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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.

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.

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.

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.

What are some examples of Curated Membership Communities?

In planning TEDxVolcano, there were three (or, arguably, four) curated membership communities involved. The first was TED. Over the last twenty years, TED has grown from a small community anchored around an annual conference in Monterey, CA to an extraordinarily influential cultural force. In the last two years specifically they’ve open-sourced their model of community curation in the form of their independently-organized TEDx events. Thousands of people around the world have planned and executed their own TED events. With the help of TEDxLondon, this was the platform upon which we designed TEDxVolcano.

The other two curated membership communities essential to putting on TEDxVolcano were the Hub, a global network of coworking spaces for social innovators that prides itself not only on having great working facilities but a highly engaged and mutually supportive community; and the Sandbox Network, a global network of excellent under-30 entrepreneurs and leaders. These two groups provided space, volunteers, audio/visual support, promotion, and much more.

The final community (the one I called “arguable”) was the “Nathaniel’s friends” group. We don’t typically think of our friends as a group that has a coherent group identity. Instead, we view them as a set of bilateral relationships. But I tend to curate my group of friends – organizing them in meetups, making sure they have access to information about eachother’s projects, etc. – as though they were a group who have relationships with each other and not just with me, and in many ways they take the shape of a curated membership community matching the characteristics listed above.

In addition to the membership communities involved with TEDxVolcano, some of the other important types rising to prominence today include fellowship communities (such as the PopTech Social Innovation Fellows) and mixers or meetups – one of the least formal of these communities, but which anchor the week-to-week professional social experience for millions.

I would also argue that the huge number of new entrepreneurship incubators fall into this category of curated membership communities, as well. While they are businesses that have investors and financial goals, their motivation is largely driven by amplifying the work of their members (i.e. startups), and much of the benefit they provide is in the social capital that the community members share with one another.

Why are Curated Membership Communities so important?

I believe that curated membership communities are going to be one of the most significant drivers of social and economic value creation in the coming decades, and that they should be treated not as a disparate set of market segments, but as a coherent unit that can be better served by entrepeneurs. Why?

• Group relationships…: Our conception of social networks is organized almost entirely around one-to-one relationships. The reality is that people have many “group relationships” as well. In these contexts, people often share needs and resources with other members of their curated communities in spite of not having a personal relationship with them. The group becomes a proxy for the trust that comes with a direct one-to-one relationship.
• …lead to wider social capital exchange: Because of this, these communities become one of the most important ways that social capital is distributed. The fact that most members don’t work directly with the others means that there is a wider array of needs, and consequently, a wider array of opportunities for individuals to meet the needs of their peers.
• …and more opportunties created: This social capital exchange leads these groups to take on the role of crossroads where people with complimentary projects can meet and form partnerships, amplifying the work they’ve already begun. By facilitating an ongoing array of introductions, they also become a generative force for entirely new projects.

There is a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs to provide tools and services for these groups. They have different communication patterns, different goals, and different behavioral norms than companies, nonprofits, student groups, and other organizations who leverage their members as inputs for a shared set of goals. With very few exceptions, today’s group-focused tools are designed for the latter and not the former type of group.

It doesn’t take pyschic powers to see that this category of groups is on the rise. Every month it feels as though there are more mixers, conferences, incubators, fellowships, and other networking groups than there were before.

While there might be many proximate reasons for this, the one that matters is this: even in a world of immensely powerful social technology, shared experience is what drives us to care about and contribute to others. As the social graph has come online, we’ve been able to keep better track not only of our friends, but all the amazing people we haven’t met yet. The explosion of curated membership communities is an attempt to create the shared experiences which bring us into contact with those people, giving us access to the amazing world which we can see, if not fully yet grasp.

Photo credit: TED

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

I live in San Francisco. That means that, simply by physical proximity, I have 1-degree connections with a huge number of venture investors. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons I moved here. When I first arrived, however, I was coming out of the nonprofit space and most of my connections to investors were through friends that have nothing to do with the field of web entrepreneurship. It didn’t matter whether or not their investor friends had great personal respect for them – their introductions did me little good.

What was at work in this situation was a challenge that is more general than nonprofits or Silicon Valley. Every successful person has (or certainly at least feels like they have) too little time. When they are introduced to a new contact, they have to make a snap judgement about valuable the connection is going to be and how much attention to give it. This doesn’t mean these judgements are right, but they are a fact.

The primary determinant of those judgements is the reputation of the person making the introduction. In this circumstance, “reputation” does not really refer to some objective and overarching personal brand, but to more contextual factors, including the previous experience the person getting the introduction has had with the introducer, and the introducer’s expertise and experience in the particularly area of the connection. This is why online reputation systems are so hard to design; when it comes down to the micro level of connections, specific context greatly trumps generalities about a person’s power to distribute or amplify messages.

In the case of my nonprofit connections introducing me to venture investors, the problem was not that those investors didn’t like the person connecting us and not even that they didn’t have a great professional respect for them. It was simply that the investors did not assume that the person I had making introductions knew what they wanted in business relationships (in this case, in prospective investments), because they were in a fundamentally different business. This lead to, at best, a low level of engagement, and at worst, an actual pigeon-holing as not worth their time even before I had pitched.

The Essence of Great Introdcutions

If the previous was the story of connections that aren’t effective, what makes for an effective introduction? For Valley investors, what I’ve experienced personally and what the consensus seems to be is that the best introductions for entrepreneurs seeking funds come from existing portfolio companies or other committed investors. While this is context specific, it follows a more general pattern that has nothing to do with web startups. The most successful introductions come from people who have:

1. Relevant Shared Experiences: This is maybe the most important element. “Relevant shared experience” means that the person being introduced and the person doing the introduction have worked together or have some other shared experience in the context of the introduction. An example might be a portfolio company introducing a friends’ startup to one of their investors. Relevant shared experience is the thing that assures the person being introduced that the introducer knows what they’re talking about.

2. Positive Interpersonal Track Record: This refers to a previous record of success in making similar sorts of connections. To extend the Silicon Valley metaphor, if my friend is introducing me to his investor, that introduction is going to be even more valuable if he was the person who introduced the investor’s last three investments. The reverse is also true. Even if I have a great introduction from a person with relevant shared experience, if that person has consistently sent bad deals to the investor, that doesn’t bode well for me.

3. Likelihood of Future Power: Most people are relatively strategic, and know intuitively that if a person is in a position of authority or is headed in that direction, paying more attention to the connections and introductions they make just makes sense. I use “likelihood of future power” as a catchall to describe that authority, influence, etc.

The Power of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The goal for connectors ultimately must be to establish a reputation that allows you to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Put differently, when you make an introduction, you want the parties to think “man, if that person made this connection, I definitely want to pay attention.” That takes time, discipline, and a focus on quality rather than quantity of relationships. For people looking for mission-critical introductions for your projects or companies, finding connectors who can leverage their reputation to get the person they’re introducing you to pay attention has to be the goal.

Ultimately, the point is this: for highly effective connections, reputation matters more than an ability to know a lot of people. Reputation is not, primarily, about metrics like the number of Twitter followers, but about relevant shared experience, interpersonal track record, and likelihood of future power. Find or create those three circumstances in your essential introductions, and incredible things can happen.

kFor anyone interested in diving deeper into online reputation and influence, we recommend checking out Klout’s company blog. Klout is taking on the difficult task of translating social media presence into actionable knowledge about authority and influence, and sharing a lot of what they’re learning.

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.

2. How do you build it?
Social capital is built over time by investing in relationships with people already in your network and building new relationships with people outside. “Investing in relationships” can mean many things, but at it’s core, harking back to a theme that comes up often on this blog, means finding ways to proactively be helpful for people and meet their needs. It’s worth noting, for example, that Ron Conway is reputed to proactively seek out how he can be helpful, rather than just waiting for people to tell him what they need.

Interestingly, social capital is less like a physical resource that becomes depleted as you use it, and more like a muscle that gets stronger the more you exercise it. If I introduce developer A to company B, and their relationship blooms, my social capital doesn’t decrease for having “used it” to make the connection; it increases for having provided each party with a valuable resource in one another.

Importantly, social capital is not just about the ability to connect to people. This skill is becoming increasingly commodified as new technology makes it easier than ever to visualize our social graph. Social capital is also a measure of the influence and reputation which you can bring to that connection, which has direct implications for the likelihood that the parties you’re connecting will actually invest in the new relationship you’re bridging. In this sense it’s also a measure of your power of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Finally, social capital is not a transaction. It is not something you can buy, and not a system where reciprocity always comes in the form of getting help and resources directly from the people you’ve helped. It is much more karmic, and the more you give, the more you ultimately receive, even if from a totally different person or group.

3. How do you use it?
Quite simply put, you use your social capital to find the things you need, whether it’s a new apartment in the city you’re moving to, a new employee for your startup or, as I learned a little more than a year ago, help funding your rescue dog’s ACL surgery. One of the most important things to realize about social capital is that the fact that you likely don’t know what you’re going to need (and there how you’re going to have to deploy your social capital) suggests that the best general strategy for building and using it is to help a wide array of people with as much vigor as you can muster, rather than assuming you know exactly the few targets that you need to focus on at the exclusion of others.

4. How do you lose it?
Like financial capital, you can lose social capital, although it’s usually a more subtle and long-term process. You can overtax relationships by not understanding how willing to help you or interested in your help certain relationships are. You can certainly misfire and make an introduction that goes so wrong it sours a relationship. But in general, there is an almost 1:1 correlation between the things that make you not a great person in general and the things that diminish your social capital: deceit, inauthenticity, duplicity. These are the things that kill your reputation and credibility and make people not want to go out on a limb for you.

5. Who are examples of people that do it best?
Each of us has a few people we can think of who are constantly making things happen by tapping into their networks. My mind immediately jumps to people like Nicole Patrice Johnson, a tech and social entrepreneurship superconnector extraordinaire, Unreasonable Institute cofounder Teju Ravilochan, and Mike Del Ponte, founder of Sparkseed and now Marketing Manager at BranchOut. These are the type of people who surprise me with new connections constantly. Each industry has certain people – such as Ron Conway mentioned above, or someone like GoodCapital and Hub Bay Area founder Kevin Jones in the social enterprise space – who have a reputation for how effectively they use social capital to help the people they care about (and ultimately, help themselves, as well). What’s an equally or even more interesting question is what are the settings, tools, and convening that do the best job at amplifying and enabling people to build social capital. This is a topic we’ll be exploring much more in the coming weeks and months.

6. Who needs it?
At the end of the day, we all need social capital. We all need networks of trusted relationships that can support us and channel new opportunities to us when we’re down, that can speak on our behalf and get our foot in the door, that can help us more efficiently and effectively navigate our professional lives.

While this sort of behavior is sometimes just lumped together as “networking,” it’s really much more than that. It’s a neverending process of weaving goodwill and willingness to help across your network, and finding ways to bind it ever tighter through your proactive contributions to it. The central activity is not ultimately, to get, but to give. Only in giving more can you assure that when you need something, you’ll be able to find it.

Social capital is not just the coming decade’s most important buzzword. It is one of, if not the most important currency in our highly-networked world. Knowing how to build and use social capital is one of if not the most important skill for modern professionals. Having tools to mange and leverage social capital…well, we’re convinced that they’re the single most important set of tools still waiting to be created. If you agree, sign up for our beta. And even if not, take a little time to read some of the recommended reading below.

7. Further reading
As you’ll notice, most of these titles focus on the community development and civic engagement space. That’s because while business writers have spent the last couple decades peddling tips about handshakes and follow-up emails, these folks have been researching how social capital helps people survive in existential situations. There is a huge amount the business world can learn from them.
“Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” – Robert Putnam. The book that introduced “social capital” to the masses.
“Building Communities from the Inside Out” – John McKnight and John Kretzmann. The most important handbook for helping communities uncover social capital resources.
“Here Comes Everybody” and “Cognitive Surplus” – Clay Shirky. While not specifically about social capital, these are the stories of how organizing and sharing is changing in the digital age, and are ultimately the story of how the groups for whom we deploy our network of resources and from whom we can tap into a network of resources are changing.

Photo via Wired

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.

In the world today, many of the most important topics don’t get covered in the classroom. Managing change, working in teams, understanding how to be entrepreneurial even within an existing company, learning how to sort through truth and lies in advertising, grappling with how history informs biology informs economics informs policy, figuring out how to build and maintain meaningful relationships, understanding how to define meaning and purpose in one’s life, understanding how to contribute to the greater good…these are not things we should relegate to the dregs of the self-help section. They are the fundamentals of 21st century life.

Over the last five years, since beginning to post videos from their annual conference online for free, TED has become a place where people go to learn about, explore, and discover these topics. The videos – on everything from the muse of genius to how it feels to live through a stroke - have become part of the cannon of understanding for the literally hundreds of millions of people who have viewed them. Importantly, these videos have paved the way for startups like Udemy and Academic Earth to scour the world for the best content they can find in order to open more knowledge to more people.

TEDBooks is an important next step in sharing that content. While an 18 minute talk can inspire, delight, and even inform, there are limits to its depth. At the same time, the same audiences who were inspired and want more from a particularly speaker or on a particular topic may not have the interest or time to read a full 300+ page book from them. The new TEDBook format is a <20,000 monograph that is designed to be able to be read in a single setting. This sort of content can fit effortlessly inside the confines of existing educational curricula, as well as the routine of people’s normal lives.

Distribution: Education in the Cloud
The traditional “distribution” model of education is anchored around two channels: the classroom and the textbook. TED is on the leading edge of a set of organizations that are, to use a Silicon Valley phrase, moving education to the cloud. You can consume TED talks via the web, iPod, iPad, smart phone, on Virgin America’s inflight entertainment system, and in partnership with public broadcasting stations in the developing world, on public television.

TEDBooks are following suit. Built on top of Amazon’s Kindle Singles platform, the TEDBooks imprint will be able to be ready through a Kindle app on any of the devices supported – from PCs to Macs to iPads, iPods and beyond. Because it’s on Kindle, it can also be shared. The cost of each TEDBook will be $2.99.

This shift in the distribution of education is one of the most important. When education is no longer coupled to the constraints of a physical classroom or a physical text, it can weave its way in and out of a person’s life far more naturally, becoming about them and their learning rather than about someone else’s pass percentage. It also, even if it isn’t all the way there yet, has a much greater ability to be distributed to people who previously couldn’t afford access to anything but the most basic learning.

Aspiration: The Rediscovery of Wonder
The single biggest problem facing our education system is not low test scores, or even overcrowded classrooms and underfunded schools. It is, ultimately, that every day the education system we have grows more disconnected from the reality of its students, in terms of both its form and its goals. Students want interactions and teams; they get individual learning and multiple choice tests. They want creativity and exploration; they get a system that only rewards coloring inside the lines. And so they get bored, frustrated, and legitimately unsure of the value of their experience. Education stops becoming about enabling their own agency and instead becomes about integrated them into an economic system which they can see for themselves is failing.

The key to making 21st century education work isn’t just better scores in math and science; it is, to use the theme of this year’s TED conference, to enable the “rediscovery of wonder.” It is to remind students that the point of learning is to enable them to achieve whatever it is in their guts to achieve, and to have that actually be true, rather than just another line in a speech.

The startups that we at Assetmap most identify with are not defined by industry but by ethos, and that ethos is to enable people to share more, learn more, give more, and do more of what it was they believe they were put on this earth to do. Our piece of that is enabling them to more effectively share resources with and get resources from their networks; Quora’s is to enable the flow of knowledge and experience like never before; Skillshare’s is to enable every person to teach what they love and know to others directly. And the list goes on.

For us, TED is a pioneer in this world of human capacity startups. It is creating platforms that are helping hasten the shift in education for the better, and in the process making the world safe for smart. Congrats on the launch of TEDBooks – we can’t wait to see what’s next.

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:

• It’s almost impossible to be sure of what you’re going to need five minutes from now, much less five days, five months, or five years;
• Even when you know what you need, it’s extremely hard to know who is going to be able to help – or to introduce you to exactly the right person to help. When we were looking for a technical lead for Assetmap, for example, the recruitment wars were in such high pitch that asking my entrepreneur friends for developers was showing itself to be pointless; they were by necessity hoarding their contacts. In a last ditch effort, I asked all of my nonprofit-y friends who happened to live in San Francisco. Sure enough, we ended up being introduced to the previous cofounder of a well known, venture backed Ruby on Rails hosting and scaling company. He was introduced not because our mutual friend could verify his technical chops, but because he was a “great teacher” and a “great guy.” You never know who is going to be able to help.
• When you do need something, you often need it quickly. The challenge of needing things quickly is that you simply don’t have time to build good will and a reputation as someone who is a good person to help. People make investments in who they help based on what they know about that persons propensity to be helpful in return, maybe not to them, but in general. People want to help others who have good karma. They want to know that their help will be paid forward and eventually returned to them in some way or another.
• The only sure way to get that sort of good karma is to start helping now, and do so assuming that everyone you help could be the exact person you’ll need to help you in the future, even if you can’t imagine how at the moment.

If this advice to “start helping” seems glib and banal, it is surprising how few people anchor their “networking” in the simple act of helping their peers find what they need. For entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders, in particular, our needs are often so immediate and so existential that it is extremely tempting to assess every new person we meet in terms of their capacity to help us. I contend, however, that it is ultimately destructive, leading to being seen as a “taker” and caught in a world of transactional relationships.

The bias towards helping widely, deeply, and without calculus to how I get paid back has been the single most important buoy of my professional life. It has not only helped me find what I need, but at least once or twice has insulated a project from total immolation.

And here’s the best part: this supposedly “professional” strategy of helping widely is also personally liberating. It is a kind of freedom to stop assessing professional relationships only in the context of their potential return on investment. It allows the natural joy of helping others return as a primary motivation for your professional behavior.

Helping in this way is at once easier and harder than it seems. It is easier in that most of the connections we make for people cost us nothing and actually build our social capital by making both parties happier and more closely connected to us. It is harder than it seems in part because we’ve mapped the transactions that happen in markets as outcomes of business relationships onto the structure of the relationships themselves. But it’s also harder simply because it’s strangely hard to discover what people actually need. One of the main intents of Assetmap is to fix this problem.

Networking still feels to many like a strange, frustrating, often inauthentic experience. And the hoards of experts who offer their help to get your handshake, business card, and eye contact right don’t help. But ultimately, networking is not about building a fat rolodex but instead about building a dense web of relationships of mutual curiosity and mutual support. That is the work of a lifetime, and it starts with the way you help today.

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.

Why this “group powering” is so powerful is not its novelty; people have been turning to their groups for resources since the beginning of human organization. What’s important is that the connective capacity of the internet is helping make informal associations, clubs, and networking groups more powerful than ever before, which in turn is giving people entirely new ways to organize their careers and professional activity.

Right now, if you’re an average high achieving millennial, an essential part of your “network” is the set the groups to which you belong. In college, student groups are getting more diverse, more creative, and more ambitious, in many cases actually reshaping the curricular programming and general landscape of their universities. After college, a new world of conferences (e.g. Summit Series and TED), networking communities (e.g. Sandbox and New Leaders Council), meetup groups (e.g. Wok+Wine and Good Brain Dinners), and fellowship communities (e.g. PopTech Social Innovation Fellows and Rainer Arnhold Fellows) provide a never-ending stream of new relationships.

Importantly, people are forming relationships not just with individual members of these groups, but with the group as an entity. The group becomes a proxy of trust and professional relationship and people begin to invest in other members even when they don’t have a deep personal relationship with them. Value is exchanged not through transactions but in a sort of Karmic system. In other words, people share resources with a member of the group not expecting to get back the same value from that person individually, but expecting that the reputation and trust they build by being a recognized contributing member of the community will result in them being able to tap other members of the group for resources when they need it.

This is an important distinction, and one of the reasons that crowdsourcing thinking can fall short when applied to persistent groups. The motivation for strangers to help when one is crowdsourcing a problem can often be financial, and organized around a marketplace. But social capital does not work the same way as financial capital, and in persistent groups, social capital “transactions” are multiparty and extended over time.

These things matter because the opportunities for individuals to invest in relationships with their groups is changing their need to rely on traditional institutional loci of power and money. You don’t need to form a giant company to start a world class conference (see: Summit Series). You don’t need a record label or a government grant to finance the creation of your music or art (see: Kickstarter). You don’t need a “career” anchored by formal companies to make money and work on meaningful projects (see: about half of San Francisco residents born between 1976-1986).

All of these shifts are enabled by the tools and norms that are changing how we build, maintain, and leverage relationships with groups. And the shift is only just beginning. All the evidence suggests we’re entering a period of punctuated equilibrium in which the tools we create will not only react to but actual interact with and shape the change in group structures.

To fund a Kickstarter project today may be an act of creative patronage, but by tomorrow it could be that funders collectives are actually powerful, organized forces. To buy a Groupon today may just be a fun way to get a discount to discover your city, but by tomorrow it could be the starter experience to join a club of peers who want common adventures. Indeed, some of the smartest companies in the world like Zappos are actively thinking about how to use the purchasing experience as the catalyst for an interact, community experience.

There is a world opportunities for startups to address the needs of highly dynamic, increasingly powerful informal associations. Traditional social networks are by definition designed around individual-to-individual relationships, making them fall short of the needs of these types of groups. Group email and custom social networks have their problems, as well.

To take advantage of these opportunities, however, we’re going to have to expand our thinking — and our lexicon. Crowdsourcing will continue to evolve and be a powerful economic and social force, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. What lies just beneath the surface are untold opportunities to use the internet to amplify human assembly, and the impact of those opportunities — from careers to politics to creation — will shape the next generation of organization and society.

Photo: Woknwine.com

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.

People who study communities and networks refer to people’s friends as “strong ties” and their acquaintances as “weak ties.” Much of today’s social networking technology has enabled new types of relationships with weak ties. But what many analysis of weak and strong ties miss is 1) what constitutes a “weak tie” is evolving from solely referring to an “acquaintance” (or someone you know a little bit) to also including someone you don’t know but share a common context (such as membership in a loosely defined network like a conference you attended) or a common interest; and 2) the way digital natives behave towards their weak ties is increasingly more engaged, preemptive, experimental and karmic than ever before. These two realities have massive implications for entrepreneurs.

The shift in weak ties is both a product of and an enabling force for communication platforms like Twitter and Quora, which are based around asymmetrical relationships (i.e. I can follow you without you following me) and organized around an interest graph (i.e. you follow people based on what they’re interested in as much as whether you know them or not). These tools are enabling a change in our scope and definition of our weak ties by reducing the barriers for finding and interacting with people who we don’t know but with whom we share affinity or shared experience. Put simply, we increasingly behave as though people we don’t know yet but with whom we share interests with are weak business relationships that can be built upon.

The second shift is in the way we build those weak tie relationships. Professional networking used to be a behavior primarily anchored around hoarding and transactional reciprocity. The hoarding behavior was that when we made a new contact (exemplified in getting a new business card) we filed that contact away in our rolodex waiting for the day we could deploy it to our benefit. Transactional reciprocity is just a fancy way to say that the norms of value exchange were “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

These behaviors still exist, but they are being challenged for dominance in significant ways. The first is that hoarding is increasingly replaced by sharing as the standard use of weak business contacts. Gen Y’s superconnectors and business leaders are constantly trying to provide value in the form of introductions to contacts they’ve only just begun to establish their rapport with. This social capital experimentation gives us a chance to see how people respond and start relationships in a meaningful way, even if we’re not sure where those relationships will end up.

Second, while reciprocity for social capital exchange still matters, it’s far more Karmic than transactional. What this means is that instead of assuming that every connection we make will return value to us from the person we helped, we assume that the value will come back to us in the form of brand building (being known as a connector) and more directly from somewhere else in the networks in which we travel. In many ways, Karmic value return is much more akin to how value is distributed in communities as opposed to the transactional system which more mirrors financial markets.

Take a look at the story above. The founder of Feelgoodz was a weak tie who became a strong(er) tie whn I shared a valuable contact with him. I didn’t expect – nor do I expect – to have that value returned in the form of a “favor” from him, or anything like that. That wasn’t the point. Similarly, the founder of Groupon likely does not have a file on his computer with all the people who “owe him” for access to his list. Instead, the point is that this is just what we do to build the web of contacts and good will which animates our work.

The result of this sort of behavior is that across an entire generation of digital natives — and increasingly, older generations who are picking up our behaviors as technology reshapes the communication and business norms they’ve developed — are behaving as though there are no such thing as weak ties, just ties that aren’t strong yet. The implications – for entrepreneurs, for networkers, for society at large – are immense.