What to Say at a Tech Meetup When You Hate Networking

Published November 11, 2026 · Last updated November 11, 2026 · 10-minute read

TL;DR

• Most engineers find networking uncomfortable, and research links that discomfort to doing less of it.
• Drop the goal of “networking.” Go to learn what people are building; good openers follow from that.
• Join circles that are open, add to their topic, and leave with a clear, warm line.
• Follow up within a day with one specific detail and one useful link.
• Go back to the same series three times. The regulars get introduced; one-time visitors get forgotten.

At a tech meetup, ask people what they are building and what broke this week, then listen for something you can help with or learn from. Join groups that are already open, leave with a thank-you and a next step, and send a short follow-up within a day. The part that matters most happens after the event: coming back to the same meetup until people know your face.

“I hate networking.” That line opens a Harvard Business Review piece by three researchers who study it, and they say they hear it all the time. If you are an engineer who would rather debug a flaky test than walk into a room of strangers, you are in large company. This post is about what to do once you are inside that room: the first line, joining a circle, getting out of one, and the message you send the next day.

Why does networking feel so uncomfortable?

Networking feels uncomfortable because pursuing contacts for career gain can feel morally dirty, and people who feel that way do less of it. That’s the finding from Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino and Maryam Kouchaki, as the Kellogg School of Management summarised it. They ran three laboratory studies and one survey of lawyers in a North American law firm. The lawyers who felt dirtier after networking did it less often, and they also had lower billable hours.

The same research has a hopeful detail. People randomly assigned to leadership roles felt only mildly dirty after networking, and the authors offer one reading: maybe schmoozing feels better when you have more to offer in return. Most engineers underrate what they have to offer. You know how your team handles on-call, which vector database fell over in production, and what your last hiring loop looked like. To someone at a meetup, that is useful.

So change the job you give yourself. You are not there to collect contacts. You are there to find out what people in this city are building, which is a far more interesting question than anyone’s job title. When curiosity is the goal, the “dirty” feeling has nothing to attach to.

What should you say first at a tech meetup?

A good first line at a tech meetup is a specific question about work, usually what are you building?, because it is easy to answer and leads straight to the interesting part. Avoid so what do you do?, which invites a job title and a dead end. A follow-up of what broke this week? gets engineers talking quickly, because everyone has a story and nobody has rehearsed it.

You are also probably doing better than you think. Psychologists at Yale found that people consistently underestimate how much others like them after an initial conversation. Margaret S. Clark, one of the authors, said people “seem to be too wrapped up in their own worries about what they should say or did say to see signals of others’ liking for them”. The awkward pause you replay on the drive home was probably not noticed at all.

Have your own one-line answer ready for when they ask back. Mostly payments infrastructure, curious about agents is enough. It gives the other person three hooks.

How do you join a circle that’s already talking?

Join a circle that is already talking by standing at its edge, listening for a minute, and adding to the topic they are on instead of starting a new one. Read the shape first. A group of three with a gap and people turned slightly outward is open. Two people leaning in at close range are having a private conversation, and you should leave them to it.

Once you are at the edge, wait for a natural pause or for someone to glance at you. A short mind if I listen in? is all the permission you need. Then contribute to their thread: if they are arguing about whether to self-host a model, your view on that is your entry ticket. Pitching your own project in your first sentence is how people get politely closed out.

If you came with a friend, split up once you have your first drink. (Two friends talking to each other look like a closed group, and they rarely notice it.) If you came alone, the person refilling their water next to you is the easiest circle of all: a circle of one.

Key takeaways - Networking discomfort is common, and research ties it to doing less of it. - Go to learn what people are building; that removes the “transaction” feeling. - Lead with what are you building? and what broke this week? - People tend to underestimate how much a new conversation partner liked them. - Join open circles by adding to their topic, not by starting your own.

How do you leave a conversation without being rude?

Leave a conversation by thanking the person, naming one thing you will remember, and saying where you are going next. For example: I want to catch the speaker before they leave, but I am glad I heard about your eval setup. It is honest, it is short, and it gives them a clean exit too.

People worry that leaving is rude, but the research suggests that staying is often the mistake. When Adam Mastroianni and his colleagues asked people when they had wanted their conversations to end, Scientific American reported that only 2 percent of conversations ended at the time both parties desired, and only 30 percent ended when one of the two wanted them to. Most of the time somebody is waiting for the other person to wrap up. A warm exit is a favour.

Three exits that hold up: - The handoff: introduce them to someone they should meet, then step back. - The next step: Can I message you about that tool tomorrow?, then go. - The honest goal: I promised myself I would meet three new people tonight, so I am going to do a lap.

Before you walk away, connect on whatever they use (LinkedIn, X, email) and type one word about the conversation into your notes. By the third conversation of the night, you will have forgotten who said what.

What should you send in the follow-up?

Send a short follow-up within a day that names one specific thing you talked about and includes something useful, such as a link, a repo or an introduction. The useful item is the point. It turns the message from a social ritual into a small favour, and favours get replies.

Here is a template to adapt, written in plain text so it works on LinkedIn, X or email:

Hi [name], good to meet you at last night’s agents meetup. You mentioned your evals keep passing while users still complain. Here’s the write-up on trace-based evals I talked about: [link]. If you try it, I would like to hear what breaks. Either way, see you at the next one.

Keep it under five lines. Skip let’s stay in touch, which gives the reader nothing to answer. Make any ask optional, and close with the next event you will both be at, which sets up the part that actually builds the relationship.

This is also where the payoff sits. The sociologist Mark Granovetter’s weak-ties theory, proposed in 1973, says infrequent, arm’s-length relationships help more with jobs than close ones, because they connect you to parts of the world you don’t already see. A team from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and LinkedIn tested it with a five-year set of experiments on LinkedIn involving 20 million people, during which roughly 2 billion new ties and 600,000 job changes were recorded. Per MIT’s summary, the greatest job mobility comes from moderately weak ties. That rules out both near-strangers and your close friends. A person you have met at a meetup and messaged afterwards is exactly that kind of tie.

Why should you go back to the same meetup three times?

Go back to the same meetup series three times because the first visit makes you a stranger, the second makes you familiar, and by the third people start introducing you to others. One-off events produce very weak ties that fade within a week. A recurring series turns them into the moderately weak ties that the LinkedIn research found most useful for job moves.

On the third visit, the host may wave you over, and someone you followed up with will ask how the thing you mentioned went. That is the moment networking stops feeling like networking. You are now a regular, and regulars hear about the job before it is posted.

This is why the city matters as much as the script. I recently gave a friend on his notice period some advice: stop letting interview rounds define you, come to Bengaluru or SF for two weeks, stay somewhere cheap, go to events every evening, and see what people are building. The referrals and the perspective follow from being in the room. Be in a good city, and understand where the culture comes from.

That only works where there are enough rooms. Bengaluru has 127 upcoming public Luma events on Hidden Events right now, and Saturday is its busiest event day. San Francisco has 344, with Tuesday as its busiest day. In Bengaluru, most of the action clusters in HSR Layout and Koramangala. In SF, look at the Financial District, SoMa, Dogpatch and Potrero Hill.

Where can you practise this week?

Pick two recurring meetups in your city from the Bengaluru meetups list or the SF meetups list, RSVP to both, and commit to going three times. Choose small, topic-led events over large mixers; our guide on how to spot a high-signal tech meetup shows how to tell them apart before you go.

Builder communities are a good place to start. In Bengaluru, Hidden Events tracks calendars such as AI Garage, The Ecosystem Community, hsrhackerhouse and BHIVE Startup Labs, and the wider Bengaluru tech events page has the rest. In SF, it tracks AGI House, South Park Commons and lablab.ai Events, and the SF AI events list covers the AI-heavy nights. If the week is packed, start with this weekend in Bengaluru or this weekend in SF.

A hackathon is a shortcut, since working next to someone for a weekend beats ten openers; see how to find hackathons. And if you want a cofounder rather than a contact, the same habit applies: how to find a cofounder covers that. If you are still building your list, how to find networking events explains where they get posted. In Bengaluru, 82.7% of the listed events aren’t featured on Luma’s discover page, so searching Luma alone shows you a fraction of the rooms.

About the author: Himanshu Saleria, founder of Hidden Events. I love meeting people. I’ve been attending events, hosting them, and picking up patterns along the way for what makes a gathering worth showing up to. Hidden Events surfaces what I’ve been finding. LinkedIn

How we research: event counts come from Hidden Events’ own crawl of public Luma events, refreshed every 4 hours. Other figures link to their original source: Harvard Business Review on networking discomfort, the Kellogg School of Management summary of the dirty-networking study, Yale’s release on the liking gap, Scientific American on when conversations end, MIT’s summary of the LinkedIn weak-ties study.