Guide: How to get exposure to “secrets” and proprietary information

Famous VCs aren’t smarter than you, they just have better information.

Think of it like machine learning. Models perform better when they have access to more data. Well, famous founders, VCs, etc, all have access to much more data than you do. So they can make generally much better predictions (on areas related to the data they’ve seen, i.e. future technology) and come up with better theories and advice (because they’ve seen many more data points).

When you’re a VC, people feed you secrets all day long. Entrepreneurs pitch their best discovered secrets that they’ve spent years discovering and validating. Your associates give their best secrets that they spend their days mining their networks for. Friends and acquaintances give their best secrets that they’ve discovered, to win favor points from you.

How you can get exposure to “secrets” and proprietary information

The short answer is: identify the area that you want proprietary information on, and then identify the highest point of “information flow” that exists.

For example — if you want to start an enterprise startup, it would be very useful to get proprietary information on what small problems large enterprises have that are growing rapidly and are likely to become big problems in a few years. Who has this information? Executives and lower level employees of enterprises. What are some ways you could access this proprietary information?

• A hard and extremely slow way would be to work your way up to becoming an exec at an enterprise company.
• A hard and slow way would be to try and convince a VC firm to hire you, so that you can sit in on the meetings they hold when they bring in enterprise company execs to their offices to meet with their startups (this happens at many venture firms).
• A medium difficulty way would be to figure out some way to be valuable or interesting to a certain set of enterprise company executives, so that you get face time with them and can gather data from them.
• A lower difficulty but more time consuming way would be to spend time with 10s or 100s or lower level enterprise company employees, knowing that they have access to much of the same information that execs have (it’s just less concentrated, and you’ll have to talk to more of them).
• Another medium difficulty way would be to identify the places where these people gather — for example, exclusive conferences for Fortune 500 CTOs, and then figure out how you can get into that conference, worst case, learning to charm your way into the conference.
• Another medium difficulty way would be to organize events for these people, perhaps gathering together VCs, Fortune 500 execs of a specific type, and CEOs of startups — where you’re not valuable to them, but your ability to create a meeting point for all of them to interact with one another is extremely valuable to them, and you get to benefit from that value you’re creating because you can then attend that gathering and be the one who gets the “credit” for all the beneficial people they meet and conversations they have at this gathering, which will allow you to get lots of face time with these people in the future.

There’s almost always a way to get access to the proprietary information you seek. It just requires having some kind of focus (which is important anyway, because it’s great to be able to build up a compounding advantage in a space/problem), and a willingness to invest time and thought into how you’ll get it.

Another important note is that it’s really important to be able to recognize the value of a secret! Many more people have access to secrets than people who have access to secrets and know the value of the knowledge they possess. Being able to assess the value of secrets generally requires depth in the problem area, so that you can assess things in context.

The best thing to do is to focus on:

• a) what is important now and will remain important in the future?
• b) what can I become world class at over time? (due to some combination of likely tenacity, determination, persistence, ability to learn quickly at this skill / in this domain, etc)
• and c) optionally, if you want to make wealth, what are other people not doing and not likely to start doing any time soon?

Then, start developing an expertise in that field/problem, and over time, you’ll naturally find yourself being able to be exposed to secrets in the field (and being able to recognize them when you do come across them).

If you’re ambitious, I have a daily newsletter for ambitious people that you may find valuable — Ambition News. See a sample issue and join here.

Side note: you might benefit from not jumping on the first idea you see. I’m a strong believer that a willingness to hold high standards (for the idea you choose to work on, for the partners you work with, everything) can make a massive difference in the ultimate value and impact of what you build. Hold out for a global maximum, rather than a local maximum — see more from Chris Dixon (GP at Andreessen Horowitz) here.

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