Silicon Valley vs Berlin: Big differences in how you network

In Silicon Valley, your yoga instructor could be a link to an investor. In Berlin, it’s unthinkable. A new study shows that the path to networking success looks different depending on where you are in the world.

– In Silicon Valley, the entrepreneurs we interviewed see every person they meet as a potential link to a future investor. Entrepreneurs in Berlin, on the other hand, felt that contacts need to be close and trusting for them to use them. “We are talking about warm and cold contacts,” says Anna Brattström, Sten K Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship, Lund University.

Together with German colleague Katharina Scheidgen, Leuphana University, she has studied how entrepreneurs go about building networks. The differences between the two hot spot cities for entrepreneurs are striking. Brattström tells how one entrepreneur they interviewed in Silicon Valley had asked his yoga instructor if he knew anyone who might know someone…

– Another emailed information about his company to one of the speakers at an event and pretended that they had spoken after the talk. The entrepreneur explained the maneuver by saying that speakers never remember who they have talked to at an event anyway, says Anna Brattström.

In Berlin, contacts need to be much warmer. The entrepreneurs in the study only want to use contacts that are based on trusting relationships. And they definitely don’t want to pretend they know a person if they don’t, as in the example above.

Network strategy determines the future of your business

How entrepreneurs create their networks has long-term consequences for how the networks (and the company!) develop. According to the entrepreneurs in the study, the first contact you have in Berlin is very important as it influences the contacts you make later on. Going to the ‘right’ school and working in the ‘right’ company is important because it is only the close contacts that the entrepreneur can use.

– In Silicon Valley, it seemed to matter less where entrepreneurs started or who they got to know first in their career. There, everyone was seen as a possible contact, even superficial contacts were seen as valuable. “It was more of a coincidence how the network developed when the entrepreneurs laid out a large number of threads among yoga instructors, parents at preschool and at parties,” says Anna Brattström.

Critical of entrepreneurship education

According to Brattström, entrepreneurship is a social activity, where you depend on others. It is important to behave according to social norms in order to find the right team and investors, and it is important to understand that social norms look different in different places.

– It is easy to forget that norms are constructed and local. In entrepreneurship education, for example, we teach the same networking methods regardless of the country in which the education takes place. In both education and research, we ignore that the world looks different in different places.

Contact anna.brattstrom@fek.lu.se

More about the study
Anna Brattström and Katharina Scheidgen received the Carolyn Dexter Award this summer. It is awarded at the annual Academy of Management Annual Meeting conference to the contribution that best meets the ambition to internationalize management research. The article can be read here.———–