What if "what you should be doing" is, or involves, business development, prospecting for leads, selling, soliciting feedback from potential customers, and/or raising funds?
Neglecting the importance of connections is silly... just as silly as neglecting the importance of building a solid product. And that's really my point here: this article seems to be hinting at a little bit of a false dichotomy through quoting the old saw "it's not what you know, it's who you know". Guess what, in the real world, it takes both.
I'm a software developer / hacker by trade, and my nature was such that I rejected this thinking for a long time. I though that my knowledge, skills and talent ought to be sufficient, without any need for "the old boys club". Now, at the ripe old age of 39, I've realized that while you may not need to be an "old boys club" insider to succeed, you almost certainly will need other people on your side at some point... and that involves connections and relationships.
Let me illustrate with an example... at Fogbeam Labs, we're building some stuff that I think is pretty damn cool - an Open Source "Facebook for the Enterprise" type package that you could think of as a competitor to Sharepoint or Jive Software among others. Now this is an enterprise, B2B play, and sales in this world is high-touch, and very human driven. So I drove down to Charlotte two weeks ago to an NCTA meeting, to mingle and network with CIOs, CTOs, VPs, and other decision maker types. There, I met a gentleman who runs a firm here in the Triangle region, who has paying customers already (we're still looking for our first "earlyvangelist" customer) who took an immediate interest in what we're doing. After 10 minutes of talking, he's already thinking of several of his customers that he can introduce us into. So we met again this week so I could demo the stuff for him, and after an hour or so, he's offering to introduce me to a number of potentially valuable connections, introduce us into some of his existing customers, and even chewing on some possible partnership scenarios between his company and ours.
I have to tell ya, if even one of these leads turns into something, it could be a game-changer for us and really help us turn the corner.
So, had we not spent the past 2 years or so building our product, this would all be moot. But if we build a product and never find anybody to buy it, the whole thing is moot. So the point is, connections are absolutely valuable and fostering those connections is a high-value task that you should commit some effort to. But it's not sufficient in and of itself. But neither is just building a product either.
Neglecting the importance of connections is silly... just as silly as neglecting the importance of building a solid product. And that's really my point here: this article seems to be hinting at a little bit of a false dichotomy through quoting the old saw "it's not what you know, it's who you know". Guess what, in the real world, it takes both.
I'm a software developer / hacker by trade, and my nature was such that I rejected this thinking for a long time. I though that my knowledge, skills and talent ought to be sufficient, without any need for "the old boys club". Now, at the ripe old age of 39, I've realized that while you may not need to be an "old boys club" insider to succeed, you almost certainly will need other people on your side at some point... and that involves connections and relationships.
Let me illustrate with an example... at Fogbeam Labs, we're building some stuff that I think is pretty damn cool - an Open Source "Facebook for the Enterprise" type package that you could think of as a competitor to Sharepoint or Jive Software among others. Now this is an enterprise, B2B play, and sales in this world is high-touch, and very human driven. So I drove down to Charlotte two weeks ago to an NCTA meeting, to mingle and network with CIOs, CTOs, VPs, and other decision maker types. There, I met a gentleman who runs a firm here in the Triangle region, who has paying customers already (we're still looking for our first "earlyvangelist" customer) who took an immediate interest in what we're doing. After 10 minutes of talking, he's already thinking of several of his customers that he can introduce us into. So we met again this week so I could demo the stuff for him, and after an hour or so, he's offering to introduce me to a number of potentially valuable connections, introduce us into some of his existing customers, and even chewing on some possible partnership scenarios between his company and ours.
I have to tell ya, if even one of these leads turns into something, it could be a game-changer for us and really help us turn the corner.
So, had we not spent the past 2 years or so building our product, this would all be moot. But if we build a product and never find anybody to buy it, the whole thing is moot. So the point is, connections are absolutely valuable and fostering those connections is a high-value task that you should commit some effort to. But it's not sufficient in and of itself. But neither is just building a product either.