Welcome To The Club. Not!

Earlier today I read Vivek Wadhwa’s “The glaring gender dilemma Silicon Valley venture capitalists are hiding from” in The Washington Post and through the gender stats, diversity initiatives and efforts to combat bias, this one line stood out:

He insisted that I would never be able to make the right connections to be successful in the valley.

The necessity of connections in the Herculean effort to become a member of the elite 1% club (only 1% of U.S. businesses receive venture funding), is also mentioned (briefly) in the Babson study cited by Vivek:

Nonetheless, women were consistently left out of the networks of growth capital finance and appeared to lack the contacts needed to break through

Contacts. Networks. Connections. These determine which ideas become breakthrough innovation – and who gets introductions, offers and all the other career and life perks of knowing someone in the know. Access is everything.

Networks and connections have fueled my entire career. There is no other way for me to explain how I’ve transitioned from CMBS attorney to startup CMO, advisor and investor. Doors not only being opened for me but for me to be proactively included in the “club” has changed my world view of possibilities.

Let me explain.

I grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. An unremarkable middle class upbringing, in that I attended decent public schools and got respectable grades that permitted me to enter the University of Victoria without tremendous anxiety or a SAT. I went on to law school at U.B.C. – my first step out of the cocoon of very provincial connections I had grown-up in – and then chose to “article” in Toronto (articling is the mandatory apprenticeship year law students are required to complete before being admitted to the bar). The year was 1991 and the reason for selecting Toronto over Victoria (much to the disappointment of my mother) was two-fold: money and love. Articling positions in Toronto paid a whopping $36,000 a year versus $12,000 in Victoria. The network of my parent’s contacts could have landed me one of the few select opportunities in Victoria but in Toronto the opportunities were much greater and I was pulled into a bigger, more influential and varied network thanks to my law school sweetheart. I didn’t fully realize the power of networks at the time however in hindsight, this is when I first discovered my networking muscle, using it to move from a respectable then mid-size firm to one of the 7-sisters (reference to the elite group of Toronto-based firms) in 1996 when upward lateral career opportunities were not common.

Fast forward to New York. Connections by way of a friend on Wall Street who was an investment banking client, opened the door to a corporate associate job at Sidley. Why interview at 10 firms when one introduction can land you an offer in an afternoon? When I decided to make the transition out of legal practice onto the management side in a law firm, client connections as well as professional contacts from my law days in Toronto, were actively leveraged and leveraged.... more on that transition another time. And so my network-fueled career story continues from legal management to the first President of 85 Broads to co-founding a startup accelerator to where I am now – plus every board appointment, committee and speaking gig in between. Before you start thinking that I’m a social networking butterfly getting ahead simply based on connections, I work bloody hard and have always been career driven. But working hard and being driven simply isn’t enough to get ahead. Being good at what you do provides a contact with one valid reason to make an introduction. So in tandem with aiming to always produce good work, I’ve built a network of professional contacts. Opportunities have presented themselves to me as a result of this career cocktail:

Expertise + professional objective + network of contacts

Who I knew opened doors for me at critical junctures in my career. It altered not only my career path but also my perspective on what I could be and more importantly, how I had the power to do the same for someone else. Access changes everything.

So I come back to having the door proactively slammed in your face:

He insisted that I would never be able to make the right connections to be successful in the valley.

As I sit overlooking the Avenue of the Americas vs Fort Street, I am perplexed and profoundly disappointed by a networking mindset which chooses to close doors, to keep the club small, to limit opportunity.

Which networking path will you choose?