I’m back home in London now. My plan was to blog a bit more regularly through-out my trip to the Bay Area. Instead I will review the whole trip in one post.
In 2½ weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area, I attended 8 events, had meetings with 7 individuals and companies and collected a stack of business cards. I also have quite a few UK contacts to follow up. I found events using Upcoming and the ValleyWag calendar. At these events I met some incredibly smart and dedicated people and exchanged business cards. I followed up afterwards, inviting people to connect on LinkedIn and to meet up again for coffee or similar. My goal was to network with developers, founders and investors to find opportunities to collaborate on projects.
When I initially planned my trip, I looked at some of the things going on in the area. I decided that the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit was the best place to meet interesting people from the technology sector, specifically web and specifically from web 2.0 companies. I chose the event because it corresponded so closely with the stuff I’m interested in. I also chose to stay on until the MashupCamp event, for the same reason. Once I had those 2 bookends, I filled out the rest of my time with every other interesting event going. I didn’t spend a lot of money on event tickets. I only went to the lobby of the hotel in which the Web 2.0 Summit was held, not the sessions themselves (though they sounded fascinating). All the other events I went to were free or in the range of $30 or less for a ticket. I wasn’t able to go to the Under The Radar: Mobility conference, which I would have liked to do. Although I could probably have found my way in, I had met quite a few mobile people already during the trip.
Events are great places to network because of the variety of people present and their readiness to say hi and chat. My goal was a bit vague, so I tried to give a specific story with each new person. It’s really important to explain to people what you’re looking for. Many are happy to help, but they need to understand your problem first. At the Web 2.0 Summit I was even interviewed because of my slightly different story.
The events I attended ranged from the general like the Web 2.0 Summit, to the more specific like Mobile Tech 4 Social Change, Metaweb‘s Freebase Hack Day and the OpenSocial birthday party at MySpace’s offices in SoMa. For each event, I would take a look at the list of attendees for interesting people and then try to contact them ahead of time, via email or Twitter, to arrange a time to say hi quickly. Twitter is a particularly useful tool for this right now as it is accessible, has high adoption amongst tech people and is close to an instant message. An @reply will often be picked up in real-time. Twittering that you are attending an event invites other people to say hi also. You can also use Twitter Search to follow the tag for an event or to look for other related terms. This will reveal yet more people to speak to.
While events are great places to meet people, they are less good for creating lasting relationships and discussing solid plans. I followed up with a large number of the people I met to create stronger connections, either via LinkedIn or by meeting in real life. Much of the second week of my trip was spent between these meetings. By the time I got on the flight home, I’d definitely created a set of contacts I would love to get an opportunity to talk to again or a reason to work with.
Results
The results of my trip are a much larger network and a better feeling for the kinds of people and companies working in San Francisco. I wasn’t able to really get out to Silicon Valley. In many ways this was because there was so much happening in the city and it was easier to attend multiple events without spending hours on the CalTrain.
Some of the contacts led to immediate conversations about work, both contract and full-time. Most did not. However, I’ve just started work on a contract with Huddle, a company of lovely people that I first met in June and have come to know relatively well due to their excellent DrinkTank event. It’s my experience that nothing can be done in a hurry. Whether your goal is to find a job, colleagues for a new project, employees for an existing one or investors to take an idea forward, start early and expect to spend some time on it.
