Working the room

Once upon a time, just before the great dot com bubble burst of The New Economy, the hoi polli of the Internet scene would gather on the first Tuesday of every month to congratulate themselves for having a modem and a business idea.

These First Tuesday meet-ups were international, unbearable and intoxicating. They were networking events where investors, startups and yellow dots (suppliers) would fantasise about bringing down the Old Economy with Virtual Reality supermarkets and email-to-fax supply chain systems. It was dangerously silly.

And it was all smoke, mirrors and hubris.

Irony, common sense and humility were exchanged at the door for a fantasy C-Level lanyard. Everyone was eager to win the battle for internet consumers that weren't there yet. Everyone had read Mary Modahl's Now or Never and was stealing made-up consultancy hallucinations from the Forrester website. It was 1999, and we didn't know better.

It's hard to describe just how popular these events were. They were like monthly conferences – investor raves – each hosting two to three hundred people every month. They took place simultaneously in London, New York, San Francisco and Sydney and a whole host of cities all over the globe, including Frankfurt.

And it was here, in Frankfurt, that you'd find a young Marcus John Henry Brown working the room. He was good at it.

Frankfurt had a lively dot com scene during the final years of the 1990s, and it all converged on the Hanauer Landstrasse, which was hilariously donned Silicon Alley.

Frankfurt's First Tuesday events were lively and full of the relentless optimism you can still find at Startup events to this day. There was more of the kind of hedonism that comes with the lack of experience, arrogance and silliness you'd expect from neo-liberal lemmings. When the dot com bubble burst, all the startups gladly jumped off the cliff, hoping the Pink Slip Parties would cushion the fall. They didn't, and all of the new economy dreams crashed, taking greedy agency folk like me with them.

The dot com crash came and went.

The First Tuesday events petered out.

I lost my appetite for networking and enthusiastic small talk.

I lost my mind as it took me on my first terrifying disassociative episode.

And, at thirty-one years of age, I lost my appetite for myself.

It took me ten years to put myself in a room full of people with lanyards again.

Sometimes, people come to me looking to fix their confidence. We all have experiences – many, not just a few. We get programmed by parents, teachers and colleagues: "Don't be too successful, you've got to work harder than the rest, you'll never be as good as your brother, unless...". We make mistakes, drink the Kool-aid and believe our own bullshit. We fail, disappoint people and get back up and try again.

All of this leaves scars. It flavours behaviour and holds us back when we feel that we need to shine: on stage, in a pitch, in front of a camera, microphone or, as in my case, in a room full of people.

Truth be told – my self-confidence took a battering when the dot com crash happened. I used to be great at working the room, and now I'm not.

If you've seen me at events, you'll know I tend to keep myself to myself, preferring to watch and listen instead. I'm even worse at parties. I'm deeply suspicious of small talk and networking. I don't trust myself either. I try and keep my ego in a box.

I was at a wonderful event last night that was full of wonderful people. It felt a little better, but that insecurity was still there. I tried a little harder this time, even staying a little longer and chatting more than usual. But this says more about the company I was keeping than about me being able to jump my own shadow.

As I sat there watching and listening to these people I caught myself thinking that I should maybe make the effort to work the room again. But in a different way this time. I know I just need to pluck up the courage and figure out how.