How to become friends with High-Achieving, Smart enterpreneurs?

There are many events you can go to to meet fellow entrepreneurs. If you are visiting Silicon Valley, check out my blog post on the topic.

There are two important things for you to keep in mind:

1. I, as a successful entrepreneur, will only be interested in becoming "friends" with you if your heart is in the right place. If you are passionate about entrepreneurship, let's be friends. If you are in it for the $$$, forget it.

2. While it's tempting to look up to the celebrities and want to become best buddies with them, a better strategy is to look in the room around you and interact with the unknown. Guess what: within 2-4 years, some of those people will be the successful ones and you'll be glad you became friends before celebrity kicked in. So next time you attend a talk by Guy Kawasaki, don't stand in line to talk to Guy :-)

Syed, are you a student?

If so, you could try the "I'm a young, ambitious go-getter who really admires your work because you've accomplished things I want to accomplish and would like to buy you lunch"-angle. A friend of mine in college is having some great success with that.

Honestly, though, you've already identified your limiting factor: no track record.

Think about ways to fix that. Work on a unique project. Hosting a meet up group is an easy one. Start doing things that others might be interested in. There's no magic formula, but over time, with enough exposure and "cool stuff" in your life, high potential people will start finding you.

Look around at your current friends. Are any of them entrepreneurial? Help them succeed. Build your own community of smart people. Work to help make them successful while working to help make yourself successful at the same time.

The internet is a really good place to start. With social media exploding and many successful entrepreneurs maintaining active blogs, twitter and linkedin profiles they are now more reachable than ever before.

I have personally developed a lot of such friends by:

1. Becoming a regular commentator on their blog posts & twitter messages and starting discussions.

2. Getting referrals on linkedin to individuals that have achieved some of the things that I want to achieve. There are a lot of people who want to assist up and coming entrepreneurs.

3. Finding out how I can add value to them. Either by supporting a cause that they are passionate about, seeing if I can assist with their current business or possibly even helping their companies recruit and hire talent.

4. Knowing how I want them to help me as well. A lot of such people have very limited time to give and you need to be focused and know what you want yourself for them to assist you. Once a relationship and trust has been developed the relationships transforms into a more friendlier casual one.

Hope this helps.

Conferences (and unConferences), networking events, Startup Weekend... these types of events are great places to meet smart, ambitious, hard-working people who are going places. Make friends with them - as Alain said, in 2-4 years, many of those people will be the "rock stars" that you want to be friends with now. And you'll be better friends because you knew them before they "got big."

You could PARTICIPATE in events like these....

ignite.oreilly.com

startupweekend.org

Network, network, and network.

LinkedIn is a great place to start. Chances are some of your friends are connected to entrepreneurs and LinkedIn gives you a path to contact these people. I have found that many successful entrepreneurs are happy to meet and chat over a cup of coffee. There is no shortcut to becoming friends though. It was written a long time ago, but you might want to check out Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Being an entrepreneur-in-waiting makes you a very special breed of cat. Over the last couple of decades, I have met and mentored many men and women with your passion, and you have one stellar advantage today. The Internet was designed to be your natural habitat, and unlike American business history in my generation, where entrepreneurship was an expensive undertaking, today it is essentially free at the beginning. Take maximum advantage of it.

Drop by my website, Jericho Technology, someday if you would like to get acquainted. Also, my blog articles may help you.

Another option is to visit StartUp Professionals Musings. This website is run by a brilliant entrepreneurial mentor, Martin Zwilling, who writes daily articles on entrepreneurial issues, mentors extensively, and even serves on a variety of Boards and frequents Angel Investor meetings. He is knowledgeable and available. He is a personal friend and one of the finest men I know. He is also an author of various pieces in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

Just one last bit of advice, that if you take it will make your life as an entrepreneur exciting and fulfilling: On your way to making a profit, in the words of Guy Kawasaki, "do something that matters".

I met heaps of smart, successful and interesting entrepreneurs while studying for my Masters in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. What's more, I catch up with many of them regularly and I could call on any of them if I needed to.

While nothing is a substitute for actually starting a business, I found studying entrepreneurship was invaluable for the network I gained, the smarts and framework for thinking about business that I learned and for the confidence I gained by working on real startups which have since launched and are trading. I have taken all this into my own startup and it has helped enormously.

If you can find a good course with a good entrepreneurship focus near you, you might want to check it out.

Also, I don't agree that people are not interested if you don't have achievements. If you are passionate, interested in them and prepared to do something to help others, they will be interested in you. Show up as the best you can be and others will be attracted to you.

The best way is to try to get into a school like Harvard or Stanford. All of the people you meet will be smart and will most likely be successful in the future.