SF Tech Week 1/7: Forming Convo across the Crowd

Kicking off our first day of tech week with 5 events in a roll. I started off with a coffee rave hosted by Manus AI, then a local pitching event, following by a vibe coding x builder mixer event, then to a designer pitch hosted at Dovetail and lastly to Kiro’s first launch event.

5 events in a day, and multiple people I’ve been speaking to, that’s really wildddd. My friend asked how do I navigate my way and find the right person to reach and connect with during a physical event, here’s my conclusion so far:

Observation: Look around the venue and see how the crowd flows

Before heading into any deep convos right after heading inside the venue, I always take several minutes checking out the distribution of the crowd. See if there’s any centre among or interesting convos that might be worth joining firsthand. Don’t directly head into just any convos, embrace the awkwardness of staying single in such events and don’t feel weird about it, I know it’s hard but I do think it’s truly an essencial mindset for social events attendance. (Also I’m often hungry entering social events, it’s always good to start with food.

Action: Convo Starters and Identifying Key Person

Always go for a 2 ppl circle, if they’ve already been talking for a while, then it’s the best time to join. Don’t be afraid to approach and stand aside to just listen up. Find the right time, end of convo or the relevant topic to hop into the chat.

My go-to three layer conversation strategy comes in this way:

1. Layer one: The What-is, for finding overlaying interest
   1. What’s the product?
1. What have you been working on?
1. What brings you here today?
2. Layer two: The How-does, for digging deeper and finding insights
   1. How long have you been doing this?
1. How do you start doing this?
3. Layer three; The Why, for aligning and reasoning on thoughts
   1. Why this, but not that?
1. Why is this appealing other than?

Most of my convo in social events stop at layer two, where I find good enough insights in the person but don’t think I need to go deeper on finding alignment (which is mostly for potential collabs or I’m just really interested).

It’s always good to meet people and learn more on different verticals, but not every encountering has to turn into profitable or valuable network. I normally wrap up conversations and my question list in 3-5 min, then can decide whether to go into layer three for deep convo or not.

And often the LinkedIn exchange happens after closing the layer two questions, where I’ve got sufficient amount of info and can summarise what’s the person been doing in one single summary phrase.

Result: To follow up, to curate familiarity

This is no secret doing post event LinkedIn post, but in addition to just simply post reflections I would add the memorable details I recall from the people I met. I still struggle from mapping name with faces but I can tell which person does what and it’s always nice to see yourself being memorised and shouted out to.

For next post I’ll talk about “Memory Hook“ which is a small tip I often use to establish a clear image in social events.