Tag: Professional Networking

Networking at Events for Introverts

I am petrified before attending any event!! There, I said it. Mixers, happy hours, cocktails, group dinners, you name it – the right side of my brain hates them all. Even attempting to “work the room” is equivalent to getting a root canal for me. Who to say hi to first? What does one talk about with a complete stranger? Why am I even here? My mind is fuzzy with these & many other questions, even as I attempt to fill out my name tag with an oversized marker, using my rarely-used & barely-legible handwriting, while awkwardly stooping over the registration desk.

But with experience, you learn to consult both sides of your brain. And while the right side of my brain is freaking out, the left side is reminding me of all the useful insights I have gathered, the wonderful collaborators I have met (many of whom have become close friends), & the positive energy I have taken away from these mixers, happy hours, cocktails & group dinners.

So yes, I am a self-confessed introvert who has been on a long journey of figuring out how to get myself to attend & do better at events. While I curse myself while driving over, palms sweaty, brain thinking through all the small talk I would need to be prepped for, admittedly I have been better off in my career & life after attending almost every one of those events.

Am sure you have heard of that old wisdom – “you should do what you fear the most ‘cos that’s where your growth is”. In that spirit, around the Fall of last year, I resolved to attend every good event I was invited to. But this time, I went in with an approach that I felt would work for me, incorporating all that I had observed about myself during & after these events.

Here are some ideas from this approach:

  1. Ask for an attendee list before the event – I figured that not knowing who I will be bumping into gives me major anxiety (yes, I am a prep-first kinda guy!). So I now ask for attendee lists upfront, so I can identify a few people I would definitely want to introduce myself to. This reduces uncertainty & guarantees at least a few interesting convos. PS: how do you do this when the guest list isn’t available, you ask? Simple – to begin with, I focus on having a good conversation with the event lead 🙂 Guarantees one valuable discussion at the minimum.
  2. Keep modest goals, quality over quantity – early on in my career, I used to put a lot of pressure on myself to meet the most number of people at an event, which made the whole thing really unpleasant for me. Over time, I have realized that spending focused time with a few quality people is significantly more valuable than exchanging business cards with tens of folks. So now, for an average close-knit event, my goal is to walk out with 1-3 quality connections that I can follow up with later. This reframing has been a real game-changer for me!
  3. For large events, set up 1:1 meetings on the sidelines – while attending large conferences, I didn’t even know where to begin, leave alone spending quality time with relevant folks. One hack I have developed is to avoid networking en masse at these conferences. I post on LinkedIn & Twitter that I am attending a particular event & then use outbound (using attendee list) + inbound (via social) to schedule 1:1 meetings on the sidelines. This takes the pressure off of working a large room & ensures a number of focused interactions.
  4. Connect on social post-event – events are just a lead-gen channel. The real value is in transforming these cold connections into warm relationships. Many times, in-person follow-ups are hard to schedule. I have found interacting on social (Twitter & LinkedIn) with these connections to be immensely useful in both giving us more context about each other, as well as maintaining momentum in the conversation. Personally, my social media game is much better than my events game, so this is one of my top strategies.
  5. Lastly, be genuinely curious! – my coach said something beautiful to me last year – “to form meaningful connections, replace judgment with curiosity”. Meeting new people with genuine curiosity, without overthinking about motives & outcomes, totally elevates the quality of human interaction. If I have to suggest just one mindset that can help you the most while meeting new connections, this is it! Whether we are introverts or extroverts, we all crave genuine human connection. And I believe that authentic curiosity is its strongest source.

This topic is very close to my heart so I hope these points are helpful as you initiate new connections at events. I am very much a work-in-progress at this, so please share your learnings too 🙏🏽

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LinkedIn Search is broken… and another Workomo use case

Workomo gives you actionable context on the people who truly matter!

I love the days when I organically encounter a solid use-case for Workomo (“Relationships Intelligence for Power Professionals”). Today, I was having a Whatsapp discussion with a good friend, who is also an ex-founder (I had invested in her last startup). As part of another early stage startup now, she is incubating a new micro-lending product in India, and wanted to check with me whether I could intro her to someone working in the space.

Now, being an active startup ecosystem stakeholder & connector, I really want to help her. Given my Alibaba/ Ant Financial/ Paytm background, finding someone with “lending” experience/ expertise should be fairly easy for me. Except it’s not. Barring 1–2 people who are top-of-mind for me right now, it’s extremely hard for me to know who among the people I already know/ have shared history or context with, will be relevant for a potential warm intro. I tried to do a LinkedIn search with keywords like “lending” and “fintech”, but got crappy results wherein I don’t even know any of the people in the first page search results. PS: I don’t even know why I am being shown “company results for fintech”, which btw, are also beyond crappy.

Actual search results page from my LinkedIn profile
Actual search results page from my LinkedIn profile

Compare this with how Workomo helped me solve for this pain point. Currently, the product is in early private beta stage, wherein for me personally, I am tracking about ~160 of my top-priority professional relationships. These are ex-colleagues, customers, batch-mates, investors etc. — essentially, people with whom I already have a shared history, context, modicum of trust and double opt-in.

I went into Workomo, clicked on the “Relationships” tab and ran a search with the keywords “fintech” and “lending” (at an MVP stage, these are few of the many manual tags I have been using to curate my relationships). I got 9 and 2 search results respectively, comprising founders, VCs and operators, all of whom I know well-enough to ping and check.

Actual Workomo screenshots
Actual Workomo screenshots

This is what Workomo is doing at such an early MVP stage. We are in process of building an AI-powered “context engine” that will ingest hundreds of signals and “auto-tag” your top-priority relationships. Imagine your own, personalized, contextual “LinkedIn Search”, working in the way it should, helping you search & curate a high-quality dataset comprising only of relationships that truly matter to you!

Intrigued? Sign-up to request a private beta invite today. We will be delighted to partner with you as an early adopter, in building Workomo out.

How to think about building features at the beta stage?

It’s been an interesting journey for me as a product person, building Workomo over last few months. Having anchored the company mission on my personal pain point, the product roadmap for Workomo (at least for next 24 months) is quite clear in my head. Still, it’s not been easy to think through the order & prioritization of building features. This is a completely new “0-to-1” challenge for me as in my previous roles at Alibaba, Quixey and IDG Ventures, I was mostly used to evaluating, building & scaling products with at least some existing user traction.

As I work towards the private beta release of Workomo, the following frameworks have been really helpful for me in product planning:

  1. Running Lean by Ash Maurya — I really identify with the Lean way of building early stage products. While certain elements of the Lean process haven’t worked particularly well in my case (mockup based proto, hacking a solution without UI/ UX considerations), I have actively used the major core principles of Lean philosophy — iterative approach, user-pull over company-push, maniacally tracking return-on-effort, avoiding wastage, only focusing on 1–2 activities that matter at this stage of the startup. Though, it’s important to point out that I have found the need to adapt these approaches to my context by suitably modifying them.
  2. Focusing on the product’s “Atomic Unit” — I learned of this concept via a recent LinkedIn post by Pravin Jadhav. It was originally articulated by Fred Wilson in this 2012 post. What are the atomic units of popular products? Twitter — tweet, LinkedIn — resume, Instagram — picture, Gmail — email, Dropbox — file. It’s a lovely way to think about your product stack. For Workomo, the atomic unit is “a contact”. And that’s what I am building first for the private beta release.

I was on a Zoom call today morning — the moment I ended it, I received this version update pop-up, with following new features:

Zoom is releasing features like confirm starting video when joining a meeting, dropbox integration etc. ONLY AFTER going public!! Just proves that as early stage founders, we need to be much, much more disciplined about building additional features into our products.

Ultimately, there will be one, core UVP feature that will mainly drive user adoption. Our job as product founders is to discover & build it in an iterative manner while burning through minimum set of cycles.

PS: Workomo is your smart & simple professional relationships management hub. If you are sick of managing your networks on an excel sheet, do sign-up for free private beta access.

Introducing Workomo — smart simple professional relationships management

Am excited to share the private beta launch of the product I have been building over last few months — Workomo.

Workomo is your smart & simple professional relationships management hub.

Workomo was born out of my own frustration of finding it really hard & inefficient to engage deeply & build stronger relationships with my top professional networks. During my career as a VC, startup operator and founder over the last decade, spread across US, India and China, I have been a power user of LinkedIn & Twitter to expand my network. However, while they have helped me to grow my “connections”, they have added minimal value to my effort to build truly meaningful career “relationships” that drive tangible value in my professional endeavors and help me achieve my career goals.

This is because I need a very different set of product capabilities to truly go deeper with my networks. Workomo’s product vision is specifically centered around these elements — I call them the CUDO stack:

Curate — Defining who these top relationships are, where I need to double down. Maintaining an intelligent & interactive database that makes networking “actions” like sorting, tagging, messaging, searching etc. easy.

Updates — Staying contextually updated on these people, to have a personalized view of their career approach, aspirations & needs. Likewise, also being able to share more privileged & personal updates about my career with them. This makes it easier to double-click on mutual areas of interest, proactively identify tangible collaboration opportunities & have powerful talking points during mutual interactions.

Dialogue — Being able to have a rich dialogue around specific topics or opportunities. Easily sharing privileged career updates, moments & info with a curated group of people in a clutter-free environment that doesn’t create noise for both sender & recipients. Enabling high-quality, two-way, double opt-in interactions to happen, instead of impersonal emails or noisy messaging groups.

Opportunities — Finally, if I can curate my network, stay contextually updated on them and have a meaningful, double opt-in dialogue with them, I can combine these 3 forces to drive tangible value exchange with my top career relationships. Eg. reaching out to 5 old customers for product feedback on my new startup, sharing an angel/ VC deal with a small, curated set of people, connecting a top engineer with select firms where I see a mutual fit, doing a limited & high-quality outreach while looking for a job etc.

While CUDO is the long term product vision, Workomo will initially offer a tantalizing sliver of this stack, something that delivers immediate value to early adopter users, and then closely partner with them to build it out as per their needs.

While the genesis of Workomo is aimed at solving my own pain points, am creating it for YOU — the new-age professional, working in this disruptive knowledge era. I want to equip you with tech-driven capabilities that help you move away from garnering more LinkedIn “connections” that you have never met or heard of, or more Twitter “followers” that only drive dopamine & no real job value, to having a set of deep, meaningful professional relationships that help you achieve tangible career goals.

Ultimately, Workomo’s mission is to build technology that helps professionals move away from generic, top-of-the-funnel networking, and towards creating a set of meaningful, highly engaged relationships that truly help you achieve your career goals.

Workomo is currently in private beta. If you find this intriguing enough and would like to become an early adopter, please sign up to receive a free private beta invite.

Excited to hear your initial thoughts & feedback, and looking forward to serving you in becoming an empowered professional relationship builder.