Conferences and networking events
A bunch of pertinent observations about conferences and networking events, in general, after attending one such event yesterday
I spent most of yesterday at Sangam, IIT Madras Alumni Association’s flagship annual event. My original intention was to spend more of yesterday at the event, but by mid-afternoon I tired out and took a metro back home.
Sangam is a “rotating” event, happening in different cities each year, and this year was Bangalore’s turn. Last year I’d written about how I’ve started reconnecting with IITM after a 20 year hiatus, and that, combined with the fact that I’m running my own company now, meant that going to Sangam was a no-brainer.
IIT Madras
I don’t know what happened, but over the last year or two (I don’t know the exact timelines), my attitude towards IIT Madras has changed dramatically. I had been neutral to mildly negative about the place, but at least over the last year I’ve been fairly positive about it.
Conference Schedules
A day before the event, I asked a friend, also a startup founder from IIT Madras, if he is attending. He said he has found conferences not particularly useful in business-building, and so he wasn’t attending. And then someone posted the event agenda on the IITM Entrepreneurs’ WhatsApp group. It was dense, to say the least. And my doubts grew on the potential value of the event.
I mentally prepared a blogpost in my head about “optimal events schedules”. Since I didn’t write it, here is a summary:
Conferences have talks. Most people who attend don’t care about the talks, and instead come there purely to meet other people. In this regard, it is ideal if the schedule has lots of lunch, tea and drinks breaks. Which means fewer talks. But time and again we see events organisers cramming the event with talks.
The one reason I can think of this is - a lot of people won’t attend unless they are a speaker or on a panel (this is my usual policy as well - else your conversations won’t be great). And having more of such people (who will attend iff speaking) will swell general attendance as well. And hence, the event is crammed.
I didn’t write the above on Friday night (as planned - instead I wrote about “managing broad people”). Being a little skeptical, I went late on Saturday after dropping my kids and car off to my in-laws’ place (my wife had already gone there a couple of days earlier).
Optimal length of networking events
I picked up my badge and was pleasantly surprised to see a reasonable crowd in what I can call as the “foyer area”. The event was happening at Taj MG Road, which has two banquet halls on the same floor. The entire floor had been booked out, and the stair / lift landing, between the two banquet halls served as an informal networking area.
The good thing about having the event in two halls is that there is always a reasonable quorum in the “interstitial”. When there is only one talk happening at a time, there is a sort of implicit expectation that everyone be attending the talk, or else it will be disrespectful to the speaker(s). With two or more simultaneous talks, though, this expectation is not there.
It is like being a freelancer / fractional employee than being a full time employee - the former gives you license to own your time. Conferences with “two or more tracks” are like that.
I spent the entirety of Sangam in the foyer area. I asked for black coffee but turned out it was nescafe, but the waiters were kind enough to bring me “machine black coffee” (possibly Americano) from elsewhere.
Lunch was at around 1:45, and by then I could feel my voice getting hoarse with all the talking. After a reasonably low-carb main course, I decided to splurge on dessert, and found myself unable to focus at all on what the guy I was talking to then was saying.
Shortly after lunch, I went and sat down briefly to watch a panel - I had been tired of talking. A friend who saw me there said I “looked exhausted”. I carried on for some more time, and around 4pm it happened once again - I just couldn’t understand what someone who was enthusiastically explaining to me was saying. It was time to go home.
If you intend for something to be a pure “networking event”, there is an optimal time period for it - somewhere around the three hour mark. Shorter than that, and you don’t have enough time for good conversations. Longer, and you will tire out like I did on Saturday. To be fair, this wasn’t meant to be purely a networking event, but I’m glad I had the sense to notice that I was tiring and exit!
“Networking incels”
The big difference between Sangam and the large data conferences I attended in the US in June (Snowflake and Databricks summits) was the strength of my “prior network”.
Thanks to Sangam being an alumni event, I knew at least 30-40 of the 600 registered attendees (not all of them IITM alumni - the event was open to outsiders as well) before the event. That meant that pretty much at any point of time, there was always someone I knew who I could talk to.
The one thing I’ve noticed about networking events is that there is a much higher chance someone will come talk to you if you’re already talking to someone, than if you are standing alone with a drink. It is some kind of weird signalling I think - where the latter possibly signals that you’re not really worth talking to.
Another way of putting it is that at any event your “network expands exponentially”. The number of new people you meet is proportional to the number of people you already know, and if you solve this differential equation you’ll know that this represents exponential growth.
So if you go to a place where you know very few people, your network will not grow by that much.
Sangam
Coming to Sangam itself, I met only two other people from my (2000-4) batch, of whom one failed to recognize me. However, I was reasonably well connected in the IITM network across batches, and I can say that I’m better connected now!
I didn’t attend any talks - maybe saw a sum total of ten minutes of them. I spoke to lots of people, both people I knew earlier and those I was meeting newly. I spoke a lot about work, and in a sense, was refining my elevator pitch as I went through the day.
If it happens in Bangalore again, I’ll surely go!