Vivek,
I cannot agree more: especially if you are a Silicon Valley
resident, you meet your best contacts in non-Business forums.
It *is* important to get a life and lead one! If one does not enjoy the
journey of creating and building a company, it is NOT worth the
potential financial windfall ... you absolutely need a passion for
doing anything good in life. No matter how much people complain,
a forum such as ventcap creates a lot of value for many of us.
Therefore, Vivek's contribution will be remembered for a long
time... so much for the value of networking, which many of us
look down upon!
To give you a brief history, I met most of my professional friends
at my various work places: Intel, Cadence, Sunrise (Synopsys);
the places I consulted at - 20 large and small Valley based
companies - Xerox, Cirrus, S3, HP, Fujitsu, Chromatic Research, Pycon,
AMD, ... and of course, my undergrad and grad schools, and the
places where I taught at: IIT Bombay, U of Iowa, UC Santa Cruz and
UC Berkeley extensions.
But most of all, I made a large number of close friends thru my
involvement in community and professional activities - camping, hiking
(Yahoo! Club, Camp99); Konkani-net; Indo-American Community
Service Center; ICA's Garba; The Indus Entrepreneurs; The Common
Wealth Club of California, the Bay Area Cadence User Group; the
Users Society of Electronic Design Automation, ...
Writing in professional magazines such as IEEE Computer, trade journals
such as EE Times and Integrated System Design, and the news media
such as the Silicon Valley Business Journal and Inc Mag were helpful
in most of my professional career.
All it takes is a bit of passion. I wish I had networked a lot more
before I started fund-raising for my current startup. This was
the first time I raised money. It always helps if people know you,
a lot more than you knowing them!
Now that we are done with Series A, we primarily hire everyone - as
Vivek rightly pointed out - thru our networks. We get good, tried-and-
true friends referring you with no short-term financial gains in mind.
It is a lot better than recruiters in most cases! It saves us time,
saves us $$, and saves us a lot of heartache while building a
strong startup team.
And this is just the end of the beginning of an exciting journey!
The third time for me. All full of challenges and pitfalls!
Best regards,
Shankar Hemmady
CEO, PharmQuest.com