Democratising relationship building

How we’ll use technology to elevate humanity

Community has been an integral part of human life since the beginning of time, albeit the way we build and contribute to community has changed dramatically since Homo sapiens first walked the earth. Our desire to be connected, respected, heard, loved, considered — a sense of belonging — is our most human motivation beyond survival.

Never has this notion been more prevalent than in the world of work and careers. We surveyed 150 young professionals between the ages of 18–35 on the importance of relationships to their career, and despite over 70% believing they were good at building relationships, 98% of all respondents wanted to be better.

The reason, is reputation. Reputation is something we are told we can build, but we actually have no direct control over it. Our reputation is owned by the people around us, and thus our access to growth and opportunity lies with them. Building great relationships is the key to building a great life and career.

What makes someone great at building relationships?

We believe there are 3 distinct components to relationship building, each of which is pretty redundant without the other. Mastering the interplay between them is not only a true skill, but it’s unique to each individual.

• Managing and organising — your ability to build a sense of perspective on your network, to make it simple to explore, search and sort as you see fit.
• Understanding and supporting — your ability to learn as much as you can about the people in your network, and thus knowing the ways in which you can be helpful that will create the most value for them.
• Soliciting and leveraging — your ability to ask the most relevant people for the help you need, and to do so in a way that is considerate of their time and energy.

So what’s the problem?

Well if you haven’t guessed, not only is mastering those 3 components really hard work, it is very rare (read impossible) to find a tool that respects and understands the need for them to work harmoniously together. Some of our observations of people and tools:

• Helping people is time consuming. Whether being helpful is a rarity or more part of your every day workflow, the friction to doing so with care and thought is incredibly high.
• Not everyone asks the right questions. So many people rarely get the full picture of someone they meet (what they’re working on, what inspires them, what they’d like to learn more about), and therefore don’t really know how to help.
• Database brain is a rarity. Masterful community builders have a knack for internalising information about the people they meet and knowing how to surface and use that information when required.
• Biases limit opportunity for others. Even if you do have the time, capacity and database brain to help people, you biases are geared towards certain people — whether that’s who you want to help, or who you think can be helpful — which means the full potential of the network is not being reached.

What’s our plan to build something better?

We are led by people and product, not technology. You’ll never see us harp on about blockchain this and artificial intelligent that. Both will play a huge role in our future as a company, but we don’t believe leading with technology will make us any better at solving the problems we’ve outlined.

We will be unabashed in our pursuit of truly human centric utility delivering acute, meaningful value, and effectively balances the interplay between the 3 components of relationships explained above. A snapshot of how this will manifest in our products:

• Search as the primary interface. Finding the right people, to help others or help ourselves, almost always starts with one or many data points, likely in the form of a question. If it’s not name or company, it’s skills, interests, hobbies, where we met, where they live, who we met them with, and everything in between. We want to create the world’s most intuitive and valuable network search tool.
• Encourage positive habits with frameworks. Not everyone is compassionate and thoughtful, and this certainly manifests frequently in our working life. But rather than thinking we can fundamentally change who a person is, we can design tools that provide the structure of a positive habit. An example of this might be making double opt-in as standard for making introductions via Ping (a practice openly recognised for being respectful of an individuals time and energy).
• Provide perspective and feedback to guide improvement. The thing we care about the most, is helping people measurably get better at building relationships. The only way people can grow is if they understand what people think of the way they operate. We believe there are some simple mechanics that leverage data, to not only provide those insights, but to also deliver clear actions on how to improve too.
• Create more opportunities to learn about others. One of the most powerful experiences a human being can have, is being taught something new. When our view of the world expands a little more, our desire to grow is being satisfied. We want to give people those little moments every day, as they learn new things about the people around them, without consciously seeking that knowledge.
• Embracing flexibility for individuality. We’re finding that no two workflows are the same. That is, how people like to track and build their network is incredibly unique to them. Building open tools that facilitate a range of bespoke experiences will be key. It’s a huge motivation behind our push to launch integrations (via the likes of IFTTT/Zapier) later this year.

With a major new update and the relaunch of our new brand on the horizon, the above will all start come into focus, and manifest in a product experience. We’ve got a long road to product/market fit, as well as to delivering the value we know our product can, but our vision to revolutionise the distribution of social capital and economic opportunity is more than enough to keep us going