As a naturally social person, I was surprised to learn that one of my most pressing weaknesses was that I was not able to maintain a large number of consistent relationships. Intuitively, this initially did not make sense to me because I understand myself as one who never drains their social battery - no matter the social occasion, I have never felt the need to take prolonged breaks interspersed with the typical cycle of socializing.
I’d describe the way how I maintain my current relationships as a shallow tree: when I began working in venture capital, one of the main goals of my job was to use the brand of working at the VC firm to expand my network as much as possible. Thus began the journey of attending event after event following work, with lots of time spent sneaking into bars and clubs (where I was underage) to shake hands with some of the biggest-name VCs in New York City at the time.
Through these meetings, I was able to collect the external validation to continue - but the problem that I was constructing my network as an extremely shallow tree. The craze in the city at the time was crypto, yet as a Construction Tech investor, there was very little I could offer these people (and there was very little they could help me with); other interests were not aligned at all. Compounded with the fact that I would meet these people once and forget to follow up with most of them — believing that meeting someone once is enough to make a lasting impression in their mind — these relationships became shallow; ones that I could not easily act upon (for example, reaching out to someone would warrant a lengthy phone or email conversation to bring up the context again).
Instead of constructing a shallow search tree with a large branching factor, the optimal relationships rely on depth, not breadth — which means that ones’ network tree would be many layers deep, but with a much smaller branching factor. I understood through these meetings that meeting people in real life is much more impactful than meeting people via the internet, but at the same time I did not understand that if I wanted to build a long term relationship with someone I needed to interact with them regularly. After conversations with one of my mentors, I realized that a great cadence would be once a quarter, and you disperse your meetings throughout each quarter so that you don’t have them all bunched up at once (which makes you less incentivized to continue the relationship). While I originally believed that the opening move was the most important (first impressions do matter), it is only 20% of the work; 80% of the success in strong relationships comes from following up regularly to the point where the repeated interaction allows the two of you to hop on calls directly.
What is a good branching factor for the relationship tree? Through recent conversations, it seems like the answer lies around 3 people per person. As a result, in future conversations with impactful people, one of my goals is to ask them the question “who are 3 people in your lives that you respect professionally, and why?” If possible, the goal is to try to get an introduction with these people, and ask THEM about the 3 people that they respect professionally. Of course, while the objective should be at least 3 people per person, realistically the number of people that you may be able to reach out to is 1 or 2. This allows me to develop a circle of confidents of people who influenced each other the most and help me understand who I respect professionally throughout understanding why my network respects these people so much. Could I have the same type of conversation with them?
The concept of natural selection still applies: no matter how much I optimize for these “better” relationships, some relationships will fade away as there is nothing to follow up on. This tends to happen when objectives, incentives, and interests are not aligned. However, at the same time, what should happen is not that you get to know 100 people, but at least 5-7 people that you have build a solid, recurring relationship with. This is a good time to gauge natural chemistry: do you and the other person like to engage with each other? You have to be able to find out what the other person is interested in and what their desires are in terms of their professional area of expertise. Once you do that, a follow up step could be something as simple as anything you find that is of relevance, you immediately communicate with that person and get their thoughts on the topic/see if you are able to help with them, and gauge their response: this is how a symbiotic relationship forms.
Another idea is to approach these conversations as if you are seeking out a mentor — one of the things I have come to understand in tech and finance is that people love to mentor. Therefore, the idea is to find the people who are interested in investing their own time to maintain a relationship between you and them. Once a quarter, you put a time on the calendar to catch up: you’ll have a detailed conversation through exploring various ideas with the other person, and of course make sure to follow up after the call with a message like “let’s talk next month or some timeframe about something that you are working on.” If this warrants more conversations, then so be it.
In principle, one should be applying a depth-first-search approach to their own network than a breadth-first-search approach. A large network of shallow connections isn’t actionable, but a smaller network of deeper connections is the key to success. You want people to be in your network that will put their money where their mouth is for you. You want people who would vouch for you, refer you, invest in you, help you out when you’re down. And at the same time, to keep these relationships going, you have to give back the same to your network as well.
I would say that another one of my weaknesses within developing my personal network is that I become myopic with networking and can’t see beyond the current step (there is no lookahead). There are two reasons why this is the case: (1) As outlined above, my current incentive structure is set up in a way such that I do not reach out regularly to someone; however, the trick is that you do not need to talk to someone regularly to maintain a good professional relationship, and the cadence of 1x/quarter above is more than enough (though if possible, 1x/month is better). That’s the bare minimum needed to maintain the relationship, not strengthen it.
Breaking down the incentive structure a bit further, (2) I establish the shallow relationships in my life because I think it’s good to meet them and that they have clout, and I don’t think critically about how they fit into my life. The lack of a lookahead algorithm when determining who I should be spending my time with causes me to essentially enter a blind search/random forest in which I am meeting people for the sake of meeting people: of course, sometimes I might stumble across people have a high expected value in our relationship, but most of the time I cannot add much value to the person and they cannot add much value to me, so the relationship fizzles out.
An astute, recent observation is that my friend Justin has been establishing much stronger relationships over the last few months than I’ve seen in the past two years, perhaps coinciding with the elevated public interest in Artificial Intelligence. I’ll start by stating some of the things I don’t do very well at:
The main idea here is that I noticed I would react in a certain way whenever I’d notice Justin talking to someone in both of our networks; often times, this would be someone that I introduced to. Instead of being proactive about talking to them, this would be my reminder to talk to them. This is evidence that I am not being proactive enough about my relationships and I am not care enough to be proactive.
At the same time, I noticed that this strategy is what enables him to get conversations with extremely high EV people. For example, through Alexey Guzey, he was able to be invited to OpenAI events where he was able to have a chat with Sam Altman about some of the largest problems that he was thinking about. Similarly, he was invited to join Craig Falls (head of QR @ Jane Street) to talk about AI Alignment. This is particularly interesting because quant is not known to be a field where the state of AI can be considered at the same level/more advanced than it is in tech. He is following up on this relationship by working with him loosely at first and perhaps more in an unknown future capacity at a cadence of at least 1x/month. Craig wants to better understand the state of SoTA in alignment + generative models, so he wants to hire Justin to explain eliciting latent knowledge and work on some toy projects with him.
One of the main themes of these conversations is AI alignment. However, within my relationships I have noticed that one of the main things I struggle with is defining a common theme that describes my personal brand. Some people know me as someone who does quant. Other people knows me as someone who wants to do Space stuff. Yet other people know me as an EE/Robotics/AI nerd. This inconsistent messaging is perhaps detrimental to my personal brand, and I need to figure out a way to project a consistent image of what I am interested in and how I want to narrow down and go deeper within my fields of interest going forward, instead of just blindly following what is popular/makes the most money at the time.