Tatiana Glad, Co-Founder and Director of Impact Hub Amsterdam, shares with us what it is like to be in a city that is suddenly and full-heartedly embracing innovative startups and social entrepreneurialism - and how Impact Hub makes its unique contribution.
"When we started in 2006, entrepreneurship was embraced by only a few young people at the fringe and 'social' entrepreneurship was a funny term from abroad - now on the brink of our 7 years anniversary the City of Amsterdam has taken a stand to be the Startup capital of the west coast of Europe and launched a city-wide action program for Social Entrepreneurship.
Impact Hub Amsterdam not only features prominently in this action program for 2015-2018, but contributed its leadership to engage the ecosystem in co-creating parts of the plan. By hosting a number of participatory labs with different stakeholder groups, we have been able to test assumptions and offer the city’s new social entrepreneurship lead, Ellen Oetelmans, a space for direct feedback on the municipality’s ideas and intended actions. As part of the first phase of the plan, Impact Hub Amsterdam is leading an ecosystem mapping project for the city, drawing on action research and participatory processes. We have made it our mission that the city’s social entrepreneurship agenda is made by social entrepreneurs for social entrepreneurs.
Collaboration between a municipality and social entrepreneurs is not always easy; what lies at the heart of it is our differing perceptions of risk. By definition our civil servants are there to provide order and safety and minimise risk, whereas entrepreneurs seek to take risks and work more comfortably with uncertainty. However, this complementarity can provide a unique opportunity. Our civil servant counterparts tell us they start to feel like social entrepreneurs in the municipal system; sometimes bringing explicit challenge to the way things are done and mostly taking small meaningful steps to build something sustainable for the long term. Collaboration with social entrepreneurs is critical given the challenges our public systems face at this time and the need to work though a sensible transition together. This means finding new approaches to public sector procurement, enabling public-private partnerships and ensuring that entrepreneurship for societal betterment grows reliably. Our Impact Hub community is well poised to be contributors to this systemic innovation as solution providers in health, circular economy, inclusion, and other key areas, as well as growing our culture of trust, courage and collaboration well beyond our Impact Hub walls.
Today, we are proud to see the results of growing an impact ecosystem in the city: a number of our early members are now successful enterprises; we continue our trend of 90% success with our Business Model Challenge startup participants exiting with a viable business; we are celebrating over €3.000.000 in capital raised for graduates of our most recent Investment Ready program; and, we are pioneering the first trans-local social innovation scaling program with 7 other Impact Hubs in Europe. Moreover, the success of our members means there is more bandwidth to collaborate with them in building our next level Impact Hub.
As we face a move - and expansion - in 2016 - we have members wanting to grow with us, undeterred by the growing number of so-called competitive spaces and networks and accelerators in Amsterdam. In our last Town Hall meeting, members found solidarity in their diversity with the common ambition to tackle big societal issues through entrepreneurship. And to do so by leveraging this network of now 80+ Impact Hubs in cities across the globe. And so it seems, we are just getting started...
....let’s Hub!”
Céline interviewed Heather Kirk from Social Fabric & Erich Züger from Balboa about their collaboration.
We heard some rumors about the two of you working together somehow. Is that true? Please tell us more about it!
Heather: Erich saw Social Fabric’s crowdfunding campaign on Facebook through our mutual Impact Hub friend and Hubonaut Flurin Conradin (from Stadtmilch), who was wearing one of our T-shirts. So Erich approached me to find out how we could work together, because he had the idea of supporting refugees through Balboa and of course also because of the T-shirts. As he was in need of promotional gear for the Balboa gym anyways, he wanted to see whether there was an opportunity for working on something together.
Erich: For a while now, we at Balboa we were looking into how to work with refugees. We wanted to take action and find out how to include them in the community or in the gym with workouts. But we wanted it to be something concrete and very close to us. So when I saw Flurin’s post and read about the Social Fabric project that was happening in Zürich, I knew it was something to look into. And as it was a project born at the Impact Hub Zurich it was very tangible. And we just kind of knew it has to be good.
Neue Trends aus dem FinTech-Bereich revolutionieren die Finanzindustrie. Die herkömmlichen Business Models werden durch Innovationen umgeformt. Dies bedeutet einerseits, dass gewisse traditionelle Geschäftsbereiche mittelfristig bedroht sind, aber andererseits neue interessante Geschäftspotentiale entstehen.
Um die Digitalisierung der hiesigen Finanzinstitute voranzutreiben und den Schweizer Finanzplatz zu einem Mitgestalter neuer Branchentrends zu machen, wurde in Zürich die Disrupt Finance Konferenz organisiert. Dafür vereinten die Zürcher Kantonalbank, die Credit Suisse, PostFinance, SIX sowie die Swisscom ihre Kräfte und unterstützten den zweitägigen, vom Impact Hub organisierten, Event.
Austausch zwischen Startups und Finanzinstituten wird gefördert
Ziel des Anlasses war es, den Austausch zwischen aufstrebenden Startups, etablierten Finanzinstituten und FinTech Experten zu fördern. Das intensive Programm beinhaltete Keynotes von Industrieexperten und Kurzpräsentationen der Startups, um Einblicke in die neuen Trends zu geben. In Workshops und Pairing Sessions wurden die Inhalte vertieft, um ein gezieltes gegenseitiges Lernen zu ermöglichen.
Die 9 eingeladenen Startups präsentierten ihre Business Models und Technologien aus den Bereichen Block Chain, Identification, Security, Digital Banking und Wealth Management.
Die folgenden Schlüsselbotschaften gingen aus der Konferenz hervor (einige Beispiele):
- Der Schweizer Bankensektor sollte weiter auf seinen Stärken in Sachen Sicherheit aufbauen und Datensicherheit und der Digitalisierung vertrauen.
- Um Zürich als führenden FinTech Hub zu etablieren müssen sich lokale Akteure verstärkt mit bestehenden Hubs (London, San Francisco, Singapur) vernetzen.
- Banken benötigen neue Expertise: Finanzinstitute benötigen statt traditionellen Bankern mehr Datenspezialisten, Experten in Sachen künstlicher Intelligenz, Algorithmen und Community Building.
Die nächste Disrupt Finance Konferenz findet im November 2016 in Zürich statt.
Mehr Informationen: http://disrupt.finance/
2324.ch ist der Gewinner der zweiten Ausgabe des Impact Hub Fellowship ICT4Good. Das Team um Gründer Mauro bieg erhält nun Zugang zu einem Arbeitsplatz im Impact Hub Zürich und Beratung sowie finanzielle Unterstützung, um am eigenen Geschäftsmodell zu feilen.
Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien und insbesondere mobile Applikationen haben grosses Potenzial, um zu einer nachhaltigeren und sozial gerechteren Welt beizutragen. Um dieses Potenzial zu fördern, haben der Impact Hub Zürich und Swisscom gemeinsam das Impact Hub Fellowship ICT4Good lanciert. Das Fellowship ist ein einjähriges Startup Förderprogramm, das JungunternehmerInnen bei der Umsetzung ihrer Ideen unterstützt. Gestern Dienstag wurde der Preis zum zweiten Mal vergeben.
Über 35 Teams sind angetreten, um den begehrten Preis zu gewinnen. Dieser beinhaltet ein Jahr lang einen Arbeitsplatz, Coaching und finanzielle Unterstützung durch den Impact Hub Zürich und Swisscom. Sieben Projekte mussten sich Ende August einer ersten Jury stellen, welche drei Finalisten auswählte. Diese wurden für drei Monate intensiv gefördert und auf den entscheidenden Pitch vor der Fachjury bestehend aus Experten aus dem Zürcher Startup Ökosystem und Managern von Swisscom vorbereitet. Das Rennen machte schlussendlich 2324.ch.
Das junge Team konnte die jury mit ihrer zugleich lokalen als auch sozialen Kommunikationsplattform überzeugen. 2324.ch will den Dialog zwischen den Bürgern, den Vereinen und der Gemeindeverwaltung fördern. Das Amtsblatt ist noch nicht im Handy-Zeitalter angekommen“ so Mauro Bieg, Gründer von 2324.ch. „Neue Kommunikationstechnologien ermöglichen völlig neue Wege der Interaktion auf lokaler Ebene.“ 2324.ch soll diese Interaktionen ermöglichen. Mit Winterthur konnte eine erste Pilotgemeinde gewonnen werden. Anfang 2016 soll 2324.ch/winterthur online gehen.
“Der Pitch hat deutlich gemacht, wie sich ICT und Nachhaltigkeit clever kombinieren lassen. Nun liegt es an 2324.ch, den Zugang zu den Netzwerken von Impact Hub und Swisscom und den damit verbundenen Know-how Transfer bestmöglich zu nutzen. Wir werden die Weiterentwicklung mit grossem Interesse begleiten“, sagt Juror Roger Wüthrich-Hasenböhler, Leiter Geschäftsbereich KMU bei Swisscom und Mitglied der Konzernleitung.
Das Team um Mauro Bieg darf sich über finanzielle Unterstützung im Wert von CHF 28'000 sowie Startup Unterstützung durch den Impact Hub zürich sowie Swisscom für weitere 9 Monate freuen.
A global membership experience calls for a global event series. We decided to call this series: Mashup and the first event took place on November 26 (almost) simultaneously in eight different Impact Hubs. We teamed up with Impact Hub Berlin, Vienna, King’s Cross, Bucharest, Prague, Geneva, Sao Paolo and Stockholm, who joined us in spirit and via live video streaming. Impact Hub Sao Paulo had raced ahead with their event due to the time difference but with some Swiss presence, as the startup Urban Farmers (the very first Impact Hub Fellow ever) was presenting there.
Creating a real-time shared event experience has the true potential for collaboration among the members. We collected the stories and projects of this first Mash Up night with the #impacthubmashup on a tagboard and in order to keep things fast and dynamic, the speakers were asked to present in the pecha kucha format. (It has nothing to do with Ashton Kutcher, believe me… and everything to do with 20 slides with 20 secs talking time each). Let’s dive into the topic of the night: Open Data.
Collecting data is nothing new, it has been happening for more than 2000 years. It has always been used to create value - let’s just think of Alan Turing and his decryption machine that significantly influenced the outcome of World War Two. And today, we are living in an extremely data driven world where we decide and act upon all kinds of data. But who owns this data? A lot is owned by big companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Bitcoin, Uber, Airbnb etc. The dark side you may think now. But not only!
From Big Data to Open Data: André Golliez from opendata.ch
The idea of Big Data has turned into Open Data, data that "can be used freely by every one for any purpose“. This change is part of the openness family movement which also includes open source, creative commons, open access, open knowledge, etc. The idea that data should be free and open has arrived on the top political levels as well. Currently there are more than 150 open data platforms by different governments.
„There is more data stored about us than during Stasi times“ - André Golliez
In Switzerland the open data movement is also growing with more and more hackathons and workgroups happening. For example the DILAB (Data Innovation Lab) with it’s new home at Impact Hub Zürich - Colab, where enterprises can see and learn how open data can be used. We are still at the very beginning of the „open data process“ in Switzerland (despite our democracy it’s not really part of our history to be transparent!) but the movement has started.
The process of collecting Open Data is demand-driven: Stefan Oderbolz from LIIP
There are over 1 million portals for open data and most of them are very specialized. Sometimes it feels more like playing „Where is Waldo?“ when you are trying to find data relevant for your work. But once you found your data such as i.e. governmental data of cities and cantons provided on platforms like opendata.admin.ch the magic happens. Open data is the foundation (think of Lego!), you can use, mash it, mix it, build on it!
„If you cannot find some data, request it. You’re in charge!“ - Stefan Oderbolz
We as developers, scientists and interested citizens are the users of this data and it’s important that people try to understand and explore it. And whenever something is missing, request it! Why? Because its a big struggle to get more industries to share their data and we need to provide them with an argument to keep sharing data.
Business cases coming out of Open Data generate value: Flurin Capaul from Boonea AG
One of those cases using open data is Boonea, a company measuring relationships between employees and companies by analyzing the time spent on a relationship. They look at meta data of communication between employees (mail, meetings, phone calls, etc) to understand what teams are doing. In two words "x-raying the organization“ to make the true structure visible, analyzing re-organization processes and help other organizations with it.
„You can have it all with Open Data.“ - Flurin Capaul
This is just one example for a business case built on open data. Within the ecosystem of open data, every one is a player. And everyone needs to help finding business cases coming out of open data, so that it can generate the value for everyone in the movement. Key is that there needs to be more early movers to take the leap and show the value of open data. This will generate jobs for data science, make the movement more sustainable and transfer value to the entire community.
Open data is crucial for three areas: innovation (to develop new products), efficiency (i.e. in governments) and transparency (in lobbying). Talking about open data, using open data and generating value through open data is vital to boost the movement.
As the year comes to an end, many of us reflect on where we stand in life – and work specifically – and what hopes and dreams should come true in the New Year.
Ever since I quit my work at Microsoft 10 years ago to travel the world and understand what “meaningful work” could really be, these annual reviews have become a loved ritual that helps me stay close to what I really care about. And we all know that it’s not that easy.
Over the years and based on hundreds of career profiles and interviews I found out that there are always good reasons not to pursue a path of values in your work, to act beyond money and status, to seek true satisfaction. I struggle with them as much as everyone else. Or are they just excuses?
Here are some of the main reasons why people avoid the transition towards a more meaningful career. Let’s not give them another chance!
Dismantling the 5 main excuses as barriers to pursuing a career with purpose
- ‘I don’t have the right professional background’
What skills are really required to create social change? You don’t have to be a doctor, lawyer or finance expert to make things happen. Each individual has a unique set of experiences, values, skills and talents, which when used in the right way, can create change and impact.
- ‘I’m too young or too old’
Can a graduate contribute as much as a business leader? Whether you have just finished studying, are yet to develop your networks or skills or are facing peer-pressure to take the corporate route, don’t be put off by the need to be ‘realistic’ with your dreams.
By the same token, if you’re nearing the end of your career and are just looking for a rest – you’d be surprised by what you can offer on a flexible basis.
- ‘I am not financially secure’
Do you need money to create impact? You’re maybe used to having nothing and thinking that means you have nothing to offer, or you are used to a high standard of living and not sure if you can or want to change that. Would it be worth it, for that sense of purpose?
- ‘I am already successful in what I’m doing’
Can I give up the career I’ve worked so hard at? You’ve probably already invested a lot in your professional and personal development, skills and network and feel that would be wasted. You might be surprised by how you can extend those networks and skills and still work in a similar capacity or space.
- ‘What will others think of me?’
Well, what will they think? You probably feel like you don’t care much about others’ opinions but still, your peers may make a lot of money and live a great lifestyle. You don’t want to look like a failure. Or maybe you have responsibilities to provide for your family. Explore your options even though it takes a lot of self-confidence and resilience to pursue a path that sits outside others’ ideas of ‘normal’.
Success is more than just outcome, it’s living your personal values and making a difference along the way. Sometimes you just need the right tools to see your world through new eyes.
If you feel like making a step in 2016, come join us in one of the upcoming workshops:
15./16. Januar 2016: Karriere mit Sinn - Workshop "Von heute in die Zukunft", 2 Tage auf deutsch in Bern
22./23. January 2016: Meaningful careers - workshop “From Today into the Future”, 2 days in English in Zurich
For inspiration over the Holidays, you may want to read “The Futuremakers”
The Impact Hub Geneva officially opened its doors in June 2015. Co-founder Santu Boëthius, shares with us her experiences and what is coming in 2016.
I spoke to my mother the other day and mentioned the human rights hackathon that we’re organizing in connection with the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in February 2016. - ‘Human rights?’, I heard her say with a with a curious, slightly ironic voice, ‘Isn’t this something you used to work with at some point in your life?’.
Indeed, my life before founding Impact Hub Geneva had been focussed on working with human rights, in particularly with the view of promoting opportunities, empowerment and inclusion of the most marginalized in society. My experience had brought me to understand the complexity of social change, and that significant change and sustainable solutions could only come from different actors and sectors aligning their resources and working together. It was the passion for what I believed in, and the potential that I knew existed in Geneva that brought me to join the Impact Hub Geneva founding team a couple of years back.
Geneva embodies a unique and complete ecosystem for large-scale social change. With hundreds of international institutions based here, such as the UN agencies and ICRC, a hotbed of technology coming from EPFL and CERN, with top-schools such as IMD, HEID and UNIGE, a strong private and financial sector, a growing community of social entrepreneurs and a creative and resourceful local population - it seems that we're only at the very beginning of triggering our region’s potential for social innovation.
However, it’s easy to underestimate the time, energy, resources and challenges it takes to start up and begin to actually do the work we were set out to do. The past two years have been filled with long hours, sweat, tears, and laughter, the ups and downs of team work, and doing business strategy in-between updating the website and changing the toilet paper. Getting an Impact Hub up-and-running can make you forget why you started it in the first place.
Realizing a big vision requires taking many small steps, and at times also a few big ones. It requires collaboration, it requires trust, it requires courage, and, for us in Geneva, a global city, it requires working together with the Impact Hubs across the world.
Six months after our official opening we now have a buzzing Impact Hub community from all across the Lake Geneva region, with amazing members, programs and partnerships that we can be very proud of. The DiploHack on human rights is but one of several initiatives where we connect unlikely allies across sectors for social innovation - entrepreneurs, UN officials, NGO workers, techies and students - to work together for a world that works for all. There are many more to come in 2016, and you are warmly invited to join us for the adventure!
Have a great holidays season and new year! Looking forward to working with you in 2016!
Original ideas and new solutions emerge at the intersections of industries, between large and small companies, and across private, public and philanthropic sectors. Where startup entrepreneurs, corporate managers, designers, artists and the best technologists in the country meet and collaborate, ground-breaking innovations are the essential outcome. Being serious about prototyping the future of business, we need to connect not only startup entrepreneurs, but innovators from the most diverse backgrounds. An incubation and acceleration program or a beautiful coworking and event space is just not enough to really prototype a new economic system in Zurich, Switzerland and globally.
Corporate partners commit to multi-year engagement for real impact to happen
With over 5000 startups and SMEs in the Impact Hub network, we are delighted to welcome Engagement Migros, Swisscom, Credit Suisse, SIX and AXA Winterthur in our community in Zurich. In the last twelve months, we have worked intensively with innovators on all levels, from executive board members to corporate interns, to develop a long-term, multi-company partnership framework that demonstrates real commitment for change. Over the next five years, we will build prototypes like digital business models, innovative and sustainable products and services, internal innovation communities, cross-boundary collaboration projects and purpose-driven leadership approaches. While all partners have committed to join our mission to prototype the future of business, each corporate partner also has its distinct agenda.
Realizing concrete and tangible projects with each partner
Together with Engagement Migros, we launch the Pionier Lab to support cultural and creative projects for societal change. Swisscom and Impact Hub ran Switzerland’s largest IoT-Hackathon with over 100 participants building technology with hardware and software solutions. Its winning project, Grosi Alarm, is a tracking watch for dementia sufferers, using geofencing to minimize data collection and thus enabling more freedom to the user. Credit Suisse and SIX, with Swisscom, Zürcher Kantonalbank and PostFinance, partnered with us for Disrupt Finance 2015, our flagship event to kickoff the fintech community. During Disrupt Finance, entrepreneurs and corporate executives discussed future developments in block chain, payments and other areas of finance, while we listened to the keynotes of Dr. Urs Rüeggsegger, Group CEO of SIX, on fintech in Switzerland and Vodafone’s Claire Alexandre on the extraordinary story of M-Pesa. Finally, AXA Winterthur has announced this week to intensify their partnership with us. Since the beginning of Impact Hub Zürich in 2011, we have collaborated with AXA Winterthur on innovation and sustainability and we are proud to strengthen this partnership over the next three years.
Growing the community in Zurich and globally
In addition to individual objectives, all five corporate partners intend to build stronger relationships with their peers as well as with entrepreneurs in our community. Startup projects can benefit from the opportunities and scale of these large, multinational companies. And corporate managers become active community members leveraging not only the potential of 600 members at Impact Hub Zürich, but reaching out to more than 12’000 entrepreneurial people in over 80 Impact Hubs. There is just no other network of this global reach with a strong presence in Zurich and Geneva for entrepreneurs, techies, artists and innovators to connect. We look forward to prototyping the future of business and society together.
I asked myself this question many times when I prepared for my job interviews. It wasn’t until I applied for the role as Strategic Community Lead at the Impact Hub Zürich one year ago that I radically changed the way I presented myself in a job interview. Not only did I want to be brutally honest to them and especially to myself, but also did I want to show them a part of me that they were not expecting at all. We are so much more than our CV says, I always thought and here we go, the story went like this.
The usual procedure of a job interview begins with small talk and often continues by scanning through the CV, having to explain the different tasks here and difficult situations in former work situations as well as finding solutions there. This wasn’t any different in my first interview at Impact Hub Zürich with the big exception that after talking about the roles and tasks, we started talking about private questions: Things that are meaningful in life, like being married, the why and not only the how and what. I was surprised by this unexpected and honest turn of the interview led by Niels, one of the co-founders of the Impact Hub Zürich. Digging a bit deeper with meaningful questions and sharing some private information immediately brings the interviewer and applicant closer to each other and sets the foundation for an honest conversation.
I was asked what I am passionate about next to the job, about my interests, my motivation to get out of bed in the morning, and what makes my eyes shine. These are the questions one should be asked in a job interview, it gives a much more complete picture of the applicant and might even bring out skills that could be of great value for the company but that they didn’t think about in the first place.
The first interview went well and I was invited to a second interview, meeting one more colleague I would be working with and another colleague from the management team. When I was asked to come by for a third interview I honestly thought: "what is left to talk about?" The roles we had discussed, the meaningful questioned had been asked and even some private information was shared, what else could be coming? Because there was no question I could think of and no answer I could prepare, I thought to check the website of Impact Hub Zürich to see how much I could be myself.
When I looked at their website understanding better what the Impact Hub Zürich is all about, what they do and why the do what they do, I was impressed by the authenticity and honesty of the team presenting themselves. Well let’s see how authentic I can be I thought and packed my Djembe (African Drum) heading from Basel to Zürich for the third and last interview. I admit that I was a bit nervous because drumming in a job interview was really something I’ve never done before. And so I was there in front of the whole team of the Impact Hub Zürich, 17 people I’ve never met before. Instead of talking, I offered to play something for them and let the rhythm speak for itself. And (as you will know) I got the job. It was a risk I took but deep inside I knew, if this company accepts my individual being, my strong passion for rhythm, I knew it was the right company because of it’s radical inclusivity.
Having written that, I want to encourage you to be brutally honest in your next job interview and challenge the company with your whole being. We are so much more than what we think.
This post was a co-creation of two of our members and resulted from a discussion that started on our member platform Hubnet.
Chance leads to interesting encounters and discussions. On the internal Impact Hub forum Hubnet a job advert was launched looking for someone “extroverted” to build and develop a network/community. The post led to some discussion revolving around whether someone needed to be introverted or extroverted to build and maintain a network. Out of this discussion between me, Nadia, and Flurin, we’ve decided to share our views in two short blog posts.
Why introverted people are are great at building and maintaining networks
In business, creating relationships are critical and a source of opportunity, personal growth and even lifelong friendships. If you don’t network, you find yourself in situations (particularly as an entrepreneur or business owner) where you need someone with a certain skill set and you don’t even know where to start looking. Building a network takes time and patience especially if you want it well-configured. A healthy networking philosophy is a commitment to give without expecting anything in return. So when you reach out and offer help to others, or when asked for help you offer it without even thinking twice about saying “yes”, you’re creating energy that will naturally, and ultimately, flow back to you.
So why are then introverted people great at building and maintaining networks? First of all, they are good listeners. They have this rare talent of being quiet when the world around them is crazy. When they meet new people, they are attentive and allow them to speak so they can enjoy the feeling of being really listened to. By being quiet and listening they are also picking up all the other non-verbal clues and information. So whilst listening they are learning a lot about the people they get to know and their needs.
Another talent introverted people have is they excel at focus oriented conversation: serious, purpose-driven, often one-on-one or in small groups. This is how they win people over: they advise and teach. Because by asking questions, you get the other involved and you approach a decision together. The result is qualitative communication which leads to superior decision making and actions taken. This stands in opposition to the extroverted approach: persuade and dominate.
Last but not least, introverted people are excellent speakers. This seems counter-intuitive but when you have the stage, you are in charge of the situation. And most of all, everybody knows you already and it becomes easier to get in real conversations afterwards. So though introverted people are more likely struggling with public speaking than extroverted, preparation is their secret to success.
Nadia Diraä has a heart for diversity, in life and work. She worked a lot for non profit organizations with a focus on diversity and managed projects to empower immigrant women, to bring more women into IT or supporting students with disabilities by enhancing accessibility of online content.
Why extroverted people are are great at building and maintaining networks
Building a network (or curating a community if you’re into fancy words) is first of all a numbers game. If you’re starting from scratch you need to meet lots of people to spread the word. Unless you’re founding a secret society you need to generate noise and buzz, otherwise no one will know what you’re up to.
And that means first and foremost one single thing – you have to be relentless IN and open TO meeting complete strangers. Every encounter is a chance to introduce yourself and your agenda. Normal human politeness should be observed, but no one will turn you down if you smile at them and introduce yourself. Just like in Sales you have to fill the pipeline, otherwise you’ll never make the conversions needed.
So what does that have to do with being extroverted ? It’s hard work and takes energy. If extroverts are “…enthusiastic, talkative, assertive and gregarious …“ and “… are energized and thrive off being around other people”, that’s exactly what it needs to get the job done (quote from Wikipedia). If you’re shy and reclusive, can’t muster the energy to keep on meeting people after you’ve already spoken to lots of others, you’re not going to get the numbers you need to build up a network.
Besides the energy to talk to lots of people, another key skill is opening up a conversation and being able to include people into the discussion. Often you’ll find yourself in a situation where people are alone or not speaking to each other and you’re the catalyst to spark a conversation. And that’s where the best skill of an extroverted person comes into play – you’re not going to overthink it, you’re going to do it. Without that key skill the conversation won’t get off the ground and people will part ways unintroduced. While this doesn’t guarantee that the person will end up in your network, not talking to them will guarantee that they don’t end up in your network.
Flurin Capaul decided to found Boonea AG and turn an idea into action. Flurin is a Swiss national with 15 years of experience in IT and Finance, having worked in Singapore, New York and Zurich. He holds a BSc in Computer Sciences. In his spare time enjoys dining out, football, Jazz, history books, tv series and museums. He’s a retired sergeant of the Cryptology Unit of the Swiss Armed Forces.