As a founder, you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed by events. Some cities have dozens of meetups, conferences, and workshops – often multiple happening on the same day at the same time. Every choice means saying no to something else. More importantly, every event you attend is time you’re not building your product.
The Technical Founder’s Trap
With a technical background, the default is to keep attending coding meetups and cloud infrastructure workshops. But here’s the thing: you already have the technical skills to build a real product. Learning about yet another framework or some coding miscellany provides minimal ROI compared to what you can already do.
The hard truth? The skills that will actually move your business forward aren’t technical.
What You Actually Need to Learn
As a founder, you’re quickly forced to wear multiple hats. You start alone, building your product. Then you need to integrate third parties (payment processors, hosting providers, analytics tools, etc.). Legal and administrative requirements pile up. When your product goes live, you’re suddenly dealing with customers, their feedback, and their problems. As you grow, you realize you need partnerships with other companies.
All of this requires stakeholder management, a skill set that has nothing to do with writing clean code.
Being Selective About Your Time
This is why last week I attended “Upskilling the Romanian IT Industry – Stakeholder Management and Executive Presence.” It was focused specifically on the complementary skills I needed to develop, not the ones I already had.
What made me sign up:
- Proven track record of speakers
- Quality of the audience
- Interactive format where attendees asked sharp questions
The event was organized by Beyond Business School and featured Alin Dumitru, Anne Dumitrache, Cătălin Stoiovici and Lavinia Neagoe.
Before You Click “Register”
Take a moment before signing up for any event. Ask yourself: does this actually fill a gap in my skill set, or am I just staying in my comfort zone?
Otherwise, you’ll lose more time at the event than you’ll gain from it.
