It's 2013. I'm employed full time at Esri. I've given more than a hundred industry talks. That's a lot of new people. Far more people than I grew up with (I had a very small family and no siblings). One issue that's happening is the number of people who want to "have a coffee".
I get at least 5 E-mails for coffee a day (coffee also being a stand-in for lunch, dinner, breakfast, coffee, drinks, virtual calls, conference speaking or chatting on the phone). I call this:
The "Let's Have Coffee" problem.
I'm only one person, and one person can't meet with everyone. It doesn't feel great, because meeting lots of new people feels like an obligation instead of something exciting. The number of inquires might scale, but I can't. Once I tried responding to someone that I had too many coffee interests, to which they sarcastically replied, "look who is popular!" with a snide remark. It's something I'm still trying to figure out.
This is an attempt at examining the core issues involved in this problem.
Calculating the Hidden Costs of a Coffee Meeting
One coffee appointment is not actually 30-60 minutes long. The coffee appointment is actually made up of a number of hidden time sinks, outlined as follows:
45 min to 1 hour for the actual duration of the coffee time
15-30 minutes of transport time (assuming an average meeting is 15 minutes away from your default location.
30 minutes to an hour over 1 day to 2 months to actually nail down the coffee appointment time between two people.
15-30 minutes of uncertainty per appointment. Someone may arrive early or late. Someone may need to cancel.
15-30 minutes writing up information gathered during the coffee meeting, writing intros or following up with the new contact.
The entire process over again if someone is late or cancels.
A single 45 minute coffee meeting = 180 min of transit, planning and communication over an average of 1-2 weeks
Muliply this by 5 and you can begin to see that merley scheduling and transporting oneself to coffee appointments alone would result in an average of over 10 hours per day.
If I took all of the coffee requests in my inbox, I'd have a 70 hour a week job. I would have no time for anything else, especially digesting and writing up any information I received during said coffee appointments. Furthermore, a lot of these coffee appointments want connections to someone I'm connected to, and there's post-processing after these meetings.
If a coffee meeting is successful, the parties might request an additional meeting. This would add a multiplier onto the initial coffee appointment with each person.
Assuming 3/5ths of coffee appointments warranted future meetings and additional social maintenance, the demands on me for future appointments in a single year would outweigh the span of my lifetime.
The problem is that I feel rude to decline coffee requests. I'd like to have the time. There's nothing more enjoyable for me than to meet new and interesting people and help them work on what they need help with. It's not sustainable. I want to connect well. But I'm one person. A single individual is not scalable.
Coffee Appointments Don't Scale
The one-to-many (maybe one-too-many) social situation is a curious one to optimize. As a simple human, I don't scale very well. An event allows people to scale socially, so having many people meet in one place for an hour or two vs. one meeting at a time allows for a feasible meeting opportunity. I'm also just one person. I have limited knowledge that's easily used up. The more people involved in a social setting, the more easily I can connect people to each other, not myself.
So What Do Coffee Meetings Accomplish?
In a business-related coffee meeting, the person requesting the coffee meeting is usually looking for advice, introductions/connections, picking one's brain (although this always sounds to be like picking one's nose), or just getting to know someone.
The most successful meetings have resulted in me introducing the coffee requester to the person they actually wanted to meet in the first place.
Why not bring all of those people together in the same room? Why not invite them all to dinner or a private/public networking event? Why not collide communities together?
I realized my most successful networking with people was when I rented a studio in Chinatown, Portland. I had events every few weeks at the tiny studio and invited people in my network. Dozens of people met each other through having a place to meet, and I didn't have to do much but introduce them! A lot of them went on to build interesting and successful projects.
Conferences and Networking Events Do
My general solution to all of this is simply to visit conferences or hold networking events where I can meet many people at once, and then give a speech at the conference. Giving a speech is the easiest way to meet everyone in a room.
In essence, I never have free time until I am at a social tech event. At social events my purpose is clearly defined as one of socialization. I often conserve a lot of energy for these events because they're a more efficient use of energy.
Ways to Transform the Coffee Appointment
1. Invite the individual to a group dinner
You can collect interest people over time and invite them to smaller dinners that happen every few weeks. Brewster Kahale has a standing dinner at his house every week for the past 16 years. Different people each time, and he has a massive network this way.
I've been looking to organize dinners with people in the future, because there's a lot of coffee appointments and it often takes longer to schedule a coffee meeting than it does to actually spend the time talking at coffee! The dinners bring together interesting people that should be meeting each other anyway.
Chances are if we met up, I'd be trying to get you to meet half of them anyway, resulting in another set of coffee scheduling! Mind if I add your name to the list of invites to the next dinner events? They will be in a small room with a curated set of awesome people who think and do exciting things. Would love to have you there! Just let me know, and I'll invite you to the next one!
2. Host a BCC Party!
Invite a bunch of people to a private event where none of them know they exist.
Where did the idea for a BCC party come from? The story I heard is that it came from some folks at Google. The invite was pretty simple - the three hosts sent out an email blast to all their friends, putting everyone in the BCC line. They called their mixer a BCC Party.
I went to a great one in Portland recently that included about 50% awesome people I knew but didn't have the time to catch up with on a regular basis, and 50% people I had never met before but were vetted by the group that put it together.
3. Invite the individual to a public networking event.
Know of an event they'd like, or one you'll be going to in the future? Invite them! It makes it easier to get the conversation started.
4. See if you'll be in the sample place in the future
SXSW, XOXO and other places may have people you know already. Dopplr was the best way to see when other people would be traveling to the same place in the future.
5. Organize an Industry Networking Event
If you don't have one, organize one! Use a public bar and having a standing meeting every week. Portland's widly successful Beer and Blog event started this way. It grew from four people on laptops to over 150 people a week at it's apex. I was introduced to my co-founder there, and it's where I directed anyone to go when I got the coffee emails.
6. Forward the person to someone else
This isn't always the best idea, as half the emails I get come from people who don't have time for coffee so forward someone onto coffee for me.
7. Give them your phone number and tell them to call you
Chances are they won't, but if they do you can always limit the call to 15 min and get right down to the point. Sometimes you'll end up surprised and talk for hours. Either way it doesn't involve scheduling, driving or viking, picking a place to meet, waiting if someone is late, ect.
8. Go on a hike or walk with them
Take walking meetings is a great way to enjoy nature while talking about complex ideas.
9. Host an open office hours.
This is what some professors do. They schedule all of them in the same day and have people sign up on a Google Spreadsheet.
Charge for the time
A lot of my recently coffee meetings have started with "I'm here to pick your brain". All this after I've spent half an hour driving or biking across town to a coffeeshop that is out out my way.
Most of the time, the person meeting me is late, and they don't even offer to buy a coffee. There isn't much more than a hi (usually not even a handshake or a "sorry I'm late" or a "thanks for meeting me here"). The next hour is a "brain picking" that feels like an extraction, and none of the advice is followed up on. I've been working on a way to figure out when a meeting is going to become one of these. It doesn't feel like I'm even being treated as a person in this case. It's just an, "I'm here to extract as much of your life force as possible in order to further my own interests". None of these kinds of meetings end with a "thank you".
These are the kinds of meetings that could be done virtually, with a payment up front. Accumulating experience takes a long time. Giving it away to someone whenever they ask feels cheap. I'm learning to do this better.
Some of these same folks have then used this opening to ask for (months later) me to write a recommendation letter for their son or daughter to get into college (writing a letter for someone I've never met). And there is a fair bit of pushback if I say, "I don't feel comfortable writing a letter for someone i do not strongly know the character of". I've been called selfish. This kind of interaction set really made want to write a post that investigates why
Don't reject the idea of coffee altogether
There are some times when coffee is good. Sometimes coffee is great. You just want to make sure you save the coffee meetings for the really wonderful people.
When to take a coffee meeting:
Often coffee people want advice or support, or want a connection. Sometimes you're just in the way of that connection. Why not find out what they want up front and adjust accordingly? This doesn't count for epic discussions about interesting things, or meeting of the minds.
When the invite somes from someone referred to you from strong, close connections (by close, I mean, people that know you well and are non-extractive). I met my current co-founder when he wrote me a very level-headed email with unique and interesting questions about how I approadhed the world. I had him meet me for coffee across the street from my apartment at a very early hour, and not only did he show up, but he was on time.
Update: Since I posted this, I had some of my mentors, as well as some famous-ish writers and media people tell me that not everyone needs a response to an email. Famous people get emailed all of the time. There isn't an expected response. I'm still feeling that I'm not famous, and that I owe the people emailing me something, although I'm hoping it will become more clear over time how I can gracefully accept, decline, or ignore requests on my time.
Conclusions
If you send me an email and I don't respond, I greatly apologize. Hopefully this is enough of an explanation of my behaviors and physical limitations as a human being.
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