Meet 10 New People Per Week

As I sat down at today’s weekly Startup Chowdown, another Villager promptly introduced herself. We got to talking and she shared her story of wanting to join a startup and the process that lead to her new job. After the conversation, I started thinking about the benefit of meeting new people on a regular basis and how even with all this great technology, knowing a variety of people is still incredibly important. In fact, entrepreneurs would do well to make an effort to meet 10 new people per week, especially in the early years of a new startup.

Here are a few thoughts on meeting 10 new people per week:

• Figure out the events you already attend on regular basis and how many people you normally meet there (e.g. two events per month, like the Atlanta Startup Village, and seven new contacts per time)
• Attend at least one new event every month and continue to grow the circles of connections
• Decide on an area of expertise where you’d like to improve your network (e.g. sales people, software engineers, etc) and ask friends for introductions
• Use LinkedIn to track how many new connections you earn for a given week or month

Meeting 10 new people per week will add tremendous value and should be on the short-list of things for entrepreneurs to do.

What else? What are some other thoughts on meeting 10 new people per week?