I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Your network is strongly correlated with your success regardless of the metric your optimising for. The serendipity of the Valley is one of the things I miss the most.
Go where events flow fastest. Surround yourself with a churning mass of people and things happening.
I’ve yet to find a great venue in London with anything that remotely resembles SF. Everything you’ve ever heard about the Valley being special rings true. Most interestingly is how different the personalities are in the Valley. The valley is to a huge extent a monoculture with all the pitfalls that comes from being one. Just so happens that I fit in perfectly. The technical founders are far and in between here. I seldom meet people who have an interest for both business and programming.
Anyways the conundrum of the London scene is totally unrelated to what I wanted to write about. I read a great piece about networking and your reach grows exponentially as your network grows.
The Key to Luck Is Being a People Connector by Jocelyn K. Glei
Let’s suppose you have first-name contacts – strong and weak links – with three hundred people. Let’s further suppose that each of them has an average of three hundred links. This means that your secondary links-friend-of-a-friend-would total some ninety thousand people. And your tertiary links-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-would total twenty-seven million.