[muzani]

People love to talk about themselves and what they're doing. I don't think there's any barrier; if you know the right way to approach these conversations, they'll dump ideas on you.

I believe it might be selection bias. Founders who are building things are not joining networking events. I tend to avoid co-working spaces too ever since I realized it's full of the people I block on Facebook.

There's people who bounce ideas, and then there's some form of idea tire kicking. They talk about how vibe code is the future and going to change how we live and work, but they have never downloaded an AI IDE. These people are there to kick ideas around all day and they'll pay for a co-working space so they can kick their ideas at strangers and ignore all feedback. It's exhausting and it's possible that you might be viewed as one of those people.

[nickevante]

IMHO Networking events are but marketing and sales events for the sponsors or VCs. We need bring back our modern day version of the Homebrew Computer Club.

The one's building amazing things are far and few in between due to lack of mentors in the community and hyper focus on "what's in it for me" mindset.

[muzani]

We do have some like the Homebrew Computer Club, but not (yet) as elite. Kuala Lumpur has some talent, but not the density of talent. I may join once every two years. Every time I do there's a founder who ends up public listed. One even had enough success rate to become a VC, but it's hard to tell which one will be who.

But so far the sales events have had a higher hit rate. There's very talented people joining whatever new thing AWS is launching, or the hackathons.

If anything, founders are good at building things. Hackathons are an excuse to experiment with a new tool for some, a sport for others. I think a lot of friendships today are forged in the heat of the hackathons. I met this guy who wanted to build an "AI assistant" with Gemini, which I dismissed as a dumb idea because Google has been building AI assistants for years. But his idea went much deeper than that and he won the hackathon car.