Pub Crawl and Networking goes hand in hand.

There is a great saying about New Orleans, “we dont hide the crazy, we parade it down the street”. This quote sums up the first walk I made down Bourbon Street. Yowzers. On this trip I was accompanied by two Finnish software designers from a town of around 45,000 people. Needless to say if I was in awe, I can only imagine what they thought.

After dropping off the rental car the first morning of the registration day, I met up with one of my closest friends. Now you are probably wondering why I dropped the car off before the event started, boss is a bit of a diva. Just kidding, it was easy to have to carry some supplies to the event. Plus I had to pick up the boss and his wonderful wife 😊. I would have had a top hat but I couldn’t find a costume in New Orleans 😁. After my friend Niall and I got back to the apartment, Smart Break headed to the registration. Niall parted ways and I would meet him later to hang out with some other acquaintances and hydrate ourselves with the finest tap or bottled flavor water. At the registration I was approached immediately about my shirt “Do you have 3 minutes?” I knew that this would be a great start.

What was on the agenda before the first day of the conference? Pub crawl. Thats right, a pub crawl. Collision had organized a pub crawl for networking with other attendees. This was a great idea seeing as I had already wet my whistle with flavored water. Why not continue and chat a bit about Smart Break in the process. The event was great. The only advice I would recommend is to not have the final networking venue be a huge bar that was way overcrowded. It was like the videos of the subway workers in Japan that just shove everyone in before the train leaves.

via GIPHY

In the morning Smart Break entered the Ernest N. Memorial Convention Center with confidence and a little bit of the spins. After a solid hour or so of slugging water and walking around the huge space, I felt like a Roman ready to conquer. There were lots of things going on that day, talks from high profile celebrities and CEOs of very large corporations. I decided to check the place for any wellness exhibitors, there was nothing that tickled my fancy. I did end up meeting with a few Ukrainian outsourcing companies that wanted me to outsource Smart Break to them for app design and web design, ummm
ні, дякую (no thank you).

After the first day, we got a good idea on how other companies exhibited and made some good connections for the next two days. It was a bit tough to fully grasp some of the talks becasue they all sounded like jibberish to me. Most of the talks were about techie things, and I admit i’m not very tech savy. But the future looked bright for Smart Break seeing as people were very interested in coming by the booth to see the product a few days later. We also peeked some interest in some investors that we were meeting in the next couple of days.

The next few days are where the preperations would come in handy. Two meetings with venture capitalists and various meetings with potential clients and partners.