Your Next Investor Is Not The Girl Of Your Dreams
Posted August 8th, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
…or Why Context Is King When It Comes To How We Meet New People
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Let’s imagine two people you’re trying to meet. One is an investor who would be perfect for your new company. The other is the significant other of your dreams. You share many friends in common with each of them.
Most people have very different strategies for meeting with these almost-contacts. In fact, almost every aspect of the connection process – which of their friends they look to to help facilitate a connection, what they share about why they’re looking to meet, and how the actual introduction happens – are different based on the different relationships intended to result from the connection.
When it comes to meeting new people, context is king. Entrepreneurs in the Valley, for example, know that the best intro to a prospective investor is from a current portfolio company. They know to move the introducer to BCC after being connected. They even know which months of the year to avoid getting introductions during because it’s VC off season. The point is that these are the best practices based on the context of the potential investor relationship. These sort of best practices are different in other fields, and they’re certainly different if one is trying to connect for reasons other than professional interest.
The human impulse to meet new people is as fundamental to who we are as our impulse to think, to worship, or to create. Indeed, increasingly research suggests that it may be even more fundamentally. Given this, it is a little ironic that the tools we associate with “social networking” are almost entirely about interacting with who you know already, rather than who you haven’t met but should. In other words, sharing moments with friends is a core human social behavior, but so is finding new friends to share things with.
The way we meet new people is a domain of the human experience in which the pre-Internet way of doing things is still kicking the ish out of the digital experience. Mixers and conferences are still essential pillars of the professional networking experience. Parties are still how we meet new friends. And although online dating has made incredible strides and done a fantastic job of destigmatizing something that used to be seriously socially dubious, the vast majority of romantic relationships still start through shared social circles and friends of friends.
The point is that who we meet from the incredible tapestry of amazing people just one social degree away is largely left up to serendipity. And as wonderful as the feeling of an unexpected connection is, it really is crazy how many amazing opportunities we miss out on just because we didn’t know very much about our friends of friends.
Improving the way technology helps facilitate connections with the people we haven’t met yet but should is one of, if not the, biggest opportunity in social networking, as is demonstrated by a whole slate of new products like Sonar and LikeALittle that are about connecting you with the people around you.
The challenge for these products is context. It’s neat to know that you share mutual interests on Facebook with the person across the coffee shop, but for the vast majority of people it’s not a sufficiently strong context to meet them. Sharing actual friends in common is a bit stronger, but still requires an incredibly outgoing person to overcome the inevitable weirdness of the cold connection. This could certainly change as people get more comfortable with this sort of connection, but right now, it’s a tough sell for most. As much as it is anathema to Silicon Valley conventional wisdom right now, I’m not sure mobile is the right place to focus initially for meeting new people, and the idea that sharing physical proximity creates a meaningful social network is questionable.
Still, these are tough challenges and it’s good that they’re finally getting attention. Figuring out which contexts enable social experiences that accelerate the way we meet new people is one of the great frontiers of social technology and the team that cracks the code will reap the reward.
P.S. Bonus points if you recognized the photo above from the original MessageParty promo video. MessageParty is a cool startup that started trying to do location-based chat and which has pivoted to be more of a group mobile blogging platform.
The Most Easily Forgotten Networking Truth: To Get What You Need, You Have To Ask
Posted April 3rd, 2011 in Networking, Social Capital | View Comments
I spent the first few years out of college designing programs for undergraduates who wanted to change the world. Between that and editing the Social Entrepreneurship blog on Change.org, I had a pretty good relationship map of the social impact space, and was in a position to help my students and friends connect with many of the people, organizations and resources they were most interested in. This was always a favorite part of what I did, which is probably why I’m now designing software to enable this connection to happen systematically and at scale.
But over the last 5 or so years I’ve noticed something interesting. If I created a list of the people who, theoretically, I should have most wanted to help – my closest friends and colleagues – and then compared that list against the list of who I had helped, there would be very little overlap. If, on the other hand, I looked at the list of who had asked for help and the list of who I did help, the correlation is almost perfect.
The point is that, in general, we help those who ask us for help. We know which of the resources and connections in our networks are valuable to others only when we know what they are looking for. Starting with information about what people need is simply the only efficient way to allocate social capital. To get what you need, you have to ask.
There are massive inefficiencies in the exchange of information about needs and resources – some of which technology can solve. But for some people, the more important problem is the psychological barrier. People who tend to not want to ask for help often struggle with feeling like a burden, and get uncomfortable feeling like they’re benefit exclusively without the ability to offer anything more than their gratitude. Ironically, the same people who don’t want to ask are often incredibly engaged and available when people ask them for help. Giving, for them, is more comfortable than getting.
For those folks, a few things are worth remembering:
1. Sharing connections and resources is a reciprocal exchange; it’s just not transactional. People help you when you ask because you are strategically valuable to them, because you have previously or are likely in the future to help them, because they just plain care about you, or because, simply, they want to be a connector with a brand for helping. Social capital is a Karmic system and even when you’re getting, you’re participating in the system.
2. In general, people are both more willing and more able to help than we assume. They’re more able because everyone has so much more social capital than they could ever use, and they’re more willing because it’s both strategic and genuinely emotionally rewarding to help.
3. The best way to feel more comfortable asking for help is to strive every day to be a person who is constantly available for helping others. This is not about collecting favors, but about building a personal brand as someone who can be counted on by their peers and colleagues.
At the end of the day, out professional networks are only as valuable as our ability to use them to get the support we need. Each of us has more to give, and each of us has more to receive from the people and groups that care about us. Learning to ask for help is the central skill necessary to unlocking that opportunity. The implications are not just individuals finding more of what they need, but an across-the-board transformation in what people can achieve.
Mapmakers: A New Award Honoring The World’s Greatest Opportunity Creators
Posted March 1st, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
Today we announce the launch of the Mapmakers Award from Assetmap, a new program honoring the world’s greatest opportunity creators.
After the long winter of the middle ages, the Renaissance was like an incredible blooming spring. The majesty of new art and the brilliance of new science helped an entire continent rediscover the wonder of creation. And as people began to look outward once again, they found that the world was much larger and more full of possibility than they had ever imagined.
The generation that followed pushed outward initiating journeys that would transform and inform everything that came next. The people who made sense of it all were the mapmakers. These mapmakers didn’t just created navigational charts. By connecting the dots and drawing the lines, they expanded the boundary of the known universe, literally changing people’s sense of the possible. The provided the foundation upon which entire societies were built.
Today, we’re in our own Renaissance, but it is a renaissance of relationships. Technology has made the world smaller and closer than ever before, and has created a new context in which relationships can flourish across greater barriers than ever before. In the process, we’ve begun to rediscover the importance of social capital – the currency of relationships that binds people and groups together, and through which they share resources and create opportunities for one another.
The cornerstones of this renaissance are the connectors – the people who facilitate introductions across boundaries of group and country, across industry and experience. The connectors in society are the people who understand the power of social capital, and help reveal the network of resources that each of us has at our disposal.
These are our modern mapmakers. And whether its Erik Hersman, the founder of a nonprofit that has used talent and experience from a dozen countries to change how we use technology to respond to crisis, Jennifer Pahlka, who is helping talent from the consumer internet collaborate with civic leaders to solve the problems of modern government, or Jeff Slobotski, who is creating avenues for tech talent from the midwest to interact and collaborate with leaders on both coasts, the common thread is that these mapmakers know that when great people connect, the whole is significantly more than the sum of the parts, and it’s not just the individuals involved but the world as a whole that benefits.
The Mapmakers Award is Assetmap’s way of honoring these incredible opportunity creators, and our way to share their insights about networking, social capital, and relationship building. Each week, we’ll feature a handful of new mapmakers, and at least once a year, we’ll collect their collective insights in a more significant way.
The point of this is not to suggest that these mapmakers are superhuman. Indeed, the opposite is true. The reality is that what almost all of them share is simply a bias towards helping and a joy in seeing what happens when great people connect. We at Assetmap believe with every fiber of our being that everyone has the capacity to be a mapmaker, and our mission is to make that easier than ever before.
If you know someone who should be a mapmaker, please nominate them. And please check out the social capital insights from our very first Mapmaker, Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka
Photo: A famous map from 1585 that imagined Jerusalem at the center of the universe.
Beyond Groups: Why Curated Membership Communities Are Today’s Most Important Networks
Posted February 20th, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
At 11:30am on Saturday, April 17, I found out that I would be stuck in London for at least a week because of the Icelandic volcano. At 11:49, I emailed TED staffers to propose a flash event we would hold the next day as a way for volcano refugees to celebrate our powerlessness. Less than an hour later they sent their excited response and by 6:00pm the next day, the curtains opened on TEDxVolcano, the world’s first popup conference.
It’s a story that would have been impossible just a few years earlier, but not for the reason you think. It was not so much the power of internet technology that made this happen, but the power of a type of “curated membership community” that, while not new, has become an increasingly central to the fabric of modern professional life. These curated membership communities are poised to become one of the most important drivers of social and economic value in the coming decades, and entrepreneurs should take note.
What are Curated Membership Communities?
Curated membership communities are networks like conference communities, fellowships, coworking spaces, professional networking groups, and meetup groups. There are a few things that makes them different from businesses or nonprofits.
- Members as beneficiaries, not employees: They are designed primarily for the benefit of their members, rather than to leverage their members to achieve a specific ends as a business would with employees. Their “outcomes” are about amplifying the variety of outcomes individual members seek to achieve.
- Significant focus on social capital: The benefits of participation tend to come in the form of the members sharing their extended network of skills, connections, and other resources with one another. In other words, it is other members more than the organizer or curator who provide value to each other.
- Highly aspirational: People tend to engage in these groups because they’re excited to feel like they have a connection with other people they admire and look up to. Aspiration is one of the main forces that drives social capital exchange.
- Ethos over tasks: Membership tends to be organized around an ethos rather than a set of specific commitments. You get to participate because you have share a set of beliefs that animates the group as a whole.
- Curators not managers: The activities and interaction of the community are curated by some actor or set of actors. These actors range from formal organizations (in the case of conferences and fellowships) to individuals volunteering their time, as in the case of mixers and meetups. In all cases, organization of members is much lighter touch than the management hierarchy of a company.
- Collaboration between curators and members: These curators who facilitate the activities of the group tend to have a highly collaborative relationships with the members. In many cases, these communities act like “platforms,” which give their members access to a brand, context, and resources to create opportunities for the group.
- Multi-faceted purpose: Unlike companies, which are organized in a hierarchical fashion in order to do a small number of things in a highly repeatable and scalable way, these communities are highly dynamic and can be reorganized to accomplish a variety of goals.
The Essence of Great Introductions Is Not Who You Know But Who You Are
Posted February 13th, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
In today’s world, making introductions between people has become an anchor activity of professional life. Facebook, LinkedIn, and myriad other contact management tools have given us better information about the people we know that ever before, significantly decreasing the cost of connecting.
Yet better information about our networks and lower cost of connection has come with other consequences, as well. Now, more than ever, to be an effective connector or to find effective connections is not just a matter of knowing people who know people. Instead, what matters most is the weight of the reputation behind the connection and in turn, the likelihood that all parties will engage with it seriously.
The Commodification of Connection
Across 600 million users, the average Facebook user has over a hundred friends. If you looked only at younger users and at professionals, that number would likely be close to, if not above, 1000. The breadth of the user base means it is the modern world’s biggest phonebook and rolodex all rolled into one. Between Facebook, LinkedIn, and your email contacts, everyone you could ever want to communicate with is a single click away.
The omnipresent rise of social media has seen an attendant increase in professional introductions, and day-in and day-out, todays professionals are facilitating introductions for their peers to potential clients, investors, partners, and more. What used to take an actual introductory meeting over lunch now happens with a few keystrokes. There are a number of recent startups that are optimizing the actual mechanics to an even greater degree than ever before.
This is a fundamentally good thing. More connections means more value being exchange and created. But just being able to make or get an introduction doesn’t make that introduction successful, and optimizing the mechanism by which it happens can only help so much. Ultimately, the value of any professional connection is determined by the weight of the reputation of the person making it.
The Rise of Reputation
Why Social Capital Is The Coming Decade’s Most Important Buzzword
Posted February 6th, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
In Silicon Valley, Ron Conway is a legend. The granddaddy of the new class of “super angels,” Conway is a prolific investor who recently increased his clout by partnering with Russia’s Yury Milner to invest in literally every new Y Combinator company. But the reason Conway is one of the most sought after angel investors is not in his cash, but in the power of his network and influence, and his willingness to deploy it on behalf of his companies. Called a “human network router” by Netscape founder and newly minted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, he reportedly keeps a notebook in which he is constantly jotting down the things his people need. In shot, he is investing his social capital alongside his financial capital.
Conway is not the only person to use his social capital to great effect. You know that person who always seems to find a way into the most premier conferences and elite gatherings? The woman on your team who always knows how to get deals done? Your friend who left her cushy job to be a self-employed consultant who is backlogged with work? That friend who, at the end of every conversation seems to have some introduction for you?
These are all masters of the 21st century’s most important currency: social capital. Deploying our social capital is a process that most of us do day in and day out, yet its something that most of us do and know intuitively, not intentionally. For a new generation of professionals, there is almost nothing as important as knowing how to build, manage, and leverage social capital. Here is your primer.
1. What is Social Capital
Financial capital refers to money and items that can be used to produce goods and services. Social capital refers to the network of relationships which you can deploy to get things done. Importantly, it is not just a measure of quantity or the number of relationships you have, but a measure of density – how thick and meaningful your relationships are – and a measure of deployability – how willing to work on your behalf those relationships are.
People who study social capital have often put it into two different groups. “Bonding Capital” has classically referred to the strength of relationships and willingness to help and share within a community such as a neighborhood or a club, while “Bridging Capital” has referred to the strength of connections between different groups of people. In the connected world of today’s internet, “social capital” tends to refer more generally to the strength and density of your social networks.
TEDBooks and the Future of Education
Posted January 26th, 2011 in Human Capacity | View Comments
(Ed. note: Every once in a while, we will write a piece about some startup that just inspires the hell out of us at Assetmap. Today, that honor goes to TED, whose new TEDBooks imprint is just one more indication of how they’re pushing education to change for the better.)
American education is in the midst of one of its most significant shifts. Costs at private universities climb higher every year; millions of students from poor communities get left behind due to underfunding, overworked teachers, and an over reliance on standardized tests; and most importantly, the capacity of our education system to actually prepare students for the challenges they will face seems in steady decline.
Ironically, these declines are occurring in a time when the cost of information has never been lower. The technology revolution has made it easier than ever for knowledge and ideas to flow between people separated by borders of all types, and the opportunity to completely reimagine education is bubbling just under the surface. With the launch of its new TEDBooks imprint, TED has further cemented its role as a leader in this remaining, specifically in each of three essential aspects: Content, Distribution, and Aspiration.
Content: The Stuff of Life
The “standard” curriculum has been standard for quite some time. One part math, one part science, one part English, one part a bunch of other important things like art, music, and foreign language, if you are blessed enough to go to a school that can afford them. Students who go to college experience some version of this broad curriculum again in the form of required courses, but begin to specialize in some particular discipline. If they’re lucky, they go to a school where they can experience classes about things they never would have imagined themselves to be interested in.
The problem with this content is not what it includes, but what it leaves out.
The Only Thing You Need To Do To Be Great At Networking
Posted January 23rd, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
The only thing you really need to do to be great at networking is to be as helpful as possible to as many people as you can.
In the middle of 2009, I packed up everything I had to follow the entrepreneurial dream in San Francisco. In moving, I was leaving a place, a reputation, and a community. While frequent career shifts can make for a dynamic learning-filled life, they also have the consequence of upending relationships. I’ve never been great at just picking up the phone to catch up with people, so when I moved this time I decided to try something different to stay in touch.
I began an every other month or so newsletter called the N-List, in which I wrote a short piece on something I had been thinking about, and then included links to brilliant, wacky, inspiring, historical, or hilarious web content. The goal was primarily to create a regular excuse to reconnect with people. But a secondary goal was to have an active channel through which to ask for help when we launched projects in the future. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Assetmap but Isis the dog that made me call on the list.
Isis is my extremely loving, extremely deaf, extremely accident-pruned American Bulldog – Pit Bull mix. Just a few months after rescuing her, she tore the doggy equivalent of her ACL. Our options were let it scar over and have her limp around for the next 7 or 8 years of her life, or get a surgery that cost at least $3000. Obviously we were going to do the surgery, but where to find the cash?
I had only just started writing the N-List, but figured I’d write asking for help with the dog. There were lots of people on there who had nonprofits who I had given to in the past, so why not try? The long story short is that over the course of the next month we raised a full $3000, primarily from people on the list, got the surgery, and now Isis is back to romping around the apartment looking for food and toys, leg good as new.
Over the course of 2010, I would turn to my networks regularly for help finding resources and connections, and more often than not it was for needs that, like doggy surgery, I absolutely did not anticipate: a sales channel for a flip flop company, a modern feminist organization looking to hire an intern, real estate buyers interested in entrepreneurial living in Mexico, a national news outlet to syndicate coverage of a well known conference, and so on.
My inability to anticipate these needs reminded me of a personal maxim to always, always be searching for ways to be helpful far in advance of when you think you’ll need help in return. What it comes down to is this:
Why Crowdsourcing Should Really Be Called Group Powering (and How Group Powering is Remaking Everything)
Posted January 17th, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
The single most important change in human organization in the next ten years will be the changing nature of our relationship with groups and informal associations.
In the beginning of his book “Here Comes Everybody” – one of the foundational documents of the Internet’s impact on society – author Clay Shirky tells the story of a woman who loses her phone in a cab, only to have it picked up by a rather unpleasant teenage girl who refuses to give it back. The long and the short of the story is that when the police don’t help, the phoneless woman turns to the Internet and manages, through a combination of efforts, to track the phone down.
The story has entered the canon of what we call “crowdsourcing,” the process by which individuals or companies draw upon the wisdom and efforts of diverse and often anonymous people to accomplish something. Crowdsourcing has left its mark on the internet and captured the imagination of many, but in so doing has at times distracted from a larger related phenomenon, which is the shift in how we build, maintain, and leverage informal and formal group relationships to undertake projects and achieve goals.
Crowdsourcing as we use the term today tends to refer to situations in which a specific task gets done by deploying the labor and talent of strangers. Often the motivation is financial. Put differently, crowdsourcing allows people to power a project by assembling a temporary group of strangers, often with the incentive of money, to accomplish a goal.
“Group powering” is something slightly different, and refers to finding the resources and support you need using the members of the groups to which you belong. The motivation is generally Karmic (the more you give, the more you get). Put differently, group powering allows you to power a project by tapping into the goodwill of a group of people with whom you share an ongoing context.
For Gen Y, There Are No Weak Ties, Only Ties That Aren’t Strong Yet
Posted January 9th, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
In the middle of 2010, I heard the story of a peer entrepreneur whose ethical flip flop company, Feelgoodz, had been derailed by the BP oil spill. Their first big customer order, a 10,000 pair shipment that was to be distributed to Whole Foods, got stuck for months in the chaotic shipping rerouting, and by the time it arrived, Whole Foods expected to be able to sell barely a fraction of the flops. The company was weeks away from defaulting on a loan, and starting to look at liquidators who would have paid less than 10% of the cost.
I heard about their problems through a friend who was one of their investors and immediately did two things. First, I wrote a story on Change.org that ended up becoming my most shared ever, generating some good buzz and good sales for them. But I knew that even if that piece was successful, it wouldn’t be able to do more than put a drop in the bucket of the ocean of 2,000+ pairs that they needed to sell for solvency. They needed a massive sales-oriented distribution channel.
To help with that, I introduced the company to the founder of Groupon, a social entrepreneur who had previously founded social activism site The Point, and in the process just happened to come up with the best business model in the history of the internet. I knew that if Groupon found a way to get the flip flops on their massive email buying list, Feelgoodz destiny could change overnight. Sure enough, three days later a deal on the flops was sent out nationally, and by the end of the weekend, the company had sold not only the 2,000 pairs it needed to settle it’s debts, but more than 6,000 pairs.
This story is exceptional only in the power of Groupon’s list. Indeed, my introduction between the two companies was fundamentally unexceptional, and its unexceptionally reveals something significant about the changing nature of professional behavior among Millennials.