that is not my idea of creating value, so I agree that it depends on how one defines value, and I would not want that - marketing non-existent products - to become the meaning of value within the context of a tech startup, that is best left to a marketing/publicity outfit if you ask me. I also think it is wrong to conduct market studies under the guise of a real product offer.

What happens when it turns out that the bullet points with features cannot be implemented, or are simply not the best solution for the users?

I find pg's thoughts on the subject of how problems may end up being redefined as they are being worked on to be very wise advice.

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