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Eric Siu recalls being 17 at LeWeb in Paris, drinking €65 cocktails at Hotel Costes with a famous entrepreneur. The lesson: networking isn't transactional. It's about showing up for your community over years, not chasing quick wins.

Eric Siu recalls being 17 at LeWeb in Paris, drinking €65 cocktails at Hotel Costes with a famous entrepreneur. The lesson: networking isn't transactional. It's about showing up for your community over years, not chasing quick wins.
And I remember one time I was—I won't say who it was—but I was in Paris. I don't know; I must have been seventeen years old. I somehow was able to have drinks with four other people, one of which was an extremely famous entrepreneur. We get three rounds of drinks, and we were at a hotel called Hotel Coste. I don't know if you know it in Paris. No, probably one of the nicest hotels in Paris. And you're a teenager? I'm a teenager. What the heck? Yeah. So I take all my money. I go to Paris. I was there for LeWeb, a conference in Paris. We're having vodka sodas. And at the end, the bill comes and it's like right in front of me thinking to myself, like, I have to pay, right? I'm not going to be like, I got to go to the bathroom. It's like right there. So I put down my credit card, bill comes back. It was like €65 each cocktail. And we had a lot. And I just remember thinking like I had that bad feeling in my stomach, right? But you just, if you do these things, you just kind of have to be long-term focused. And I think that's what being a good community person is. It's about being long-term focused. Yeah.