One of the cons of working on your own bootstrapped, remote companies from home for three years is lack of network.
There’s always been somewhat of a vacuum in my professional network for years due to certain life choices and travels (e.g. leaving my Silicon Valley engineering job to bartend in Australia where I met my wife), and chasing passion industries instead of lucrative ones (maybe mom was right about going Ivy League/FAANG 😅).
But I’d never really felt the pinch until recently, when I had Y-Combinator + another accelerator reach out saying my app was strong, but needed a co-founder:
While I’d never rush onboarding a risky co-founder just to satisfy YC, and am perfectly fine bootstrapping Dopplio (I’m technical and doing all the coding anyway) or raising separately, I realized it would be nice to have a peer group who enjoyed building things in a similar fashion — that could fill that co-founder role if things lined up.
So I decided to make a change.
Approach
Most of my friends who are either founders, could be founders, or are just solid engineers, I met through working at startups or living in SF. While working at startups is definitely one way, it's unfortunately a bit slow -- we need something faster. And living in SF is unfortunately not short-term feasible.
Note: I’m specifically looking to increase my tech network, not general social circle. We’ve got plenty of friends in San Diego we don’t see nearly enough of (joys of parenthood), I just can’t argue tabs vs spaces with most of them.
Viewing this as a sales pipeline, there were two things I needed to improve:
- Number of collisions
- conversions (aka filtering for cultural fit)
Increasing Collisions
There are three main avenues for increasing collisions:
- passive - setting yourself up for collisions during activities you do daily (work, gym, home)
- outbound - going to meetups, extracurriculars
- inbound - writing (like this blog), hosting a group
Outbound and inbound are pretty straightforward. Just go to events with your target demographic (e.g. tech meetups), or create something that attracts your demographic (articles, groups, communities) Passive was a bit more interesting. The three main activities I do everyday are:
- home
- work
- gym
Home - we could move to a more tech-y neighborhood. While we have long-term plans to move to the bay area, and would love to move to north county San Diego, it's not something we can immediately change Work - I believe connections are made through repeated, unplanned interactions, so I've started working from WeWork instead of home Gym - instead of working out at home (like I do now), gyms can be a great social opportunity. There seemed to be three main options here:
- sport-based - boxing, BJJ, tennis, etc.
- class-based (F45, OrangeTheory)
- club-style regular gym
I decided class-based was the best option, mainly because:
- higher variation in population
- seems to attract people who have other things as their main focus, rather than the sport itself
- seems more social than club-style
- filters for energy
So I've started looking for a gym nearby, I’m sure each neighborhood will vary wildly as well, so I plan on trying several. The added bonus here is I’ve put on some pounds while building Dopplio, so I could genuinely use the motivation of a class to get in shape again 😅
Increasing Conversions
Collisions are only one half of the problem, you can’t just be meeting people, you need to be meeting the right people
For me, this splits into three main categories:
- demographic
- filtering for legitimacy
- filtering for cultural fit
Demographic
Since I’m trying to find tech founders, it makes sense to focus my collisions on places with:
- business owners
- youth
- tech
And ideally all three of those simultaneously. This is the beauty of SF, it’s all in one. In San Diego, things are spread out among different neighborhoods.
Tech - since there isn’t one particular “tech” location I’m aware of, the best way I think to achieve this is just via meetups
Business owners - best proxy I can think of this is for nice/wealthier neighborhoods, so La Jolla, North County, Little Italy/Downtown, maybe Pacific Beach and Bird Rock
Youth - probably more happening areas like downtown and Little Italy, or a more youthful activity like HIIT fitness classes
Practically, this mainly affects my choice of work and gym locations. WeWork is in both La Jolla and downtown, both very solid locations with a pretty similar professional crowd when I visited.
Similarly, HIIT gyms are in both places, so I’ll probably find one closest to the WeWork I end up choosing.
Filtering for Legitimacy
The next problem is finding people within that demographic who are capable and actually do things.
I’ve tried meetups and conferences in the past, but got scarred after getting trapped by “wantrepreneur” and “ideas guys” types (I never fully appreciated the HBO “Silicon Valley” scene where Jared runs around aggressively interviewing strangers until this experience).
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a real way to filter for this other than one-by-one. This is one of the big appeals of joining an accelerator, they do the filtering for you (most YC founders I spoke to were pretty sharp). I’ve even heard of groups in San Diego for venture-backed companies (the VCs acting as the filter in this case).
Lacking this, my main solution here is to improve my ability to escape from long wantrepreneur* pitches while still meeting everyone. As someone that likes to be polite and not offend, I’m a very easy target for getting trapped in a conversation, so this is a lifeskill that needs to be buffed up anyway.
Interestingly, actually determining whether someone is likely to be capable of building something I’ve found to be pretty straightforward, it comes out in the questions they ask and the stories they tell (on average ofc — there will surely be some false positives/negatives)
*Note: I want to differentiate between beginners starting out, who I’m always happy to chat to (being one myself). We all start out as wantrepreneurs, but some never make the jump — and I honestly don’t enjoy talking about startups/tech that much 😅
Cultural Fit
Then there’s cultural fit.
Looking at people in my current network I would willingly co-found a company with, there were patterns in their hobbies: they were mostly engineers that enjoyed real-time action sports/video games, like basketball, Call of Duty, and Rocket League.
Golf was overrepresented as well, so I started learning. Now when I go to tech meet ups, I simply ask people if they're interested in doing those things, as well as post about setting up a group for these activities in tech group chats.
Not that I’m uninterested in meeting others with different interests, but just playing the odds here (and doing activities I enjoy).
Results
It’s only been one week so far, but I'm already surprised how well it's gone, we already have golf scheduled and I've met some pretty cool people. If you’re interested in more dissections like this you can follow me on Twitter