– In Silicon Valley, the entrepreneurs we interviewed see every person they meet as a potential link to a future investor.\nEntrepreneurs in Berlin, on the other hand, felt that contacts need to be close and trusting for them to use them.\n“We are talking about warm and cold contacts,” says Anna Brattstr\u00f6m, Sten K Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship, Lund University. <\/p>\n\n
Together with German colleague Katharina Scheidgen, Leuphana University, she has studied how entrepreneurs go about building networks.\nThe differences between the two hot spot cities for entrepreneurs are striking.\nBrattstr\u00f6m tells how one entrepreneur they interviewed in Silicon Valley had asked his yoga instructor if he knew anyone who might know someone… <\/p>\n\n
– Another emailed information about his company to one of the speakers at an event and pretended that they had spoken after the talk.\nThe entrepreneur explained the maneuver by saying that speakers never remember who they have talked to at an event anyway, says Anna Brattstr\u00f6m. <\/p>\n\n
In Berlin, contacts need to be much warmer.\nThe entrepreneurs in the study only want to use contacts that are based on trusting relationships.\nAnd they definitely don’t want to pretend they know a person if they don’t, as in the example above. <\/p>\n\n
How entrepreneurs create their networks has long-term consequences for how the networks (and the company!) develop.\nAccording 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.\nGoing to the ‘right’ school and working in the ‘right’ company is important because it is only the close contacts that the entrepreneur can use. <\/p>\n\n
– In Silicon Valley, it seemed to matter less where entrepreneurs started or who they got to know first in their career.\nThere, everyone was seen as a possible contact, even superficial contacts were seen as valuable.\n“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 Brattstr\u00f6m. <\/p>\n\n
According to Brattstr\u00f6m, entrepreneurship is a social activity, where you depend on others.\nIt 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. <\/p>\n\n
– It is easy to forget that norms are constructed and local.\nIn entrepreneurship education, for example, we teach the same networking methods regardless of the country in which the education takes place.\nIn both education and research, we ignore that the world looks different in different places. <\/p>\n\n
Contact anna.brattstrom@fek.lu.se<\/a><\/p>\n\n More about the study<\/strong> 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":28252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,404],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-visa-deepl"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31780"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32716,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31780\/revisions\/32716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esbri.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}