Into The Mixer

The other night I did something new for Limulus Systems – I went to a “Entrepreneurs/Cofounders Mixer” organized through Meetup.com. If you don’t know about Meetup.com, it’s a web site for that facilitates creation of groups around any and all interests, from printmaking to programming, from soup to nuts, and of course, startup company entrepreneurship. It’s social networking taken to an extreme level – face to face meetings! I had a few questions around starting my own company, and thought that perhaps a meeting of like-minded individuals might be able to answer my questions.

At Meetup.com I picked a group, “Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs and Startups”, that looked interesting and relevant and I signed up for a meeting in San Francisco. It was a big step for me, because in general the thought of facing a roomful of strangers gives me the willies, but I figured I should try. The meeting sounded good; the published schedule allowed time to mingle and network, with a little time for presentations from other attendees.

Before the event, the email notices from participants were flying and most of them read about the same. A typical message would be,

“Hi, I’m an entrepreneur interested is starting an exciting/novel/disruptive company in the field of [X]. If you’re an IT/programming/technical person I’d love to talk to you at the mixer!”

Everybody seemed to want to network their way to a techie. Was I the only one not looking to hire a programmer out of this gathering? It made me wonder if I was attending the right meeting.

So what was it like? The evening went by in a blur of handing out and receiving business cards, but I’ll do my best to describe the scene. The networking portion of the meeting felt a little like speed dating; it was seen as completely proper to pop in and out of conversations quickly, gathering what information you could from people in brief snippets of conversation before you moved on to the next person. In other settings that might have been impolite, but here it was merely efficient. The meeting was held in bar, which I didn’t mind early on, but it soon got crowded and the noise level rose so that you could barely hear what the person next to you was saying. That’s OK for a bar, but less than ideal for conducting business with people for the first time. I came away from the evening with my throat hurting from shouting at the person standing next to me.

The presentation portion turned out to be a haphazard affair. Instead of an organized presentation on the struggles of a thoughtful CEO, about midway through the evening the organizer announced that anyone who wanted to say something about their company was free to do so and should take a turn in line. One by one, those eager promoters stood on a chair and tried to shout out their “elevator pitches” in the crowded, noisy bar. It was a hopeless situation. I stood fairly near the speakers, but could only make out about every third word. I finally gave up on hearing anybody and went to the back of the room where the free food was coming out.

Not surprisingly, there were no IT/programming/technical people at an Entrepreneurs/Cofounders Mixer; well, almost none. There was one guy, an inventor, who had designed both an airplane that could purportedly take off in eighteen feet of runway (he had pictures and a model) and an electricity generator that sounded suspiciously like a perpetual-motion machine. Unfortunately for him, inventing wasn’t paying his bills despite having thirty patents, so we also talked about his limousine business. I politely collected his business card, on the off-chance that I might need an airplane or a perpetual-motion machine in the future. Apart from him, though, there was nobody there who could actually create anything. There were a fair number of people who attended in hopes of profiting indirectly from all this entrepreneurial energy; the human resources consultants, marketing directors, legal/intellectual property types, etc., trolling for business. They were at least at the right meeting for networking, though it wasn’t clear there were many jobs to be handed out. I got the impression that entrepreneurs with money and jobs didn’t need to come to meetings like this.

Mostly it was would-be entrepreneurs like me, so if you can imagine a whole bar full of very earnest, ego-driven, highly motivated people, each of whom thinks they have the best idea since sliced bread, you get the picture. Everybody was very pleasant, and eager to network (gotta find those technical people!), so talking to people was easier than I had anticipated, but it was not the most useful way to spend an evening. The only thing the meeting cost was time and the price of a couple glasses of wine, so I wasn’t too disappointed, but I had hoped for more substance to the meeting. Maybe I need my own group, an “Introverted Entrepreneurs of the East Bay”?