MGMT Newsletter #114: Apr, Week 2 2022

Networking in the Age of Elon

Apr 15, 2022

Networking in the Age of Elon

For Twitter employees it was supposed to be a recharge week without meetings. You can imagine how quickly that got turned upside down when Elon entered the app. Just a couple weeks before payments startup Fast hit the wall and shut down suddenly leaving hundreds of employees looking for new jobs. In a rapidly changing macroeconomic environment, things are getting tougher out there!

These days, whether you work at a large public tech company or a seemingly fast growing private company, your reality can change very quickly. And most of that is going to be outside your control. That's life.

Employees at both of those companies and many more beyond are probably thinking about doing some networking. Whether it's for the next job or attempting to reconnect we all get to the point where we need to poke our heads up and try to figure out what's next.

My perspective on the concept of "networking" has evolved a lot over the years. In the beginning it felt necessary to try to meet as many people as possible in order to open doors. As you can imagine, there wasn't a lot of value being given in exchange for the time I was receiving. Mostly just meeting with nice people who were willing to give me a few minutes of their time.

Later, I thought it more necessary to put my head down and "get experience". It didn't make sense to do all that fluffy conference stuff. Waste of time and...so much useless swag. How many pairs of corporate socks do you really need?

The pendulum, at least for me, has swung back to the middle more recently. Work each day requires a lot of effort. That pays the bills, has a lot of the upside potential, provides experience, and builds the internal network. But also each month I'm trying to spend to spend a couple hours keeping in touch with people. Old co-workers, clients, and people I've met along the way. It doesn't hurt to stay in the mix a little bit.

So in these uncertain, wacky, "life is a simulator" times, perhaps stay plugged in. Opportunity can come from anywhere. You don't want to be head down when it knocks...or tweets!

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