Not too bad advice but the key lies somewhere else:<p>0. Stop chasing the one investor or selected perceived important people but rather get a sense who might be important<p>1. First and most important: ACHIEVE something, create something unique, build strong traction, DO something where others raise their eyebrows, get people impressed, everyone!<p>2. This is now what most people don't get: you do not network by just going to networking events or by mingling with other people, no: your achievements will be your networking vehicle -- you network by achieving stuff -- you don't have t ask for meetings anymore, people will approach you. Or you have just to talk about your achievements (to everyone) and the rest comes by itself. And when you want ask for a meeting, don't -- just tell your achievements and the other party will ask to grab a coffee together. So, create or work towards a situation where others approach you some day. Really, the key is to work on achievements and nothing else.<p>It's definitely not enough to tell the other party "in exchange [...] what we learned about" this and that, you have to achieve something, tell them where you succeeded! They don't want another boring conversation with a flimsy excuse. Imagine some developer who wants to work for your startup and approaches you and tells you about what he learned about some random technical topic -- this would lead to an awkward situation where you just want to escape the conversation with a needy guy. Instead imagine the same guy telling you that he build the first Sinatra-like framework for Openresty/Lua that blows Go and the JVM together and he would love to show it to you since you need some high performance web framework devs. Big difference.<p>Sidenote: everybody is important and will bring you one step further on your journey, not only VCs or angels. Most underrated target: other entrepreneurs, in particular those which are on the same level like you or a bit ahead because they are most willing to share thoughts or meet up and because they are your real peers (this is what I totally missed when I started).