I recently heard somebody say “It’s not about what you know, it’s about whom you know”.
This simple sentence couldn’t carry more truth.
When I came to Silicon Valley about a decade ago I did not know anything about entrepreneurship, startups, or venture funding. Very soon I realized that I had been catapulted into the center of a maze of innovation with adventurous entrepreneurs pitching their seemingly crazy ideas and venture capitalists waiving their checkbooks to get a piece of the action.
First I had to know that there was something to know — that there was a world of startups, growth, MVPs, design thinking, business models, exponential growth, winner-takes-most markets, valuations, convertible notes, equity crowdfunding, angel investors, and advisory boards.
But the second step was not to go read books and try to learn from theoretical, academic knowledge.
The next step was to identify WHOM to connect with and HOW to to ask questions that would bring me right to the WHAT I needed to know before spending months working through online resources which were mostly outdated once the SEO engines of Google spit them out as top results.
I also realized that there is a lot of “information” on the internet that is noise, especially in the field of entrepreneurship. Everybody thinks they are an expert and typically digests their startup experience by writing about it. Those are valid accounts — don’t get me wrong — however, if you want to get to the core of a hard question, qualify the author before you get excited about implementing their sparse action-oriented tips.
In 2020 I started to take on a few very select entrepreneurs as coaching clients to be their WHO and point them to the right WHOs during their process of launching a company.
It opened my eyes to another trend: Coaches pollute the internet with 1hr webinars in order to establish trust and domain expertise to book clients and become two- or three- comma coaches (yep, that’s the jargon they use). It is a concept that attracts desperate clients who don’t value their time because the amount of information for every hour spent on these webinars fits in a 200-word blog post — the rest is pure sales and get-rich-quick BS.
*rant over :)
You ask: “Ok, I get it — the internet is too deep to dig, Google is not pointing us to the best resources, and I can’t trust the so-called experts online, how do I get the information needed to build my startup and ensure that I learn from the right people?”
Here is the answer: Join communities that curate them for you.
I speak from experience as I led multiple communities in the past (e.g. Women In Product) and I am leading a community of female entrepreneurs, investors and innovator called The GUILD. We put years and years of energy into networking, referrals, speaking, reading online content, and launching, starting, failing, and selling businesses, advising hundreds of startup founders, creating a virtual accelerator plus organizing intimate entrepreneurship summits and large conferences in San Francisco.
The fastest way to find your way to the WHO is by joining already curated communities with a track record in your industry and the area of expertise you want to learn about.
Community leaders choreograph a medley of advice from well-known experts, ecosystem leaders, influencers and thought leaders in their space. Communities also typically create opportunities to connect and spotlight their top members and once you are part of the community your opportunity to reach out to them as part of that joint circle yields much higher results than reaching out cold via LinkedIn.
Look for community leaders who have relevant experience in the field and who have worked with lots of startup founders. Look for communities who are putting on interesting events with speakers you would like to connect with. Check their social media feeds and see whether they are posting fresh resources and if they write their own content.
I’ve sat through many workshops and TED talks and took note of the ones where a light bulb went off. At my startup and a non-profit organization we organized over 300 events in the past decade locally in San Francisco and in dozens of chapters worldwide. This means I know who lands with an audience and who are the real experts and thought leaders. I’ve spent time interviewing them on stage, I spent time with them in Davos, on skiing trips and I certainly drank a lot of champagne with them (all for the benefit of our network of course! ;)
Leverage the social networking power of these relationships of the community leaders.
Lastly, look for programs within those networks and check their paid offerings. Many communities offer paid courses and bring their top connections to speak. It’s well worth the investment as long as the content is what you are looking for and you can ensure that you will in fact have a chance to connect with them live and not in a group chat. You won’t find curated resource on online learning platforms like Coursera or on LinkedIn Learning. You can binge on pre-recorded video material but you don’t get to connect in person.
However, a real-live experience that you can commit to for a finite time period makes a huge difference and comes with the benefit of not just building a relationship with the speakers but also with your fellow cohort entrepreneurs. Those connections last for a long time.
Community courses and webinars are not sales webinars but are packed with nuggets of wisdom that are hard to find anywhere else. Join them live to get your questions answered in real-time. Reach out to the experts after the events or during the course and ask if they offer you a few minutes of their time for follow on questions.
See how deep the community’s content library reaches and check whether the content titles apply to the area where you are searching expertise.
That’s the beauty of building startups — it’s an ever-changing process and the experts in the space are quickly evolving with the ecosystem — so do communities. Stay nimble and find your tribe to access and learn from the most relevant experts in your space.
