“If you spend a ton of time cultivating your network, how are you leveraging that work in your current role?” This week’s show explores multiple ways to reap the rewards of building a strong professional network, and how this week’s guests tap into that. Etienne de Bruin welcomes Erin Fusaro, Wayne Haber and Brent Thumlert to the CTO Studio Podcast. Erin is VP of Engineering at Chipper Cash, a fintech company. Her role involves helping the company grow and scale sustainably. Wayne is VP of Engineering at GitLab, focusing on security, growth and machine learning. Their primary objective is increasing “revenue via growth experiments and growth hacking and also apply machine learning to make teams customers more efficient.” Brent is the Managing Director of Software and Technology at Radicle. “Our purpose is to help people find the balance between people, planet and profit, specifically around inventory and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions,” he tells Etienne. 

Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:

Who are you bringing to the table when you sit at the table? Having a strong network means that you bring more than just your expertise; you’re also bringing all the people you know and have influence over.

You can get objective feedback on new ideas from your network and enter new places at a high level of trust.

Maintaining a network of professionals who are as invested in personal development as you are is like “crowdsourcing mentorship”.

Relationship building is everything in networking.

“My network always wins,” Erin says. “That network is such a big part of my value as a leader … my network supersedes any job I have, because it is continuous across my career whereas I may work for a company for a period of time.”

“A healthy network creates knowns and predictability or removes uncertainty.” 

One way to keep relationships strong is to watch what you say publicly. 

How to measure the health of your network.

The power of community and group discussion. Using a personal Slack channel to keep in touch and simultaneously help one another expand their network.


Resources
Erin Fusaro on LinkedIn | Email
Brent Thumlert on LinkedIn | Email
Wayne Haber on LinkedIn