ExecTec - Well Met

You can not have known me long or been a member of this group for more than a month and not realized that I am more than a little passionate about networking. For me the goal of networking is to help the people I know and meet get the maximum potential of the rest of the network.

I truly believe we all know someone we can help or who can be helped by someone else we know or who is known to someone else we know.

ExecTec has been and always will be about creating an environment that promotes getting to know others well enough to engage in helping each other and often that is as much about helping other friends as helping each other.

I was reminded of this in Las Vegas this week when a guest from a fortune 500 company who joined the ExecTec NAB Breakfast was telling someone he was looking for a very specific technical solution and it just happened I knew someone (an ExecTec member) who had developed just that solution. While I would hate to jinx a deal (and hence have not mentioned names) I hear a successful meeting was had between the ExecTec member and the searching executive and with luck both sides will benefit from the introduction.

Mark Suster @msuster (http://bit.ly/bGcNDz), who refers to himself as a 2x entrepreneur gone to the Dark Side of VC as a General Partner for GRP Partners, in this blog post (http://bit.ly/aWjAMW) talks about how twitter has distinct advantages over traditional social networks which are more restricted to people whom we already know and that their information and updates are less discoverable.

In making his point, Mark highlights the idea of really getting out and discovering and meeting new people. If you network just with the people you know then you really are missing out on the boundless potential of others. It is interesting to see how Mark used twitter to reach out to people he barely knew and the connections he made as a result.

Had the guest executive not joined us he would have probably missed finding the solution he was looking for. Simply put you never know just whom, where or what will link you to that key element you might not even know you need.

Now while networking is often focused on meeting people or introducing yourself to others the above inspires me to suggest we dedicate this week to the concept of introducing others to each other. There are always those people you know who you would not think twice of introducing to others. These are people that it is easy to be passionate about and who invoke/inspire you. Simply put they are well worth knowing.

So who do you know that other people should really get to know either virtually or perhaps in person? When you meet someone new how often do you think of who you know who might be a well met addition to that persons network?

You never know you might tell someone about just the right person to help both of them achieve great things together and that is truly what networking is about.

As always, there is no better way to meet and connect with other executives then over dinner and conversation. $21 in advance via PayPal or $25 at the event gets you a full dinner, drink and the best networking around.