Great advice! However, from my experience, I've found that networking events to be a complete waste of time -- I could be especially bad at it -- but I've found that the better and more long term way to build a network is to work with people. Be it joining a startup, going to work at a large tech company, collaborating on open-source, or even volunteering somewhere.
If you work at an early-stage startup you typically get to meet/interact with investors. And I did exactly that, the investors that I met at the first startup that I worked at when I emigrated to the U.S ended up investing in my company 4 years later.
It's a bit heavy at the beginning, but for a non-natural-networker like me, it has LOTS of useful advice.
By the way, the authors insist on face-to-face meetings, but I want to explore how far it's possible to get applying the same principles with remote relationships - which is fundamental when you don't live in a tech hub. I'm still thinking about how to proceed with this experiment, but if anybody else is interested in exploring the idea, feel free to contact me: dan@cybranding.com
If you talk to other founders, you'll probably find that all of them recommend both working with people (stronger friendships with a few people) and networking events (weaker friendships with a lot of people.)
I should say, I think that highly contextualized events, like say, "YC founders", or "Xoogler Founders", etc are useful. I think because a) there's a shared context and more probably shared interests b) there's frankly more signal-to-noise ratio, i.e. more likely than not people are worth knowing there.
But the paradox here is that you already need to have the relevant background to join such groups.
If you work at an early-stage startup you typically get to meet/interact with investors. And I did exactly that, the investors that I met at the first startup that I worked at when I emigrated to the U.S ended up investing in my company 4 years later.