Next Gen Summit Trip: Day 1
Intros, Networking, and Dinner With Emerging Founders
Today was full of exactly 8 hours of meeting new people at one of the best conferences we have ever attended. Although we’ve been to plenty of other networking events and conferences in the past, NGS surpasses them all, especially in terms of youth presence and diversity.
When we got off the subway, we rushed over to Galvanize. Luckily we got there relatively early, and took the opportunity to speak to a handful of particularly impressive young founders who were only juniors in high school! After the conference officially commenced, an hour-and-a-half networking session took place in the main floor of Galvanize.
Gradually, the room filled up with hundreds of faces — from places all around the world in varying industries. What was special about this networking event is that we had the opportunity to not only meet other entrepreneurs and changemakers, but to actually learn about what impact is being made in other places in the world, far from Arizona. Although there are hundreds of student entrepreneurs in Venture Devils, meeting young entrepreneurs from Korea, Switzerland, Vietnam, and plenty of other countries is a truly special experience.
As soon as the networking event ended, the dinner series was in place. Depending on personal interests, each NGS attendee had the option to have dinner with professionals in various fields and have an informal Q&A. We both found the fundraising themed dinner, “How to Raise Your First $200,000 In Funding” particularly interesting. The 0.8-mile walk to the restaurant from Galvanize was beautiful and we couldn’t have been happier with how the dinner went.
As we were walking into the restaurant, one of the co-founders of the company who was speaking directed us to the seating area and went back outside to direct more people. At first, we had no idea who was speaking with and quickly realized that she was the guest speaker! We immediately went the entrance of the restaurant and started chatting with her. Long story short, we had an awesome conversation with her and her co-founder for almost an hour and we made a few new friends.
We are both excited to see what day 2 of NGS will be like, and we’ll be up bright and early for it in the morning. Until the next blog post, stay tuned for further updates from us!
