1) Aren't going to hire somebody for a leadership position because they met them networking --- they are going to hire them based on merit
2) The people in charge of smart companies aren't at networking events because networking events are a waste of time
Startups are a way to "level up" your career only because you can skip years of moving up a corporate ladder by starting at the top and building a successful company below you. This doesn't mean that by being a CTO of a 3 person company you are all of the sudden eligible to be a CTO at a big, successful company. The process of being CTO at your 3 person company and growing it into a big, successful company is what makes you eligible for that position at a different company.
The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking.
This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architect at a Fortune 50 company, Manager of Development at a big ad agency). Last year, when I was looking for work, those titles were pretty much entirely disregarded by the employers I applied to. Almost every one of them told me they never trusted titles from other companies and tried to get me to join as a mid-level engineer.
Every time I had a friend inside the company, however, I was routed to senior-level jobs that actually matched my experience. I've spent time keeping up those friendships with occasional notes and lunches. If I had just assumed that being really good at my job would be my best insurance, I would not have found the opportunities I did.
This was not even a startup where people get a cto-title just by happening to be there. This was a group inside bigco.
There's a whole world out there that technologists like us rarely pay attention to, which mostly consists of building relationships with other people whose only job is networking so that when their company is looking to purchase, they think of us. Familiarity is a remarkably effective distortion on our evaluation of what is "good", and many technologists who didn't realize this ended up building something that nobody ever heard of.
The reason YC (and other top startup advisors) say to ignore this isn't that it's unimportant, it's that you can fairly easily hire all the people whose day job is networking once you have a product that people want on its own merits, while if nobody wants your product, you'll have to hire them at fat prices to get anywhere. It's a matter of negotiating leverage: show up at the table with something people really want and you will find plenty of people willing to help sell it, while if you spend all your time trying to sell what nobody wants, it will never become something people want.
This doesn't mean "you should go to lots of networking events" -- many of those are a waste of time. But you should build relationships with people, because relationships are a massive influence on hiring, even at smart companies. Also, relationships give you ways to experiment with new projects, learn stuff, and test your own ideas.
Lots of people ignore this and do good work, but don't get recognized. Others do average work, but have powerful networks and advance strongly in their careers. While I favor meritocratic hiring, it isn't wise to advise people that networking is irrelevant.
Sorry, I have to disagree. Understanding the "merit" of a leadership/management role has way more to do with who you know than your merit. Management ability is almost entirely subjective.
So even if that were true (which is questionable, at best), they won't hire you if you are not on their radar. One way to get on their radar? Know them / meet them.
They are (probably correctly) betting that > 80% of the people they meet at these events aren't that smart. Birds of a feather and all that.
Most business founders come from an environment where this is what has worked for them their whole career. That's how you get a job on the business side of things, and it's how you do your job on the business end of an established company.
The take-away, I think, is to know which game you're playing and make your moves accordingly. Being a great research engineer is one game; being an engineer at a startup is another, and moving up the ranks in a big company is another one entirely. Doing sales for a big company is a different game from doing customer development for your own startup, which is different from doing business development for either. Building a lifestyle business in a competitive niche is very different from doing hard tech research, which is very different from solving a problem that seems crazy in an area nobody else will go near. If you apply the rules of one game to the situations of another, you're unlikely to get good results.
(A corollary of this is to make sure that all your startups' other decisions are lined up with the game it is playing. I've seen a number of startups with ideas & personal goals that are clearly in the "lifestyle business" camp, but then they make decisions about markets, fundraising & hiring that put them in the "we're gonna be Google" camp, and unsurprisingly this tends to end poorly.)
Despite my personal record for failing to do so 5 times out of 10, the core recipe is not that hard: build a product that solve a problem that people would be willing to pay to have solved and get them to hit the "buy" button.
Women in business face special challenges. Failing to deal with them at all can be catastrophic. But getting too focused on that piece can also be problematic. It can be challenging to figure out which is which.
Of course, it's REALLY hard to do PR when you don't have a product people love, really easy once you've got that. Keeping it fresh and top of mind is a challenge for many founders though.
I think I've asked this question but I found myself a cofounder with 2 others that prioritized too highly IMO coffee meetings with "investors", no name board advisors, expensive conferences, and basically everything on that list. My approach was to gently voice my concern and but also let them do it in the hopes they'd see how useless it was. The other thing that didn't help was I was the "technical cofounder" and the attitude essentially was I didn't "get" business, and sometimes I wondered if they were right.
Interestingly both were woman, and I don't recall too much of #3. They definitely participated in women in tech type groups but I thought it was no different than any other useless networking others that aren't focused would do.
This will be definitely something I probe for in the future. Anyone looking for a cofounder? (I'm serious, and I have a cool little project we could do to see if we can build something people want together)