This weekend we had the opportunity to attend Tech 808 at George Washington University. The conference was led by The Phat Startup, and featured a roster of dynamic power players in the tech industry. It was the first tech conference that either of us had attended, and we were excited to be in a room full of techies, entrepreneurs and influencers who were mostly people of color. Although editorial writing doesn’t appear to have any connections to tech, Victoria was glad she followed her whim and decided to attend. Lukogho left the conference with a new sense of energy to accomplish her own entrepreneurial goals. Both of us left with a better sense of how to #BossUp to our potential.
Here are a few lessons we walked away with from #Tech808:
L: Know where to find opportunity and how to keep them flowing
Paul C. Brunson (swoon), founder of PCB Agency, opened up the conference with a motivating session on the lessons he’s learned from working with billionaires. My greatest take away from this session: power players and billionaires are constantly looking for new ways to grow their connections and to keep relationships constant. This means going beyond the surface networking many of us engage in, which consists of making relationships that aren’t enriching or purposeful. How many times have you reached out for coffee dates, only to never see or engage with the other person after that meeting? Unfortunately I’m all too guilty of participating in this type of behavior.
Brunson also spoke on mining our weakest ties and looking to our distant friends as the greatest influencers. There were several times throughout the session that I felt like this man was preaching to my current situation. As my circle grows, I have been struggling to balance my personal and business relationships. Relationships are like plants and require lots of pruning and weeding in order to flourish. Brunson left me feeling assured that it’s okay to cut off and let go of folks when the relationship has reached its end. Most importantly, he really drove home the fact that the success of relationships and networking comes from being aware, focused and consistent.
V: Network to build with, not to take from
At times, networking can feel like being sized up. Each pair of eyes you meet feels like they have the capacity to evaluate the worth of your entire existence within 30 seconds, with which they will discard or invest accordingly. It can feel like a game of take — one that, if you’re like me, someone currently facing a serious career transition, can be hard to play well.
But Brunson let us all know one thing: we have to be willing to give a little, and give a little early. Reach out, but do so with the intention of finding out more information about how you can help someone and not about what you can get from them. You’ll learn about the latter in due time if you are genuine about the former. This means you have to put the ego to the side and be humble enough to listen to the needs of other people in order to cultivate a potentially reciprocal relationship. So no, you can’t just send an email to Oprah, and contrary to what you might think, you aren’t just endowed with the right to contact a fellow black person and/or person of color in your field, particularly in overly-informal terms. Zora Neale Hurston is known for saying, “Skin folks ain’t kin folks,” and that means reminding yourself that the connections we create amongst ourselves as a community are not endowed but are earned. Pay your respects accordingly, both literally and figuratively. If you go about it correctly, you’ll realize the importance of reaching out to folks, but not too far above your “pay-grade,” and of cutting mediocrity in order to build and grow for yourself alongside other people.
Do so and you’ll probably learn something else — most of your big opportunities aren’t going to come from your best friends, friends or even strangers. They’re most likely to come from acquaintances, from the people you know but from a distance.
L: Perfect your email/communication game
Email is probably the most important form of communication we use outside of text messaging. Nathalie Molino Niño of PowerToFly and Dwight L. Peters of BackersHub both spoke on the significance of using email to effectively communicate your business mission and goals. Telling your story, whether it’s for your business or personal brand, can be intimidating. Both Niño and Peters spoke on their failures and successes in perfecting their messaging for their businesses. They provided great insights such as to eliminate words picked up by spam blockers in your subject line and to be concise in your messages. Cold emailing is not an easy craft to perfect, but it is manageable through practice.
Rakia Reynolds of Skai Blue Agency gave us a quick 101 on the dos and don’ts of public relations. Understanding how to communicate, whether it’s to the media or the general public, is imperative if you want to reach a greater platform. Everyone who is a part of your company or your project should be able to convey the who, what and why of your story. She also urged us to be authentic in our messaging. People will be able to distinguish between what is real and what you’re doing just to gain followers.
V: Lead with the problem, not your passion
Many of us have heard a lot about hacking, either in association with gaming or even the latest breaks in governmental surveillance technology. Though different circumstances, both speak to the same technique: identifying an opening. Find that space, and if you know the lay of the land, you have your hands on a potential problem that you could solve. This doesn’t just apply to coding; it reverberates back to techniques you should use to create and build your social network.
As great as it is to be passionate about what you’re doing, Niño emphasized how much more important and efficient it is to be able to direct your passion toward a specific concrete problem that you can uniquely solve. It might seem cold or disingenuous, but that’s exactly what you need when you’re first meeting someone. You don’t walk up to a potential partner, dump your entire life story on them and then ask them to marry you. Or, at least, I hope you don’t. But here, in terms of the conference, you had to be clear about one obvious but often overlooked fact: THEY DON’T KNOW YOU! Start off with something neutral, i.e. the problem your passion is driving you to solve. Start off with that and you allow the person the opportunity to see how you can help, which allows them to talk to you about how you can be of service. If you’re genuine about it, have faith that the conversation about passions will come up, or trust that your work will be able to speak for itself.
L: Know if you want to be profitable or popular
In this day and age of app creation, people often endeavor to build apps with the hopes of becoming popular and profitable. This also applies to entrepreneurs who decide to start businesses. Not many people starting out build an app or start a business with the intent to watch it fail or to become broke in the process. With the influence of social media, it’s easy to become focused on numbers in terms of how much of following you have. Having 1 million supporters on social media or people who download your app doesn’t always translate into making or having $1 million in profit. Decide and establish your goals early on. Don’t be dismayed by what you see others in your industry are creating, they may not be making as much money or have as large of following as you think.
V: Be Prepared to Lose
You might execute the networking formula perfectly and have your body language, email and communication game on lock. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to fail. Indeed, be ready to lose. As counter-intuitive as that advice might seem, it’s essential.
Anthony Frasier, co-founder of The Phat Startup, was upfront about the fact that when he’s considering app creations, he plans to lose. Much of this comes from the fact that success isn’t necessarily about perfection, but adaptation. You have to be willing to experiment. Sarah Milstein, VP of programs at indie.vc, took many of us through an exercise to do just that. After coming up with our specific products, we had to imagine a scenario to test some of our underlying assumptions about how our idea would be successful. In doing so, we had a better sense of our make-it-or-break-it points, according to which we could “pivot.” And you will pivot. Circumstances change rapidly, especially in today’s landscape, so if you don’t adjust, you’re probably going to miss out on the next door that’s wide open, waiting for you to enter.
