Former Google Product Manager Shares Networking And Fundraising Tips

those are some really good points Tim now some people believe like my technical skills Will Set Me Free I just need to code something great and then all of humanity will give me money this whole networking and people stuff and whatnot maybe you can give some tips Engineers on just like how can you network without selling your soul or how could you stay in contact with people like any any thoughts on that yeah it's a good one it's hard I don't actually enjoy well there's different types of networking actually working at like technical events or like you know where you're meeting other Engineers um that's fine I love that actually because I think the conversations are really interesting you know as a Founder you often have to or maybe should go to networking events where it's more like other Founders lots of investors and that can be a lot less fun partly because I mean it it can be fun but you know it's it depends on if it's your crowd and if you really enjoy that I I've gotten used to the fact that I have to do a certain amount of networking in order to be an entrepreneur and so I go to a certain amount of you know these events but it's not easy I remember once going to an event and you know I just wasn't into you know the the hobnobbing and the you know here's what I'm working on and everything's going so great uh that that everybody was doing and I was just kind of hanging out by the side and there there was another person who was just kind of hanging out by the side and he looked kind of nerdy and like you know he was in the same place that I was and so I you know started chatting up with him and he was great he turned out to be the the founder of stack Overflow forgot his name Joel um Joel something no way let me stack Overflow founder let's see here uh Jeff Atwood and Joel spolski Joel spolski yeah and it was a super fun conversation turned out we knew people UNC common and we ended up meeting up again in New York City he actually had lots of great advice for me um even advice about entrepreneurship and fundraising but he was clearly in the same sort of mental space that I am where it's like you know certain certain types of these events are a bit of a burden but I do think it's important you know I'll go to networking events and maybe nine times out of 10 nothing really comes out of it you know um you know you meet some people you know in the old days you be change business cards now you like take a picture of the of your the other person's badge or you just like scan their LinkedIn and you connect or something like that but it's people that don't end up playing any type of role in your company in your company's Journey you know they they they're not business partners they're not investors they don't make any useful intros you know you just kind of got to know them and who knows what what'll happen but some really key things have come out of networking and when they do matter they tend to matter enormously so as an example my last company one of our of our investors was SV Angel you know a fund out in Silicon Valley and I went to their CEO conference and um you know just kind of meeting meeting random people and at one point uh this great investor uh toer Conway he says oh here's you got to meet this person from from Apple you know Sean prudent and she's actually a very senior executive at Apple she I think she might be in charge of Deva relations she's the person that presents the apple design award all the time and she um she just made introductions within Apple to the App Store people and then Apple started featuring our app as like you know number one featured app in the photo video category which is the category that we were in but then also number one across all categories and then it was like in all countries and then that led to being featured in the Apple retail store demo devices so you go to an Apple Store you you know pick up an iPad uh our app running on it our video editing app because it helped Apple sell more IP ads they made an introduction to Starbucks and we ended up being like Starbucks's app of the week which is surprisingly like a big deal you get like hundreds of thousands of uh of of downloads to that and so all this came you know through that you know introduction and it's hard it I I never lose track of the fact that a lot of great things came out of networking they all almost all came out of that one introduction that came out of that networking event and then like this wasn't networking event but it was also just sort of an introduction more like a email networking yeah same guy to for Conway just like fantastic investor and he introduced me to Dave leeb at Google photos he was the lead product manager at Google photos Dave yes now he's at y compan isn't he he yeah he just became partner at YC yeah and that introduction led to Google buying my company and US joining fly laabs and so these things both came out of networking and so I probably went to like 30 or 40 networking events you know maybe there's a tiny tiny bit of impact from a couple of uh you know people I met um besides those too but then huge amount of impact from the you know two most important connections that got made networking so I feel like it can matter a lot but it's like a um it's like a I don't know what the right analogy is but it's like like a spray and prey type of approach you meet lots of people and then like you know you pray that one or two turn out to be you know really big deal C the analytics says I pay for just two things in the web chat GPT and F channel for its videos and Associate Discord group it's a unique form for those interested in the advanced aspects of AI technology and business Jordan hunt says it feels like an amazing community of people who are stupidly passionate about tech and are just straight up nice and absolute true of information and life experiences plus it's a great Hub to keep up with the chaos that is AI at the moment especially when life has keeping me busy my anti-ad internet Theory home we talk about robotics in here we have a channel for AI place for research people share their research papers in there there memes and comedy gaming entertainment investing documentaries name it we got it hit that join button right now or support us on patreon so you can get access to this community y 1010 would listen to this again we have a media board so I'm going to give you one of these sweep the leg no mercy that's of course you know that's what that's from right cry Kid K Kai like Sensei you want me to sweep the leg his ankles hurt he's like sweep the leg no mercy and that that means when someone does something really cool new AI launch was really good tip you're going to sweep the leg so thank you um also such good tips I think one thing it came across was you're open yourself up to luck you're just going to events and like something happens great if it doesn't that's fine I'm just going to keep on talking and see what happens here and keep on meeting people and that's what you got to do it's sort of like prospecting in some way kind of like sales says great way to put it yeah exactly so I thought that was really good and then you met Joel the founder of um stack Overflow what were some of his like if you remember some of like his highle tips on fundraising because I get Founders to come up to me and ask me this question I'm like I actually I do remember because it was it was great you know we were putting together a round for for fly labs and I was thinking about some different ways that the round you know could be structured and um I thought he might be helpful his office was right near my office and so you know I you said hey could could you give me some advice and said sure come on over and we chatted and he was like you know he barely remembered me he's sort of a big shot I was you know nobody he was like you can you remind me what is your what is your startup do I mean I've told him like trying to think about you know the round structure and you know this or that and and actually tell us real quick what what fly does and then we're going to go into Super teer after sure fly laabs the company at the time was uh mobile video editing app so we were the number one video editing app when video editing on on mobile devices was brand new so we the first company to sort of like crack that uh be able to make that happen and so he's like yeah remind me so I you know I told him that um he's like okay cool listen Tim that's your like expertise that's where you innovate don't try to innovate on like how the round is structured and I know like as you know and again I was sort of like an engineer at the time like as an engineer like you have that mindset where like if I you know you can adjust the mechanics and this all that this works that way and such and such but he's like you know there people have already figured out how to do rounds you know at the time it was like verble notes and there's like price rounds and you know now this you know for the early stages convertible notes for the noobs what's that mean convertible notes is sort of like the pre predecessor to Safe notes um I think for the most part people don't have to know about convertible notes if they're like um you know preed seed stage companies anymore because everybody uses safe notes but uh they were essentially loans that will eventually convert into the terms of the uh the subsequent funding round so just like a safe note safe notes are better they're easier they're cheaper uh there's more protections all around so safe notes are better um and that's why everybody uses them now but um yeah he's like listen there are a few structures that everybody knows works again this was pre-safe so convertable note was the other one price rounds the other one there's a couple of you know mechanics there's the you know the you know the valuation the liquidation preference there some other stuff that you hopefully never have to deal with as a as a Founder like participation rights and you know sort of like uh investor friendly terms but like that's it just deal with the things that are out there they can solve all your fundraising problems you you not you shouldn't be trying to innovate on fundraising you should be trying to innovate on video editing on on mobile devices that's your thing just do the normal stuff when it comes to when it comes to fundraising and I've taken that not only to be true about fundraising but kind of about a lot of stuff you know there's the stuff you're trying to innovate on and there you really are thinking from first principles and doing things that nobody's ever done before because that is you know your actual core competencies your area of expertise and then for a lot of the other stuff just do normal stuff that's kind of people have done it you know you you know how do you structure like a a you know what like you know you shouldn't be running your own payroll you should just be using like you know just works or a Gusto or something like that you know just do normal stuff when it comes to like Health Care 41k stuff for employees just have a normal vacation policy like you just don't need to overthink any of this stuff just kind of do normal stuff and that saves your energy for like okay how are you going to actually make video editing possible on you know iPhones and this is like I don't I don't remember what error this is but like iPhone probably like five or six or something it was it was a long time ago um how are you going to make that possible or how are you going to make an AI tutor that can you know tutor children whatever it is that you're you're you're building that's where you innovate and everything else just keep it simple that's perfect well said I mean because you have so much cognitive load going on with just building a product that's good and all the other things going on focus on that enough exactly then like oh I'm going to innovate on payroll I'm also going to innovate on corporate structure innovate no just it's just way too much and then you're also saying is like don't engine over engineer things you know and I I you probably have dealt with Engineers too who you're like hey I want to go build out this new feature here for some Edge use case that might matter and you're like no focus on this don't get get caught in these random paths that can lead to disaster now you mentioned also I think you Sundar you edited one of sundar's videos or presentations with the app can you talk about

Channel: SVIC Podcast

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Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024