The Most Impactful People: The Why behind “The Network Project”
I came into Summer 2019 with the potential and intent for IDEA and entrepreneurship to be the largest part of my life it has ever been. I tried to make that very clear to IDEA’s CEO, Abhi Balakrishnan, as early as June and quickly the conversation got going around five themes he and his team Leads had for the coming year. One of them was “network” and while, of course, only vaguely defined months before the start of the semester, we ran with it.
I don’t think almost a year ago my motivations around what is now, thanks to my inability to come up with a better name, referred to as The Network Project were in the fully thought out form I intend to present today. I also can only speak for why I want to work on this, and not for the many other people who have put equal effort into supporting ventures this way. However, personal reflection has inspired me to try to present my “why” around this effort because it has taught me a bit.
Impact is my word. It has a very specific definition to me at this point (a topic for future discussion) but when someone asks me what I want to be, it’s always related to this concept. I thus spend a lot of time thinking about the people who I see executing on a similar definition of impact. There was an exciting similarity between all these people, one practice that each and everyone of them was constantly honing. These people are the connectors within their communities and the value-add intermediaries between the people in their lives, both personally and professionally. In my personal life, I strive to be just that with the people who matter most. However, I have a professional community I also care about in the founders who look to IDEA for guidance and support when building their businesses. The Network Project is an attempt to borrow the practices of the most impactful people to support founders.
In the fall, we prematurely started building and putting together a vague vision of systemizing something I didn’t fully understand and that is far too intricate to mechanize. Version 1.0 was a complex system that failed to gain significant traction. That’s because I started with the what and not the why. We created something we wanted without stepping back to understand what the goal was. And that’s when I began to look more closely to the people who serve as the connectors in their community to implement similar practices in our IDEA community. I had begun to spend a lot of time with young people in venture and start ups, an area where it seemed being a connector was commonly rewarded. As a result, I observed the very human element to this whole networking thing.
This same group of young professionals consistently expressed their desire to support the concept I was thinking about. This seemed like the best marketplace ever, demand for support from founders is unfulfilled and demand to support founders was also unfulfilled. The last couple months have been attempting to design the system that exploits this in a mutually beneficial manner. It needed to be well defined and highly systematized but human-centric and flexible enough to meet diverse needs.
For members of the venture community, The Network Project will provide 3 primary ways to engage with our “Go Stage” ventures. These include simply being kept up to date with their progress, getting your hands dirty and hosting an Expert Session (group intensives on specific subjects), and engagement in a long term relationship with IDEA, and thus our ventures, as an advisor or coach. The idea behind each of these structures is they are mutually beneficial and flexible enough to fit differing needs and offerings. Most importantly though, they are all focused on encouraging relationships by increasing touch points between founders and the community and thus opportunities to benefit from the awesome ecosystem that surrounds us in Boston.
Finally, founding a company is an iterative process. It requires a combination of steps forward to progress and steps backward to reassess, similar to the experience we had building The Network Project. For that reason, we hope by serving as a deeply impactful connector within our community, IDEA can generate more coffees, deck reviews, customer introductions, etc and thus the critical input required to productively iterate.
It is all still taking shape but I love to talk about this project so certainly don’t hesitate to reach out (dolce.k@husky.neu.edu) if any of this sounds interesting to you.
