Borys Musielak - A Geek's Guide to Networking
Hi. Do you know what this picture shows? Can anyone tell me what this picture shows? Good. It is an image from a portico collido detector like the one in [ ] in Switzerland. When 2 particles are running into each other nearly the speed of light and when the timing and location is right, they can collide. And when they do, huge energy is being release and even new particles are created from that energy. Amazing quantum phenomena occur. Same happens to people. When people meet each other, when they run into each other in the right place and time, equal amazing stuff can occur. It was a metaphor. I am Borys. I am one of the hot boxes which is called Film Master. I also co-founded Reactor which is like a Silicon Valley actually Black Box inspired place in Warsaw with startups work, collaborate and network. Networking is the subject of my talk today.
I have been to a dozen of conferences last year. I was not very well prepared to the first ones so I was learning. In the last 3 months, we did 3 very good conferences. I would like to tell you how to prepare, how to get the most of the events you attend. I came up with this list of 5 rules. I did not have a good name for them so I call them Five Rules of Borys. I will just go through this list and this and this will be my presentation.
First and most important rule is you have to choose the events to go to wisely because unless your name is Alex Barrera, you will not be everywhere. You have to choose the proper conferences to go to that will be most beneficial to your business. For example, if your boring B2B startup South by Southwest is probably not the best place to go unless you just want to party along for movie geeks like you for the whole week. You will be better off going to some of the conferences where all the industries where you can meet your customers, where we can meet our actual potential partners. That is what we did. We went to first South by Southwest and then MAVTV. One more thing, the bigger the conference is, the bigger you have to be to shine there. It is sad I know but unless you are one of the organizers or a star like Sean Parker, no one is going to notice you in the conference. You have to do the work yourself to get to the people that you want to meet.
I have seen so many startups going to conferences that should not get us party as a way to spend your free time. I treat a conference as hard work as like 25 hours a day work. You have to set goals. The goal can be meet those potential customers that you want to have a relationship with. The goal can be meet that we see you want to do a business with the next year or the goal can be get a lot of feedback about your new product. I will tell you a very quick story about our story in South by Southwest. We decided to do a booth because we had this new product that we work on a TV space. It is a Google TV app at Movie Discover app for Google TV. It was our first app on an actual TV. We wanted to get feedback. We wanted to get real users to test it. What we did is we did a booth and we have to think of something amazing to doing a booth because we actually had seen so many really shitty booths on South by Southwest. No one is going to them. It was just after the Oscar’s ceremony and I know you probably remember Angelina doing this totally stupid thing for her leg like standing like that for the whole evening. We kind of replicated it in our booth which became a total success where people are Tweeting about it. I mean a lot of people where actually taking pictures. This is lady actually happened to be a Chief of an IP TV department in AT&T. We got re-Tweeted by the leg itself. I know it is pretty crazy but the leg has like 40,000 followers on Twitter. We got featured as one of the best film startups on South by Southwest but what I am getting to is you have to be sure you are getting what you paid for.
Booth is really hard. Unless you really know what to do, do not do booth. There are many other ways to be featured on a conference. For example, you can plan your meetings. I know it is strange but lots of conferences have those really good (well, they are not very good) networking tools when you can see who is going to the conference. Use those tools to get to the people you want to meet way before the conference. For South by Southwest, we did 2 months before the conference. For MAVTV, we did also 2 months. We had 20 meetings plan a month before the conference started. Those people who we wanted to talk to (cable providers, IP TV, owners) they were very busy. The quicker you are the bigger chance to get those meetings. Use the tools. Use Twitter. Use Plancast. Some people brought because they plan on Plancast. Use all the available tools to reach those people. If you know someone that knows someone that you want to meet, ask for an intro. Also, very important. Have a list of people you want to meet. Update it daily so that you will always keep track of your current status of each person.
Personalize your messages. The people that you are going to meet need to instantly know they are going to benefit by the meeting. It is not just your benefit by the meeting it is not just your benefit. First, say what value you are bringing and only secondly say what you actually want from those people. You have to be very pro-active. Some people will say, “Catch me at the event.” That does not mean they do not want to meet you. They just mean that they are very busy. Do your work and actually use Twitter. If you have their phone number, text them at the event very often. The next web, we had free meetings with investors/VCs because our goal there was to actually start relationships with VCs. We have free meetings planned beforehand and we got 4 or 5 more at the event using text/Twitter because people just turn out to have some free spot. Conference is sort of like amazing way to meet the people you would never be able to meet otherwise. When you get their attention, they usually say, “I only have 5 minutes of time.” but we had this star with one of the really cool investors we wanted to talk to. He said, “Just 5 minutes.” but then after talking to him, it turns out to be almost stuck for an hour. We got him really excited about our product. That is boring but you have to know your pitch. The pitch can be boring. We are a video recommendation startup in the cloud. We are just not like so totally exciting when you like as the first sentence you say. We usually say something like “Watching TV totally sucks and we are changing that.” It is trying to get the people totally excited, get them want to ask more.
That is the last thing. Follow up. I do not why they chose this picture. When you already met those amazing people and started relationship with them, the first thing you do after you come back is add them on Twitter, add them on LinkedIn and send them an email with the exact date and time of the next meeting on Skype and have a plan what you want to get from them. You get them pretty excited about who you are. They probably even like you. So, push it hard and go for the win. Thank you.
