Reflections on three weeks in the valley

- Johan-Ulrik Lervang

So after three weeks in the valley I have learned quite a few things. One - three or four weeks will never be enough time to network in place like this. Although my "colleagues" might not agree, the only one actually having traction in regards to his business idea has been Steven. Steven has had the advantage of having friends living here prior to coming and therefore being able to leverage their networks. That being said, it has in no way been a waste of time for the rest of us. Seeing how networking occurs here raises quite a few questions - especially as Danes. This leads to my second point.

Networking in Silcon Valley at least seems to have people divided into two categories.  On one hand we have the people too busy to interact with people not within their area of expertise for more than 20 seconds and on the other hand we have people wanting to network, hoping that other things might be brought to the table. I am sure that all the us, the participating students, have experienced people coming up to us, sounding genially interested in knowing more about us only to walk away within a minute - as a Dane that comes off quite rude, but it is the rules of the game here. At the same time we have also experienced the other version. Last Thursday after having visited Progression Partners in Palo Alto - Yuval, Johan, Jakub and I went to visit a two women company called Panafold. Johan had befriended one of the two founders at an investors pitch event earlier that week. After having played around a bit with their application allowing Panafold to record our feedback and how we interacted with their application we sat down to talk about we had been so far and our ideas. Now these two women knew a lot of professors around the US, especially who to talk to even though our ideas ranged from employer branding to image recognition software.

Now I have since asked myself what I think about these two ways of networking. First of all both types network with the sole goal of obtaining access to the other persons network - in my mind a very shallow way of interacting with people. That being said I see reasoning behind both types. Going in depth with multiple people is time consuming and if you are on a mission and need to meet the right people now, it is likely not the way to go. On the other hand pursuing the right person now also means that you could cut yourself off from befriending the person, who himself might not be interesting, but knows the right people. Especially at these meet-ups this would appear to be an extremely fatal networking strategy as people do vastly different things.

In the end there is definitely a cultural difference. In Denmark we like to get to know a person before we introduce them to our network - here you don't. We've been told several times that we need to improve our ability to cut people off introducing their idea by simply leaving. I must say that I often find people's ideas interesting and inspiring and be honest I like to give people feedback on their ideas - at least when I am able to comprehend them. Deep down I am probably too Danish for this game because in the end I just want us all to be friends.