I love reading articles like this because it reinforces what I've believed all this time. At first I thought, maybe I'm just not a social creature and that is why I can't find value in networking. True as it maybe that I dislike socializing in general, I found that I was simply "networking" because this is what "you are supposed to do" or "everyone does it so it must be right".
Especially in startup culture, people even without ever having started one or work in the industry seems to know EXACTLY what to do. You network, you build contacts. I don't argue that it's useless but at launching and being very early on in the product cycle, even if I had contacts, I'd have no use for it as it's too generic.
The spending 50% of time describing your specific problem and walking away with answers that you already know....it's not that people that you network with are stupid, it's that you are faced with very specific problems early in the game that you must solve yourself.
Of course when you grow a business, you are faced with questions that they teach you in business school, but more than often, I find the time you spent going to networking events, you could've spent just brainstorming and cranking it out yourself.
Especially in startup culture, people even without ever having started one or work in the industry seems to know EXACTLY what to do. You network, you build contacts. I don't argue that it's useless but at launching and being very early on in the product cycle, even if I had contacts, I'd have no use for it as it's too generic.
The spending 50% of time describing your specific problem and walking away with answers that you already know....it's not that people that you network with are stupid, it's that you are faced with very specific problems early in the game that you must solve yourself.
Of course when you grow a business, you are faced with questions that they teach you in business school, but more than often, I find the time you spent going to networking events, you could've spent just brainstorming and cranking it out yourself.