‘Where you going now?’ asked the waitress. I was in a burger restaurant in Camden.
‘Oh, an event in the city; it’s about business networking or something, you know, entrepreneurs?’
‘Ah, lots of arseholes in suits, right?’
The event I was going to was going be a ‘combined event’. Three different groups: Networking for Business, London Entrepreneurs, and Technopreneurs were descending on a single venue.
As the waitress took my plates away we chatted for a bit. It turned out she lived in Brixton. She told me that there were parts of it that were being thoroughly gentrified and recommended a visit to the market.
‘I don’t live in the gentrified bit, though. I live on one of those estates that are filled with crack heads’. There was an uncomfortable pause whilst she reached for the payment machine.
‘I live south of the river too’, I said, trying to make a connection. For some reason I didn’t want her to feel bad about where she lived; I sensed that the crack heads were playing on her mind.
My journey to the Meetup was pretty easy: I caught a Northern Line train to Bank, and then had a short walk along Gresham Street to a pub called The Anthologist.
For the second time, Bank underground station thoroughly baffled me; I got lost. Rather than walk around looking for endless exits (hoping that there would be an exit to Prince’s Street or Gresham Street), I went up to street level as quickly as I could, only to be confronted with a summer storm. Rain battered down; commuters hid in the underground entrances for shelter. For once, I had the foresight to pack a rain coat: a lightweight cycling jacket. For ten minutes, I became a slightly self-conscious high visibility commuter.
I was surprised by The Anthologist: it was a fancy restaurant and flashy cocktail bar; I had been expecting a dreary pub. I peered through the windows and saw rows of ordered tables, looked again at the name of the venue (to check to see if I was at the right place) and saw a group of about sixty people at the back of the restaurant. I made my way inside.
‘Is this, erm, the Meetup group?’ I had now thoroughly lost my fear of going to these events. I no longer had Pre-Meetup Tension. There was also a part of me that just wanted to get this one over with so I could just go home, put my feet up and watch telly.
‘Yes, it is. Hi. My name is Eva.’ I introduced myself and we soon knew why each other were at the event. Eva was a part of a company that offered a range of services to new businesses. Her company did things like advertising, corporate identity and branding, website design, and whole host of other business sounding things. I sensed in this event I needed to apply a ‘this is generally true but it’s what I’m going to say for the time being’ cover story: that I was interested in how technology was being applied in real-world situations.
‘Hello! How are you!’ Indra held out his hand. Indra, it turned out, was the organiser of all three Meetup groups. ‘Thank you for coming! What do you do?’ Indra wasn’t messing about. I told him that I taught about ‘computers’ and gave him my official business card. He looked at it intently for a few moments.
‘You know what, I’ve been looking for someone like you!’ I took a step backwards. ‘Faculty of Mathematics… Hmm. I also run these other groups, and we have some speakers down to talk about different subjects; hour sessions’.
I told him that I couldn’t do any teaching about mathematics, imagining a group of city traders hungry for information about quant algorithms; I said I only really knew about software ‘stuff’.
‘That’s not a problem; it’ll be for an hour – and you can choose the topic, whatever your specialism is, you can choose. Can I email you? Can I add you to LinkedIn?’ He gave me his expensive looking camera whilst he rummaged in his pockets to find a business card holder. ‘Here, this is my card. We should sort something out. I’ll email you’. Indra suddenly recognised someone else, and was gone. Indra had made me feel good; we had networked.
More people joined our group: a chap from Sri Lanka who had been in the country for two months, and a tax accountant called Tim who had just come back travelling from South America.
‘I’ve been back two weeks… and I’m already bored’. Tim had been travelling for six months and was now working for one of the big four accountancy companies. He was looking to move: ‘I’ve had enough of giving people advice to do stuff; I want to actually do stuff myself’. Tim was clearly suffering from tax accountancy anxiety.
I made a break for the bar to get a drink (disappointingly, there wasn’t any free beer or pizza), and by the time I returned, I found myself amidst a new group of people.
I chatted with Concha, who was on holiday in London, who worked as a Spanish-English translator (who was taking the opportunity to try to drum up some business), and a guy called Harry who was searching for a new chief technical officer for his start-up company that was a long-term web-facilitated on-line letting agency. I talked about cloud computing, distributed IT and programming languages, but he was fundamentally disinterested in taking anything any further: I was obviously not the chief technology officer he was looking for.
Working my way through the crowd (whilst thinking to myself, ‘what on earth am I doing here?’), I bumped into someone called Mary. Mary described herself as an entrepreneur.
‘So, do you have your own business?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I do. It’s a business life-cycle business’. I had no idea what one of those was. ‘We offer services to help businesses through their whole lifecycle. So, if a business is starting, we can help with offering services and advice to solve some problems, such as HR or recruitment.’ I got it. Mary was, in essence, a management consultant. She was the third management consultant I had met in twenty minutes.
I pushed onward through the throng and got chatting to a chap called Blake. Blake worked for a telecoms company. He made the move to telecoms after working in property letting for many years. He said that there was loads to learn in telecoms; he had to learn stuff about infrastructure and datacentres. I asked him whether he had heard of a book called ‘Tubes’, which was all about the architecture of the internet. After describing the book and talking about data centres (which I know next to nothing about), he then said that I ought to sell training courses to industry about telecoms and networking.
‘You’re missing a trick, man! You see, I’m always thinking about business, how to make money, looking for business opportunities; you should sell yourself. I would help you if I wasn’t so busy’.
‘I wouldn’t know where to start, really…’
‘You academics…’ he laughed. ‘You’re not interested in making money, are you?’ Blake said that I should put together a four page plan of an ‘introduction to telecoms’ course, and approach chief executive officers of small telecoms companies. ‘You should go do it, man’. I started to think about this: could I really do such a thing? Was this a good idea? Could I really imbibe some entrepreneurial spirit? Could I develop a whole new side line? I thanked Blake for his thoughts.
I soon found myself talking with Rajesh who overheard a conversation with a software engineer who was talking about ‘business intelligence’.
‘I’m out of that game now! I’ve done that for fifteen years!’ Rajesh said. Moments later, my old friend Eva joined us.
‘I run a business that sells chocolate. Not just any old chocolate, but health chocolate. Its chocolate that is sugar free, gluten free, and lactose free. It contains some electrolyte salts, so it’s good for you; it helps to rebuild your body and give you energy’. It turned out that his company was based in America, and he was setting up some kind of import and distribution network.
‘We also have a range of high impact energy products, you know? These are products that have been designed for the health consumer in mind’. Eva was clearly intrigued. Rajesh told her about his different business models and then asked her about her business support services.
‘Perhaps we could have a chat about your business services over a coffee one day. What do you think? Do you have a card?’ he asked Eva. Eva had run out of business cards, so he asked her for her email address; he was a slick operator.
Rajesh didn’t ask me for my card.
I looked around me and decided that it was heading towards ‘the bitter end’ – it was time for me to go. The area of the restaurant that had been cordoned off for the Meetup was starting to get quiet; two thirds of the networkers had gone home.
As I made my way to the exit I got chatting to Andrew, who was possibly the tallest man I had ever met. Andrew was in his early fifties. He had a glorious welcoming smile and a firm handshake. Andrew ran a business that was all about financial match making; he ran events to get investors and inventors together in the same room. I sensed that he was very good at what he could do; he had a gentle and easy charm. In some respects, he personified what the evening was all about: finding opportunities, friendliness, and trying to find connections with people who might be able to help with your pet project.
When I left, it had stopped raining; the city pavements had been washed clean. I caught a bus to London Bridge from a station that was next to the Bank of England. When on the bus, I started to think about the event. It struck me that all these events were starting to change me. Although a very large percentage of the people that I spoke to were wearing a suit, I didn’t feel that they were arseholes. All these financial-business-tycoon types were just like everyone else; they were just trying to make do and get along in the best way that they can. In some respects, they were just as much into randomness as I was. The difference was that they had much clearer dreams and ambitions than I had.
No comments:
Post a Comment