What’s wrong

Just went to a networking event, low profile, just to socialize a little bit with other entrepreneurs. Bad idea

I’m not sure what’s wrong, it must be just the wrong type of events so writing down few notes before moving on

To put thing in context, weeks ago I went to a entrepreneurship talk and pitch night, to get some ideas and to learn a bit. The environment was a bit tense, apparently many investors or people wanting to be investors. The talk itself what good, but it sounded a bit like bragging about lucky facts as by chance some projections were more or less close to the numbers of a simplistic plan

The product or idea itself had nothing new, just timing and connections made it work. If a second team with exactly the same skills were running it, it may have probably failed, without connections or at bad timing. In fact the speaker said something like “if you get anything out of an accelerator, you are not going to make it”

Either way most startups locally think the same: focus on enterprise clients, sell couple big contracts = million dollar revenue = success. Anything outside that mindset is out of the table here

The important part after the talk: the pitch night, was quite weird:

* Company X – someone in Canada, connected by phone, with a robotic voice (but kiwi accent so it was not a bot) presenting lots of facts and numbers – no questions made

* Company Y – great idea – couple questions about scaling etc

* Company Z – it was not actually a pitch but couple slides of how they are doing, kind of neener neener to the ones that didn’t invested in them?

So I left that meeting with some ideas but quite lost about how to pitch local investors

Today’s meeting, on the other hand, was supposed to be just a social/networking event, but it seems for few it was a pitch night and you had to either pitch your product/idea or get advice

Without wanting to do that I had to dodge questions and get weird feedback maybe from not the best qualified people, in other words: just a waste of time

What’s wrong people these days? Should it be possible to socialize and make good network contacts in these events, rather than make it an awkward pitch style conversation

Either way, I made couple good connections