Assetmap Blog Company blog on how social capital is transforming business, culture and social change

Your Next Investor Is Not The Girl Of Your Dreams

…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.