Yesterday’s TiE-SmashUP at IIT Delhi Seminar Hall was the third TiE event I attended in the last 4-5 months and like all the previous events I was happy for being there.
For those of you who might not know, TiE is the world’s biggest formal network of Entrepreneurs and Professionals. The thing I love most about TiE events is the wonderful opportunity they offer of meeting loads of interesting people from various profiles spread across different industries and hailing from different parts of the country and world.
It took me some time to realize and appreciate that the kind of audience TiE events attract is a lot different from what similar events(Startup etc) attract and that’s what sets them apart from other events in the same category. Also, as mentioned previously I strongly feel that TiE events are especially designed to make networking more easy and often, for example this time around(for SmashUP) there was a “Power Breakfast” in which you were asked to choose 3 out of 5 established VC’s/Successful Entrepreneurs and the orgaziners would try to arrange you(and 8-9 other folks) to have breakfast with one of them on a separate table. Having attended a Power Breakfast yesterday I can say it was a simple yet very effective thing. To discuss and network with 8-9 attendees and a VC/Successful Entrepreneur in just an hour couldn’t have been easier and better.
Having said all that I’d like to conclude this post by saying that if you are one of those who like professional networking with people and you haven’t yet attended a TiE event, you should give it a try.
Hey, I wanted to attend it but just wasn’t prepared. Do they publish some sort of post-mortem on what was achieved during the event?
Just to set the expectations right, it’s primarily a networking event more than anything. The talks also have some value/gyan in parts. TiE folks should be uploading videos of the talks during the coming week.
Yes, it’s a networking-cum-thought provoking event in total. I was amazed to see majority of companies were event companies.
And as always, marketing guys on these kinda events are plain nausiance. I don’t hold anything against marketing professionals, but somehow I feel they are on mission to spend that 100 pack of visiting card, w/o even knowing anything abt their product, w/o even knowing whether the next person would be of any use.