Earlier today, Proximate’s dev team was sitting in the awesomely non-corporate (#82) Voltage Cafe in Kendall Square, doing our weekly wrap-up meeting. As I sipped my latte – I’ve got to say, Voltage’s coffee (#1) is the best around – I was struck with blog inspiration. I jotted a note down in myMoleskine (#122) for further research on a potentially important realization: white people like startups.

I’m not just talking about any white people, though, or even people who are necessarily white. I’m talking about the Christian Lander’s now-famous concept, book and blog Stuff White People Like, which has become a lasting favorite by skewering the affectations of people just like me and you, dear BostInno reader. Take a look at what I mean.

• We Bostonians always wring our hands about Valley centrality, but I bet it’s just because deep down we all love San Francisco (#91). Certainly the high density ofAsian girls (#11) in its startups must score SF some white-person-like. Maybe theFacebook (#106) defection still stings us too much to admit it?
• The Bay Area may be startups’ Mecca, but even many NorCal folks are jealous of those to their south when the ultimate tech networking event, TED (#134) takes place in SoCal every year. Everybody loves those talks, man. No science is too complicated with Keynote! Frankly, the talk videos are good for procrastinating too, what with my not having a TV (#28) and all.
• It might not be TED-worthy attire (unless you’re ironic (#50) like that), but I feel that Proximate became real to me when I ordered our first Proximate branded T-shirts (#84) (American Apparel, naturally). These are essential pieces of startup-kid gear, much like my MacBook Pro (#40); it speaks to my uniqueness but subtly counterbalances it with brand-conscious savvy.
• Even the negative aspects of working at a startup can be appealing, given the right mindset. Haven’t had a paycheck in months? It’s like an unpaid internship (#105)with equity! Have a liberal arts degree (#47)? No worries, promise to learn a new language (#115) – for me, it’s Ruby. Did your cofounder quit? Nice! That’s like adifficult breakup (#70), and luckily since you have great relationships with lawyers (#56) you’re not too much worse off.

And the love goes both ways, startup white people. Some of the stuff we love has started loving startups back. The Ivy League (#98) is big into innovation now (just look at Harvard’s iLab). And Barack Obama (#8) has made technology innovation a key part of his recovery plan – he even had our back on SOPA, which would have ruined music piracy (#93).

Did this post offend (#101) you? I’ll bet you’re into that. Still, I’d love to apologize (#55). But what can we take away from this epiphany; why is being called out on our affectations a little awkward? Maybe it’s because it makes us feel like we’re only in startups for the lifestyle. Maybe like, sometimes we’re faking it? In the words of my beloved Mobb Deep (#116), “ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks” (#107).

Consider it motivation, and see you around at Voltage.

All this tax-day stuff got me thinking something rather obvious: I hate paying bills. But some are better than others.

In writing last week’s piece, “Biz dev buys the pizza,” I gave thanks to a lot of the people who have helped build the Proximate platform into its current beta stage. It was a fun piece to write – who doesn’t like telling war stories?  Though it occurred to me that some of the best help we’ve gotten thus far wasn’t only from those who have lent their time and effort, but also the products and services that have been really force-multipliers to the effort we’ve put in. There’s no doubt that it’s a lot easier to launch a concept and to get to those itty-bitty hints of “scale” – as we’re starting to see in our private beta – with good service providers who have your back.

I think for those who are a few months behind us on the startup curve some recommendations might be helpful. Every startup needs to manage its cash runway carefully, and there’s a (wise) tendency to go without where you can. But here’s a list of six products and services that I don’t mind getting bills from – because they do a great job. I’m probably not recommending anything you haven’t seen before – some of these are obvious choices that I’ve gravitated to because of startup-world received wisdom. But thinking of it as a cross-functional stack that works well for at least one startup might help in your purchasing decisions.

App:

Heroku - if you’re on the technical side, there’s no real need to recommend this to you, but for those of us who haven’t previously launched a web app, Heroku is freakin’ magic. It’s literally a one-liner console command to deploy a Rails/Node/Django/etc. app, and the platform plays really well with many of the other services on this list. Plus, assuming you’re doing this whole startup thing with an eye towards Lean methodology, you’ll be starting small/slow and re-evaluating constantly as results come in, and Heroku is perfect for that use case. It’s free for low-traffic apps (we didn’t pay a dime for our first two months) and deploys quickly so you can patch bugs responsively.

New Relic - another big advantage of Heroku is that it’s really a gateway service to dozens of how-did-I-live-without-this plugins. One that everyone should try is New Relic. It’s a way to take a highly detailed, retrospective look at your application’s performance logs so that you can fix urgent problems and improve lagging pages. If you’re non-technical, this is going to make you infinitely less annoying to your developer. I now understand how annoying and unrealistic I was to say “Something went wrong!1! Check the logs!!one!” – Heroku logs can’t trace retroactively very far, and tell you functionally nothing compared to New Relic. Now you won’t just get an email from a pissed-off customer; New Relic will let you know first, and can show you the line out of your entire code base that was tripping everything up. It’s night and day. Worth the $75+/month you’ll pay.

Stripe - I rave about Stripe so frequently that friends have begun to think I’m on the payroll (I wish I was on any payroll…). But after the debacle with PayPal that I detailed in my last post, YC darling Stripe saved the day by taking the time-consuming, painful, and generally awful process of getting set up to take credit card payments and making it less of all those bad things. As a matter of fact, its API is so clean that it actually makes developers smile, and if you’ve ever seen us implementing something new that’s saying something. But what really sets Stripe apart isn’t the easy setup – it’s that you’re able to securely take payments on your website (not redirecting to PayPal’s site, messing up your branding), for exactly the same price as PayPal (2.9% + 30¢). And you can do it immediately, as opposed to waiting several weeks for PayPal’s (capricious) approval. These are touches your customers might not notice, but that can mean everything to a small startup like ours.

Management:

LaunchEffect - No matter what your project is, a launch page is a great way to capture interest and follow up later – whether it be beta invites or client relationships. LaunchRock is well known and respected, but if you’re looking for a bit more control over look and feel and are comfortable with WordPress, LaunchEffect has been our choice. It’s allowed our biz dev to create a launch page exactly matching the look and feel of our web app, without burdening developer time. There’s a free version, but upgrading to the paid version was worth it for us; the integration with our other favorite services Google Analytics and MailChimp is key, and $65 for a product that I’ve used to set up 4-5 launch pages is a heck of a bargain.

Pivotal Tracker - At one level, managing a development team of two (where I represent one-half) seems like it shouldn’t require a highly structured project management tool. Submitting requests generally means tapping someone on the shoulder. However, I’d argue that it’s even more essential for our team, given that we often work asynchronous hours across several locations. As I’ve grown into my PM duties, I’ve migrated between several tools, and loved working with Asana (whose keyboard shortcuts are fabulous). But Pivotal Tracker is the “default” option for so many startups for a reason – it’s actually less flexible, and the structure that it imparts on PMs keeps me reasonable about the speed we can crank out improvements. $7/month is worth it for us, even with so many good free options out there.

InDinero - another Y Combinator company, InDinero is the “Mint for Startups.” When I’m spending my day split between literally every functional area at Proximate, I often don’t have time to manually keep track of our receipts as they come in. InDinero links to our bank account and does this automagically, and the dynamic graphs, balance sheet, and P+L statements are great to check on my iPhone app once in a while (“Hey cool! We’re not broke!”). While it was great to show our team that we just passed break-even on a shiny graph, where InDinero totally saved me hours (and an audit) was tax time. If you’re the unfortunate one tasked with doing your returns next year, remember this tool.

So, I guess what I’m really trying to say to each of these services is: thanks. They work quite well for us and all have free versions you should check out before paying.

What did I miss? Let me know in the comments.

As the product manager at Proximate, one of my most important roles is to serve as the mediator between our engineering team and business development. It’s a demanding job, keeping track of our developers’ ever-more-complex timeline while incorporating the real-time customer insights of our sales team. But someone has to do it.

“Uh, aren’t you guys three people right now?”

Well, yeah. On the surface of it, it should seem like our organization might not need a lot of active mediation. IBM we are not; when I say I serve as the go-between between engineering and biz dev, I’m talking to one full-time person in each “department.” But in my first six months on the job, I’ve started to discover a few truths that have helped me as a newly-minted product manager and might relate to others working on a small team.

You’re a PM because you’re average.

That is, you’re supposed to be the average of the teams you work with. As the PM, actively directing the development process and preparing for its payoff in successful sales, there’s no substitute – and no excuse – for not actively engaging in both sides of a startup’s life cycle. You have to make something and sell it, and be comfortable not having complete control over either side of the process, and with not being “the one in the spotlight” for either one.

Ultimately, you’re accountable for the results of the team, and particularly for making sure that any slip-ups don’t negatively impact the whole project. I’ve found that my mood at any given point is a pretty good barometer of how well we’re clicking as a team; if expectations are off on one side of the dev-sales equation or the other, it’s going to mean stress for me. (And that’s a good thing.)

Product needs take precedence – except when they don’t.

I’ve frequently seen the PM role described as “making sure sales stays out of the engineers’ way.” While we’re blessed to have an experienced sales lead with product experience, that friction between product and sales timelines can sometimes occur. At these early stages, it can happen often, given that the spec must be fluid as we actively work with paying customers to test out our hypotheses. (Steve Blank and Eric Ries must have known they were gonna make my life difficult.)

I’m finding that, when I have to mediate between the needs of making a particular sale and the need to keep the project on track as laid out, I side probably 80% of the time with my engineer and the existing pipeline. However, it’s often that 20% of the time – revamping a feature quickly to meet an important beta customer’s demands, for example – that moves the needle on revenue. Realizing that we don’t yet have a product that’s perfect for anybody, let alone everybody, and having the confidence to sell it on its current merits, is key to staying on our targets. The careful flexibility to recognize when the product needs that one more merit to sell is how we’ll grow beyond those targets.

Biz dev buys the pizza.

When you’re working with a small team, crisis moments mean it’s up to the PM to pull everyone together, regardless of their functional role. It’s in those moments, when you’re trying to focus and put out the present fire, that finding ways to involve all functional roles builds incredible cohesion, trust, and plain old joy in working together. As often as possible, sales and dev should know what each other are up to, by being there. Working with a startup really shines when you feel like you’re working on challenging problems with smart people you respect and enjoy, across the organization.

I’ll tell a short story to illustrate.

Late last year, we were working on our first big beta project, an expensive conference projected to sign up 500 attendees. Having tested the system to open for registration at 8am the next morning, the rest of the team shut off their computers and prepared to go home for some much-needed sleep. As I stayed behind to finish up some email, an automated warning hit my inbox at 10pm. Our PayPal account, working just a moment ago, was now non-functional and on administrative hold.

In a panic, I called PayPal and found that they had frozen our account to check if our service met their requirements. (This despite our having run the PayPal system for a month; never, EVER rely on PayPal.) The review would take weeks, and there was no way to keep the system running while they deliberated. Our website was effectively non-functional for the foreseeable future. After a few cathartic-but-useless choice words for various PayPal employees, I resigned myself to the reality that we’d just forfeited thousands of dollars in revenue and completely lost a customer. I prepared to call the organizers and apologize, but first went off to deliver the bad news to my team.

Thankfully, I was to meet the team and some friends next door at the bar before we went our separate ways. I slunk into my chair and broke the news our team. Our developer just refused to accept the reality, I thought – “Well **** it, we’re gonna rip out our payments system and rebuild it tonight to use Stripe.” (ALWAYS rely on Stripe.) We threw some money down on the table, left without our beers (the tragic part of the story), and ran back to work.

That night, our team of three stayed up until 5am and, with the help of two amazing dev friends, fashioned a new payments workflow from scratch. I can hardly call what I did “project management” – it was primarily directing panic – but everyone put aside their roles and did exactly what was needed. I’ll never forget “biz dev,” with no sales to make at 2am, running out for pizza and pop. I watched the whole team fell asleep on the floor an hour before registration opened; the Stripe logs tailing, successful charges on the monitor above their heads.

A three person startup. It’s no Microsoft, but for me it’s a lot to manage.

And I wouldn’t trade it for any job in the world.

In a great Wired article from January, Jonah Lehrer thinks about events in the context of homophily, or the tendency humans have to seek out social connections where they identify similarities with themselves.

It’s the classic “birds of a feather, flock together” phenomenon, and has some interesting implications for the way we form social connections.  It’s long been theorized that homophily can play an important role in a variety of decisions we make, such as our political leanings or healthy habits.

It’s long been known that social network theory can add a lot to our understanding of business relationships. But a 2007 Columbia University study Lehrer noted in his article applies professional networks specifically to events.

Do people mix at mixers? The answer is no…Mixer parties are supposed to free their guests from the constraints of preexisting social structure so they can approach strangers and make new connections. Nevertheless, our results show that guests at a mixer tend to spend the time talking to the few other guests whom they already know well.

Frankly, I would have loved to be a guest at this “party.” With everyone wearing electronic-tracker name tags, it would have seemed a bit like being an endangered animal – “the office-working professional.”

Lehrer believes all this similarity is a terrible thing. For example, he cites research from Stanford that suggests too much similarity hurts entrepreneurs’ ability to be innovative, due to a lack of challenge to their ideas.

But there are also some wonderful benefits to seeking similarities. Particularly in a business context, when time to network is limited and the potential return on investment for a great contact is high, using your time to warm up an old contact or find new ones similar to what’s worked before is the best use of your time.

Frankly, it seems that the scientists involved in the “mixer” study at Columbia, and Jonah Lehrer too, are holding networking up to be a broadening exercise that it just isn’t.

At any mixer I might go to, it would be great for me to meet someone in marketing, mobile development, or human resources. If I’m looking to hire or partner, that’s what I’ll be doing. But for most of my time professional mixer, I’m interested in meeting people also working on Rails development or matching algorithms, and especially seeing if I can find any sales leads to follow up with. That’s why I’ll be spending a lot of time with people I know, looking for introductions.

Maybe if I can spare a second, I check out that tray of little hot dogs that was just carried by, too.

That’s what I know I can use, and given that I can’t meet everyone at the event tonight, that’s who I will seek out.

___

The researchers do highlight several intuitive, but important, hypotheses about what makes productive professional networking happen. They aren’t scientifically proven, but both are quite valuable for finding great people at events:

There is a greater likelihood of encounter and engagement between two guests who are similar on demographic dimensions and other characteristics that indicate common experiences.

• In other words, it’s not a bad idea to do some reading on who’s going to be at the event, and see if you can meet with those people with interests and experiences like yours; it’s got a higher chance of success.

Two guests at the mixer will be more likely to encounter and engage with each other if one of them is already engaged in a group that includes one or more pre-mixer friends of the other.

• Use those social connections to help you find and be successfully introduced to your targeted connections!

If you’re anywhere in the startup world and haven’t seen the unbelievably painful “Startup Guys” segment, consider it required reading for this post, and your life in general.

Our Startup Guy protagonists spew an unbelievable amount of startup-marketing BS and start several companies in the span of a four-minute video. It’s a spectacular waste of time, but then again you can actually stop this train wreck by closing your browser window. [Try doing that at your next cocktail mixer.]

True to startup form, though, our founders get into a bit of an argument within 50 seconds of the start of the video. [Luckily they return to groupthink nonsense just a few seconds later.]

“If I could just drive the bus for a second?”

“Go for it…”

“Branded integration from a user-side content platform is dead.”

“It’s dead.”

“It’s dead.”

Say what? Just because I enjoy a challenge, let’s see if we can go one step further than anyone’s ever gone and actually parse what the hell these guys are saying. (No guarantees as to whether that’s even possible, as the terms are deliberate nonsense.) Then we’ll do the easy part and prove it wrong.

What are some “user-side content platforms” that benefit from “branded integration” and take a business to the next level in name recognition, prestige, revenues? Is it ever a good idea to let the public play around with a brand you’ve built, with your official blessing? Can giving up control of your carefully curated identity, even a little bit, by stamping outsiders’ creations with your own brand help you succeed?

For a case study, I nominate the gold standard of conferences and one of the world’s most powerful new brands: TED. While I’m at, why don’t I pull in another gold-standard business brand, Harvard Business Review, which covered the world’s ultimate event today on its blog.

(The mix of high and low in the post is getting crazy. Keep reading, I’ll redeem it, promise.)

TED (which stands for Technology Entertainment Design) was started in 1984 and has long been known as a hyper-exclusive, hyper-expensive forum for the world’s elite to present their most interesting ideas, network, and soak up the California sun in early March. But, as Joshua Gans puts it in HBR, TED hit mainstream when curator Chris Anderson conceived the masterstroke of democratizing TED’s “ideas worth spreading”, the snappy 15-minute talks given by world experts on a variety of topics, by posting them on TED’s website. Gans explains:

[Anderson] took a bet that TED would become more attractive as if its published works were widely exposed and shared than it would if they were locked down. That change turned the actual conference into a “premium” offering (where you could see the talks live and interact with participants) compared with TED on the web, which was free for all. This move enhanced the status of TED and served as a bonus to the TED speakers. They could now benefit from exclusivity — few were invited to give TED talks — and from massive exposure. […] Making TED a shared experience only enhanced the value of the more exclusive experience.

Far from making TED the annual event less special, the free videos brought TED the brand to an audience of millions and exponentially increased its notoriety. With the promise of exposure, the value of a TED talk exploded, as did the quality. But that’s not where Anderson and TED ended their expansion. After giving the public a taste of what the TED conference was all about, they found a way to keep the original event hyper-exclusive while leveraging TED’s popularity worldwide.

The world’s most control-freak premium conference did something crazy - it open-sourced the TED experience. This year there will be hundreds of local, independently-organized TEDx events, from Sub-Saharan Africa to Somerville (and Boston, and Cambridge…).

The Startup Guys may not have a solid idea of which company they’re representing minute-to-minute (they start up, take VC funding, and fold on at least three in the course of the five minutes), but they’re totally sure of one thing:

“Absolutely no brand-cuffs.”

TED, on the other hand, loves to “brand-cuff” its TEDx curators and participants. If you want to use the TED name to enhance the prestige of your content, you’re going to do it their way. The TEDx model requires that curators attend a central TED event and apply for a license (which is not automatically renewed each year). Furthermore, 25% of the talks must be selected from the hundreds of pre-recorded talks by world experts at “big TED,” and there must be no advertising. Like all good creative work, restraint ensures a quality product.

HBR believes TED has the cachet of traditional platforms like print and television, but the speed and reach of new media like Twitter - and that it’s ideally built to leverage both in this hybrid form. Those ideas are not only worth sharing - they are almost guaranteed to be shared.

TED has become a publisher (curating content and disseminating it) and a publishing platform (a format designed to attract and disseminate more content). The platform is akin to other new forms of publishing such as blogs or tweets. A TED talk is something that can be described and that gives it informational power. TED could have done the traditional publishing thing — put up walls and sold exclusivity. Instead, it has chosen to embrace the notion that information has the most value when it is shared widely. Perhaps traditional publishers of other forms of media should take note.

Sorry, Startup Guys. “Brand-integrated user-side content platforms” might not even be a real thing, but they aren’t dead.

TED makes them work better than anybody else.

Takeaways for event organizers:

• Whatever you’re doing, pay obsessive attention the details that make your event high-quality. Brand cuff, baby.
• Get your content out there to the broadest audience possible. Exposure helps your event, your speakers, and the public.
• Build a community across years - consider releasing your content bit-by-bit to engage your audience until next year, or hold meetups.
• Make yourself part of a bigger movement - join one, or build one. Find and link up with other conferences on your topic.

Let’s say you are attending a TEDx event, where speakers from different fields from all over the world, come to talk about the latest technologies, their achievements, and magnificent ideas. Yes, the talks are great, but we are all here to network, and the time has come! You start going around the room, talking to a few people, and the moment of truth is here, did you bring your business cards?

You are now frantically searching for them in your pockets, your bag, your wallet, but no luck. Isn’t it such an awkward situation where people are handing you their business card and you have to apologize for not having yours? They might think you are stupid for not bringing your cards to TEDx, or that you only have a few and don’t think they are important enough to hand them a card. 

It only gets worse when you head back to your office and stare a the pile of cards you got (let’s hope you remember the names of the people you want to get in touch with). What to do now?!

Our post was inspired by a recent article from Scott Kirsner. Scott says: 

These little rectangles accumulate in pockets, purses, and desk drawers. In the 20th century, we knew what to do with them: staple them to other pieces of paper and insert those pieces into a device called a Rolodex. The number of Rolodexes on a person’s desk was an indicator of power and influence.

In the 21st century, though, we want phone numbers and e-mail addresses to be digitally accessible. I have been exploring the best ways to accomplish that - by scanning cards, photographing them with a mobile phone, mailing them to someone else to deal with, or trying to avoid exchanging cards entirely. The only strategy I have eschewed is typing the information in myself.

What I personally do is take a photo of the card, email it to myself with the contact’s name and company in the subject line. Absurdly manual, and I need a better solution. 

Thanks to Scott’s diligent research, we have options: 

CardMunch (it’s free):

Unfortunately, it’s only available for the iPhone, with no plans announced for an Android version. Given a decent picture of a business card, CardMunch not only returns perfect data in the proper fields, but it also tries to find the person’s profile on LinkedIn, the business networking site. (LinkedIn bought the company in January 2011.) The app gives you the ability to connect with the person via LinkedIn, and also to export their contact info to your iPhone’s address book. CardMunch doesn’t bother trying to automatically recognize the text on the card; instead it sends the digital image to an army of self-employed typists around the world who act as your outsourced secretaries in exchange for a few pennies per card. To ensure accuracy, each card is typed in by as many as four workers, and the results compared. CardMunch promises a 24-hour turnaround time, though the actual results can be much quicker.

ScanBizCards (priced at $6.99): 

It first tries to decipher the text on a card. Then, you can either make the corrections and fill in any missing data, or you can request that someone else do it for you. (The app comes with a couple of free transcription credits; after that, transcriptions cost 18 cents per card.) When the app failed to notice that a person’s office was in Cambridge, and missed the company’s name because it was printed as a swirly logo, I requested a transcription. It came back within 10 minutes, with everything entered perfectly.

CamCard (priced at $6.99):

It doesn’t include the human transcription option. Both CamCard and ScanBizCards back up a copy of your data on their secure websites, and they also both offer free versions of their apps that have limited functionality.

CloudContacts:

You toss the business cards you would like to have digitized into an envelope, mail them to the company, and they scan and correct them for you. You can then download a file from CloudContacts’ website that can be imported into whatever software you use for managing your contacts. (CloudContacts will even transcribe notes you have written on the back of a card - as long as they are legible.) The company charges $29.95 to digitize 100 cards. 

The challenge here is accumulation: 

If you keep up with cards and scan them as you get them, any of the mobile apps will probably work just fine. If you let them accumulate and don’t have time to process them, it’s hard to beat the CloudContacts solution.

Scott and Sid Viswanathan (co-founder of CardMunch) both agree: 

That paper business cards may be like handshakes - a central and ineradicable part of the ritual of meeting someone new. “We’ve been very focused on not breaking the social protocol of exchanging business cards,’’ says Viswanathan, who is now a product manager at LinkedIn. “Even though the mobile device is becoming the center of your contact universe, the new Rolodex, it still seems like the most frictionless way to exchange information today is the business card.’’

What do you think? Will the business card be obsolete?

To read the Scott Kirsner article, click here.

You might laugh at that Facebook status, but this guy is admitting that he’s got a problem. And, no, I’m not talking about the fact that he’s using Facebook on a Blackberry. That’s another post. His problem is my problem, and probably yours too.

Why are some perfectly sociable people occasionally really awkward at the parties, meetups, and other events that seem to be happening literally every night in the Boston startup scene? 

We’re Proximate, and our first product is an event platform that sells tickets, prints name tags, and publishes an online event directory customized for each attendee based on their social network profile. But most of all, we think a lot about you’re so awkward and prefer to hang around the cheese platter rather than having great conversations and finding somebody interesting.

In eighteen months as a conference organizer, six months developing Proximate, and twenty-three years of being awkward, I’ve developed a three-point theory on why events are the highest-value, but also most difficult, time for people to make new social connections. [Former management consultant alert.]

Flash networks: this event is the only time you’ll get these networking opportunities.

Conferences are time-limited social instances where participants are gathered for a certain reason. Usually, they’ve got more people who share the same interests than they normally would in their everyday lives. You might normally be the only graphic designer at your startup, but now you’re in a conference hall with 300 counterparts.

Upside: You aren’t a unique snowflake, no matter what Mom says. Here are a lot of people just like you. They might even know something you don’t! That could be helpful.
Downside: this event is unique: who knows when you’ll bump into these same people again, or whether they’ll be in the same position to connect with you at another time? Get a move on.

However, while the number of potential contacts is exponentially greater than usual, so too is the opportunity cost of networking at random; the potential for career-boosting contacts makes the prospect of unhelpful conversations immensely frustrating when you’ve only got at most a few hours.

Liminal moments: to meet interesting people, you’ve got to be interesting.

When you’re at a good event, you and the other attendees are in liminal states, transitional periods as an individual moves between social roles. For better or worse, it’s less about what you actually do at your day job at these events, and more about how you present yourself and your aspirations, that will determine what you get out of events.

It’s probably that phenomenon that irks a lot of people, and makes them feel like “networking” is a dishonest or deceptive activity. No doubt, everybody knows that guy who’s full of it at these events. But the liminal state is more nuanced than that - everybody’s faking it (being an aspirational self) and nobody’s faking it (feeling a bit out of their element and projecting to make up for it).

Research shows that liminal moments encourage openness and quick formation of friendships. Everyone is in a condition of social vulnerability and can be more frank about the desire to connect. The barriers to finding and engaging with someone drop. Frankly, it’s super-uncomfortable at times. But the fact that everyone is theoretically in it together is what makes it easier to reach out and form a relationship.

Clear objectives: get in, get out, hit the appetizer table. [repeat.]

While ordinary life demands a longer lead-up to forming a professionally useful social tie, networking at events often does away with this requirement. This is perhaps even the main objective of conferences and events: to pack useful peers in a room and connect them as quickly as possible. This context is known to pretty much everyone attending, and your ability to be comfortable in that context goes a long way to determine how good you are at the whole networking game.

Ideally, the objective of forming a great number of good connections provides a convenient unstated understanding. It should do away with awkwardness and insecurity. In reality, it’s often not so simple because people have a hard time sticking to that objective - we stay talking to one person who we hit it off with, and don’t meet other potentially interesting attendees, or we don’t have a clear sense of who we would even like to meet in the first place.

So, our three reasons events are a different social space. Now, let’s use them to make you less awkward.

Flash networks. So many people, so little time, and this is your only chance.

• This is your kick in the butt: don’t walk out of here without knowing somebody new.
• When you’re at the event, do your best to be fully present and attentive; after all it’s only a few hours.

Liminal states. Everybody’s outside their comfort zone. Get over it.

• You don’t normally check for non-existent texts, right? (Right?)
• Use this free pass to be confident and approachable. Be confident like you’re successful. Meet someone who can help make it a reality.

Clear objectives. Make no mistake: everybody wants to be your friend, but this is partially serious business, too.

• This is a great moment to meet anyone who’s in that room, because they came here to meet you too. You can engage people with confidence.
• Make those weak ties - research shows you’re more likely to get a job, a new hire, whatever you need, through events than even your close friends.