This week I got back from a 3 week trip visiting San Francisco and New York meeting new people, catching up with old friends and making new ones.
Here are a few takeaways from the trip for those interested in what I was up to.
Taking a personal trip to expand your network
Every couple of years I like to take a personal trip where itâs both work and play. The âworkâ part for these trips is primarily to meet interesting people and expand my network as opposed to traveling solely for work.
I highly recommend everyone to try this, irrespective of what industry youâre in. The best people in any industry I find have a âpay-it-forward mentalityâ and thus open to meeting and giving advice. It also helps that founders are generally open to these encounters.
The way I go about it is to ask them for introductions from my exisiting network or just cold email people that I want to meet. Cold emails probably work for me about 50 per cent of the time and itâs incredibly rewarding when they do. The people that donât respond may very well of read your email and it gives you a good excuse to try and reach out again on the next trip.
Keep in mind it is important to be authentic. Have a reason for why you want to meet as theyâre time is very valuable. For me its because Iâm help lots of young entrepreneurs in Australia, some of whom end up in the US.
Pro-tip: Search 1st and 2nd degree connections on your LinkedIn in the city youâre visiting. Youâll be surprised how many people you are connected to.
Takeaway 1: Scale and ambition
The âmost impressive company that I visitedâ award definitely goes to Samsara. You probably have never heard of them but theyâre one of the fast growing companies globally. Growing from zero to 600 employees in 3 years! LinkedIn even gave them an award them because theyâre growing so fast.
Samsara builds sensors for fleets of trucks and other industrial applications. This gives businesses more data and insight into whatâs happening on the ground. Itâs not a sexy area but this exactly why theyâre tech is being taken up so fastâââitâs leaps and bounds ahead of the legacy products that are based on old and unreliable tech. Itâs also a critical part of modern day infrastructure.
I had the pleasure of meeting some of their team from sales, product and even one of the co-founders and CEO, Sanjit (who is a very impressive entrepreneur!). What struck me was how everyone was so genuine, smart, open and fired-up about the company and the work their doing. Itâs rare to find all those things in a new company, let alone one scaling that fast and selling into a difficult space.
Notably this is the co-founders second time around. Itâs pretty awesome witnessing great entrepreneurs build awesome things. Watch this company.
Takeaway 2: Mindset is so important
In one of my more fun meetings I was constantly reminded about mindset. The meeting was with Jason Calacanis, the (in)famous angel investor and blogger-entrepreneur who recently published a good book on angel investing. Jason has successfully invested in lots of startups at seed stage including including Uber (which just filed for IPO).
Halfway through me pitching he interrupted and reminded me âits not if James but when.â How you talk about things has a massive impact on yourself and others.
Iâm currently raising an seed fund to back talented, young entrepreneurs across Australia and New Zealand, Galileo Ventures. I like to say the only thing harder than raising money for a startup is raising money for a fund to invest in startups. Its very difficult and takes time to do well. Even more so when its youâre first time.
I chatted to Jason and his team about Australia and the surge of talented founders and good startups coming out from Down Under. It was an interesting conversation with some good tips.
Side note: Itâs also an important signal that one of the most active seed investors in SF is now actively scouting Australia for startup talent.
Takeaway 3: Attract and motivate good people
I also had the pleasure of meeting a board member of Amazon.com, yeah that ~$800 billion dollar company. He has been on the board for a number of years and witnessed its phenomenal growth. He also was instrumental in leading the team that built one of the humanities most successful consumer products. So to say he is successful is putting it lightly.
We talked about lots of things, including one of our startups that had sought advice from him. As we wrapped up the conversation we landed on how titans like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs seemed to continuously attract good people.
What became clear is that the most successful people know how to attract, hire and motivate good people. Attracting talent is the first step. But motivating them to do good work and perform is the other half of the equation.
Companies like Amazon and Apple remind me how one good thing, can spawn a whole community of motivated people that go on to make a huge impact.
The compounding benefits of helping good people become more successful is one of the most impactful things anyone can do. And throughout my trip I met lots of people doing just that.
While youâre here, check out a few other things Iâve recently written:
