Strategy vs. Networking: Get The Most Out Of Your CEO Time

September 17, 2025

Why CEOs should put strategy before networking – on conference ROI and the value of focused time.

Strategy vs. Networking: Get The Most Out Of Your CEO Time

I'm literally driving to Frankfurt airport as Shub and I record this episode. I choose to live far away from big cities among lakes, forests, hills and foxes - no central hubs - while Shub prefers it near airports and cities where the business world congregates. This lifestyle difference means I spend hours in cars and planes just to meet people face-to-face. It's a trade-off I'm willing to make for the life I want, yet it forces me to think hard about ROI on every trip.

This got us talking about a bigger question that's been bothering us since COVID ended. For two years, we proved remote selling, remote partnerships, and remote decisions actually work (to a larger degree than before - we are not saying remote is everything, absolutely not).

Yet the conference circuit bounced back stronger than ever. Why is the business, founder and VC world spending so much time on logistics to meet again conference after conference again?

This Week On Practical Nerds - tl;dr

Conference ROI caps (without thinking time between conversations)

Higher-frequency event attendance signals poor time allocation to investors

One thought experiment: Hiring your successor, and judging them for their time allocation

Strategy determines networking frequency, not the other way around

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Conference ROI caps (without thinking time between conversations)

What's the real cost of constant conference attendance?

We started questioning our own assumptions during COVID. For two years, meetings moved online and remote collaboration actually worked. Yet conferences bounced back stronger than ever. We initially thought humanity had moved past events - clearly not what persisted.

But maybe we were right after all.

The challenge isn't conferences themselves. It's understanding the real trade-offs. When I drive to Frankfurt airport, then fly to meet people, I can only do two activities: phone calls and face-to-face discussions. The thinking, processing, and decision-making that defines other aspects of my work gets mostly paused, my efficiency to do actual work drops vastly.

A sophisticated capital allocator's comment made should make anyone think. They mentioned how certain fund managers spend too much time at events, and they will judge them for that given that their job is to make prime allocation decisions. That observation was eye-opening.

If you're making rational choices and prioritizing conferences to a high frequency, you're essentially saying to yourself (and others) that networking is your highest-value activity. What might that signal about your other options?

I witnessed this dynamic once a few years ago. One founder spent his first year optimizing for meetings with other founders and VCs at tech events instead of focusing on typical CEO responsibilities. That founder went to every tech conference the earth had to offer. In year one.

I had conversations about this approach twice with him. The company probably won't deliver significant returns for investors. Looking back, I wonder if at the time he believed networking could substitute for the harder work of building substance. He avoids tech conferences now, by the way.

The incremental value question keeps coming up for me. After attending a small handful of high-quality events annually, additional conferences often mean encountering the same people and information. I find myself questioning whether the ratio between incremental value and lost focused work time makes sense.

I discussed this with blue-chip CEOs I know personally. They come to the exact same conclusion.

Higher-frequency event attendance signals poor time allocation to investors

How does constant networking affect your credibility?

Outside observers notice patterns you might miss on yourself. For startup founders and fund managers, time allocation matters because your business is decision-making. Do you spend your time on acquiring prime information to make prime decisions?

When people see significant time being spent traveling to conferences and anticipating the next event, they naturally draw conclusions about priorities.

The logic is straightforward. If someone consistently chooses this networking approach, they've presumably decided it offers the best return on their time. They are rational actors, after all. This might suggest your other potential activities aren't significantly more valuable than your next incremental event attendance.

Also, it’s hard not to see what might be echo chamber effects. In an era of short attention spans and social validation, it seems easier to create environments where audience recognition feels like achievement. The goalpost after the n-th event attendance in a year might shift from delivering actual results to gaining visibility or speaking opportunities.

This pattern appears beyond just VCs. Some startup founders also spend considerable time at events. Either group has to answer for themselves whether they prioritize social validation from attendance rather than focusing primarily on business building (and the validation coming much later after compounding effects). Such echo chambers can reinforce each other, creating cycles of mutual validation. It’s rewarding in the short-term.

One thought experiment that stuck with me

Imagine you've built a successful business over 10-20 years, and your business is making $100 Million in revenue, delivering strong dividends to you and your family. Your business has a good market position, good brand and reputation, good talent. You have competition, and you must execute still well, but you have a strong foundation overall to keep compounding. In Germany, this is one of thousands of Mittelstand hidden champions.

Ok, so now you are deciding it’s time to hire your succession. You're hiring someone to run the business you built into a huge, sustainable success.

How would you react if that person planned to spend half their time traveling around the continent or the world and spend at industry conferences? Most owners would probably have MASSIVE concerns about that approach. Would you? Let that sink in.

But, to be fair, there is a narrow set of scenarios where this actually can deliver ROI. Whether you as the owner would have concerns does depend on the business strategy your successor has agreed with you.

Strategy determines networking frequency, not the other way around

When can high-frequency networking for a CEO make sense?

For a fund managing partner, different portfolio approaches might require different strategies. If you're building a portfolio of 100 companies focused on deal flow volume, frequent event attendance could make strategic sense. You need relationship-driven sourcing and want exposure to many deals in your space. Your diligence will be light and your indexing strategy will rely mostly on velocity signals. This approach can potentially deliver consistent returns with higher predictability.

Concentrated strategies will need different approaches. If you're targeting fewer, higher-conviction investments with substantial ownership, conferences will not help with better picking. This approach requires deeper analysis of your own taste, and thinking time. Frequent networking will eat away at your picking ability and thus might not align with this strategy.

The bottleneck principle (aka constraints theory) keeps coming up in our experience. Both CEOs/founders and investors will succeed by identifying their main success-driving constraints and focusing on removing them. Strategic event attendance can help solve very specific bottlenecks. But unclear networking without defined objectives might just fill time.

Context seems to matter tremendously. Sometimes intensive relationship building makes complete sense - like a publicly traded company CEO addressing valuation issues with capital markets allocators and bank analysts at conferences, or someone launching a new business line who needs to understand supplier markets. These are the strategy-derived sprints of high-frequency attendance that can remove your core constraint currently. But even these will taper off eventually.

General networking without specific constraint removal might be less productive for many.

And the curation aspect changes everything. Events seem to work better when participants are selective about attendance and come focused on contribution rather than self-promotion. Think of those retreat-style gatherings where business leaders have genuine strategic discussions. But many events have commercial agendas that might constrain authentic relationship building.

Our Strategic Event Framework

Maybe the key is applying a bottleneck test before committing to conferences. We try to ask ourselves what specific constraint an event might help address and how it connects to our core objectives and our strategy. When the answer isn't clear, time might be better spent elsewhere, and we don’t do it. The answer is clear very, very rarely for us.

And the most meaningful relationships in my experience don't seem to form at conferences anyway. They tend to develop through referrals and curation, shared work and shared experiences, and organic interactions that demonstrate mutual value over time. Strategic networking feels more sustainable to the vast majority of business leaders in our experience than the spray-and-pray approach. (Exceptions exist, of course ! I know a few people who make spray and pray networking work for themselves and their relationships !)

Everybody is susceptible to echo chambers in different ways. The question might be whether we’re honest enough with ourselves to recognize when we’re seeking validation or have not identified higher-ROI options to use our time, rather than building substance and delaying the gratifying effect of success.

For Shub and me, we decided to use this trip to meet a lot of hardware founders and their factories in this city, by the way. Something that remote does not do very well, yet, and given our hardware-deployment strategy, a high-ROI, decision-making improving, and bottleneck removing activity in our context :)

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