Your Next Investor Is Not The Girl Of Your Dreams
Posted August 8th, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
Share…or Why Context Is King When It Comes To How We Meet New People ** 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 [...]
Keep Reading »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
ShareI 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 [...]
Keep Reading »Mapmakers: A New Award Honoring The World’s Greatest Opportunity Creators
Posted March 1st, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
ShareToday 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 [...]
Keep Reading »Beyond Groups: Why Curated Membership Communities Are Today’s Most Important Networks
Posted February 20th, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
ShareAt 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 [...]
Keep Reading »The Essence of Great Introductions Is Not Who You Know But Who You Are
Posted February 13th, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
ShareIn 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 [...]
Keep Reading »Why Social Capital Is The Coming Decade’s Most Important Buzzword
Posted February 6th, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
ShareIn 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 [...]
Keep Reading »TEDBooks and the Future of Education
Posted January 26th, 2011 in Human Capacity | View Comments
Share(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 [...]
Keep Reading »The Only Thing You Need To Do To Be Great At Networking
Posted January 23rd, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
ShareThe 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 [...]
Keep Reading »Why Crowdsourcing Should Really Be Called Group Powering (and How Group Powering is Remaking Everything)
Posted January 17th, 2011 in Networking | View Comments
ShareThe 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 [...]
Keep Reading »For Gen Y, There Are No Weak Ties, Only Ties That Aren’t Strong Yet
Posted January 9th, 2011 in Social Capital | View Comments
ShareIn 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 [...]
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