Eric Siu spends $25,000+ on elite events like TED for the networking, not the talks. He's met Darshan Shah (Next Health founder), Rahul Sehgal (whose data company now works with his agency), Chris Powers, and Sameer Singh (Unilever CMO) at these events, turning connections into business deals and friendships.
Here's why I pay $25,000 plus to attend events like TED. So I used to not be able to fathom why anybody would pay that much for an event, but over the years I eventually understood more on why that actually makes sense. So most people actually think it is actually going for the content, but if you stay till the very end, I'm gonna give you the reason as to why I actually do this. Number one is when I went to TED, I actually was standing in line and I met a guy. He had a backpack, and on the backpack there was a badge on it, and on the badge it was Singularity University. It was basically a tribe of motivated people that wanted to understand kind of new game-changing technologies that were happening in the world, right? And so you're just trying to actively learn, get better, and learn from kind of experts in those fields. So the guy that was standing in front of me, his name was Darshan Shah. And so I said, hey, like, are you part of Singularity University? And he turned around, we started talking. And, you know, it turns out that Darshan is actually the founder of Next Health. He's also a doctor as well, and he lives in Malibu, right? Turns out he's also in a group called YPO, which I eventually ended up joining as well. So he's an entrepreneur, he has similar mindsets, Singularity University. So it brings people together that are like-minded and motivated. Another example is I was also standing in line. I ended up talking to this guy named Rahul Sehgal. He was actually in one of the peer groups that I was in called Entrepreneurs Organization, which is a worldwide group. So we've kept in touch over the years. I saw him at the TED the following year. As of now, his new company is actually talking to my ad agency, Single Grain, about working together. In that situation, it's like, okay, now I know someone that lives in Singapore that is also in this entrepreneurial group, but also he has a lot of things that he understands that I don't, specifically around kind of building like a data company as an example, or selling data as a service. Over the years, he's called me, I've called him. You know, our friendship has kind Kind of just blossomed that way. Look, if you're enjoying this right now, hit the like button because I'm gonna give you more and I'm gonna help justify why it actually makes sense to do this, right? So by the way, the last TED recently, when I arrived, they did a round of COVID testing and unfortunately I tested positive for COVID 'cause I just flew in from Bitcoin conference in Miami. So, you know, I caught it and so I couldn't go into it. But what had happened already was that it was my third time going and there's a group that was being organized of investors, right? So the caliber of the people that are attending this thing, you kind of just don't know what you're gonna get. I mean, are there some misses here and there? Like, absolutely. You know, those people are smart. and they know signal, like when they're talking to someone, they can immediately discern whether it's someone that they want to spend more time with, right? The final thing I'll share around this is thinking about other people that I've met over the years. I remember I went to a Singularity University event. You know, I met a guy named Chris Powers, which is called a real estate mogul. But over the years, like I saw his stuff over Twitter and he's a pretty prolific tweeter as well. And he's just known for buying a lot of real estate over in Texas. And that's just kind of his jam. And he's done really well doing that. And I met another guy named Sameer Singh. He's the CMO of Unilever, which is a large company where they do a lot of consumer goods, right? And so what is my point with all this stuff? Sure, you might go the event in the very beginning, like TED is known for its content. Like the content brings people in, but what you ultimately stay for is you stay for the people, right? The people, that's what ultimately matters. Like once you become someone's friend, it's not just a transaction. You figure out ways to help that person. You make introductions and, you know, the world goes around that way. The world is really built on these collaborations with other people. And how do you start collaborating? Well, you build relationships with other people that are like-minded. And so people are there for a specific reason, which is why we have our kind of private invite-only event, which is live.levelingup.com. And that's all people at the top of their game when it comes to media, marketing and business, right? So look, I just talked about why I pay so much to go to events like this and the benefit of it, but it's also important to understand how you can actually build that network for yourself. I actually share that in this video over here on how you can build that $100 million indestructible network, and you don't need to have a lot of money doing it. So watch that video over here. We'll see you in that video. Catch you later.
