I don't network. I write.

I’ve always been suspicious of the industry dogma that tells us success in tech is mostly about who you know. The idea is repeated so often it starts to feel more like moral instruction. Go to the dinners. Get in the right Slack channels. Find the insider who can whisper you through the door.

I’ve tried a few of these rituals, and I always leave feeling like I’ve delivered a scenery-chewing disaster in an off-off-off-off-off Broadway play I wouldn’t force on my worst enemies.

Everyone delivers their lines about disruption and collaboration, and everyone applauds each other’s performance.

But a performance is all it is.

I never built much through those rooms. The “right” rooms. What changed my life was the slower, and - to me - more honest act of writing. When I write, I’m forced to wrestle with my own thinking. I can’t hide behind buzzwords or charm. I have to put the words down, line after line, until I’ve said something that holds up on its own. That discipline created more opportunities than any networking dinner ever has.

An essay, after all, can outlast a thousand handshakes.

Tech culture has a near-religious faith in serendipity. People tell stories about chance introductions leading to unicorns and hallway conversations sparking billion-dollar companies.

And no doubt, it happens. Not to me, not to you, to someone.

But I wonder how many brilliant ideas never see daylight because their creators are too busy chasing rooms, too busy performing for gatekeepers. The chase itself becomes a distraction. You become known less for what you’ve built and more for how well you circulate.

Writing is its own form of networking, only scalable.

You put your ideas in public, and the right people find you.

Why do so many of us resist this? Why do we find it easier to make the rounds at a mixer than to sit alone at a desk and write? Maybe because writing exposes us. A blank page has no patience for vagueness; it forces you to know what you mean. We’re so often rewarded for sounding confident, even when our ideas are half-baked. Writing strips that shield away. You have to be coherent, or you have nothing. That’s hard. It’s easier to put on a good face at an afterparty.

But hard things are often the ones worth doing. Writing has given me rooms I couldn’t have entered otherwise. My words circulate in spaces where I am absent. They argue for me, persuade for me, provoke on my behalf etc. And unlike a conversation at a bar, they persist. They can be returned to, challenged, reinterpreted. Writing isn’t opposed to networking at all. It’s networking’s more honest sibling. One is presence; the other is permanence.

I’m not naive. I know that in tech, relationships do matter. Companies are built by groups, not individuals. But I’ve come to believe the best relationships grow out of ideas, not transactions. When someone finds me through my writing, the conversation begins on different ground. We’re not trading business cards, we’re engaging in thought. And that makes for a stronger foundation.

When I hear the familiar refrain - your network is your net worth - I find myself shrugging. A network can disappear overnight. Words endure. Arguments echo. Clarity travels. For me, writing has become the only form of networking that feels real. The rest is a plague on my time and my dignity. And I’d rather spend my time at the desk, trying to get one more sentence right.