I spent most of my undergraduate degree (in applied math/physics) with my head down powering through courses and working a job in the evenings to pay for my education. Over that time, I met a bunch of talented people, many of whom I keep in touch with, but none of whom I could ever see myself working with. Moreover, they're also all engineers as well with skillsets that more or less resemble my own.
I'm at a FAANG company at the moment and I'm finding it quite unfulfilling (nothing new here), and for the last several months I've been hacking away on my own projects just to keep honing my skills and to try to figure out what's possible in terms of turning technical know-how into commercial products.
The last one I built felt like a relatively solid idea but I quickly realized (a) how much of the difficulty in launching the product depended on having a good network and knowing how to utilize it, and (b) how much I felt poorly equipped to do (a). Moreover, I'm also understanding how deeply reliant tech products are on domain knowledge in the industry they're attempting to push into.
The conclusion here seems to be that I'd be far more effective at reaching my goals working in partnership with someone who checks the above boxes (which, in hindsight, was incredibly obvious). The problem I'm having now, though, is that none of my friends are similarly motivated to me, and networking feels nigh-impossible with the COVID-19 situation.
Does anyone here have tips on how they meet people and feel out whether there's any professional compatibility – especially in the current situation? While I'm not opposed to just riding this out and trying to network the traditional way when the world reopens, it seems like there has to be a more effective way.
> The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned. I know that from experience. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. [6]
>This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:
> This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.