Networking is Overrated

You have got to be kidding me.

Networking events are invaluable, especially to new graduates. It's important to know how to interact face to face with other human beings. It's important to show you can have a real human conversation with someone, understand body language, understand emotions and social cues.

I realize these skills aren't highly valued on HN for some, but if you really want to be successful they absolutely are.

Also - Elon Musk and Steve Jobs networked their asses off. Homebrew computer club. Speaking engagements. Hustling investors. That's all networking.

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.

Now, I know where to look for my future wife. Aspiring billionairesses on YC, you had me with your 'Hello, My name is ____' sticker.

It's 8 years later, I'm in my early 30s, and I feel like my network is doing pretty well. At least, some of my direct friends - people I would invite to crash on my couch when they're visiting town, or go out for dinner with weekly - are tech leads of major consumer products with millions of users, or entrepreneurs with a successful exit, or heads of university research departments, or responsible for managing tens of millions in investment portfolios. And my 2nd degree connections include early Google employees, venture capitalists, heads of government agencies, etc. This is all without doing all that much in the way of deliberate networking. I just get involved with things that I'm passionate about and seek out other people who are passionate about it - or, more commonly, get sought out by other people who are passionate about it.

It's a little paradoxical that almost all of my big career successes came from my network, but almost none of my network consists of people that I specifically "networked" with.

I think what a lot of people miss about general social interaction is that people like to hang out with other folks like themselves. If you specifically believe that networking is the key to success, you will attract other people that believe networking is the key to success, and you will end up with a network full of...well, networkers. Which can be great in fields like enterprise sales or politics where success is pretty much based on knowing lots of people who know lots of other people. But if you want to network with people who are passionate about changing the world for the better, your best bet is to be passionate about changing the world yourself, make your actions congruent with that, and you'll find that you will find and attract other such people.