How to Win Influence and Friend People

Apr 15, 2020

In which we riff on Dale Carnegie’s title and offer tools for developing your social network and using your connections effectively, with special emphasis on ideas for new entrepreneurs.

We’re all flooded with requests for help, advice, introductions, and investment.

Our email, LinkedIn feeds, and social media teem with people reaching out, connecting, networking, pitching, all requesting a bit of help. We all, in our turn, need help from others.

A surprising and gratifying fact about Silicon Valley culture is that we actually want to be helpful. It is a cornerstone that makes Silicon Valley a fount of innovation and opportunity. Unlike in other ecosystems, say Hollywood, where everyone wants 10% of you to arrange a meeting, the most frequent transaction in the Valley is contributing to others’ advancement without a quid pro quo.

Helping talented individuals, early on, before they become rich and famous, is the norm. We all remember being helped on our own paths to success. (Thank you Adele Goldberg, Esther Dyson…) We are predisposed to paying it forwards. Everyone benefits.

But, we’re drowning — we have to be picky.

I’m going to offer you some practices and considerations to help you engage and create lasting connections with people who will influence your career path, and build a resilient and supportive long-term network.

The practices and suggestions I offer here enrich our entire ecosystem of collaboration. They promote dissemination of opportunity, fairness, and encourage and reward altruism, effort and mindfulness. While I show you how you gain personally from applying these guidelines, they‘re not merely transactional. They’re also the right thing to do to foster opportunity and innovation.

General Advice

Visualize your ideal outcome, job, or situation, and identify intermediate steps between now and that end state. This will help you to not waste time on directions that do not lead to that goal, and to lay down the right stepping stones to where you want to go.

Be focused; look for value where it might really lie, not where it’s easy to look.
Early 1900s Mutt and Jeff cartoon illustrating a parable originally attributed to Seljuk Sufi mystic Nasrudin Hodja.

Get to know as many quality, connected, and talented individuals as you can before you need anything from them. Always bring an interesting or valuable fact, article or observation to inspire interest in you.
Minimize the burden on anyone you’re petitioning. Address their needs and make your appeal personal. The more personal your request, and the more you are doing something for someone, the more they’ll feel you’re in their camp and will want to take time from their own work to help you.
No one responds to just being a name on a list. Make interactions authentic. Don’t include sloppy boilerplate or misspell a name (so easy to do — I misspelled the name of one of my reviewers here!). If you’re sending canned communications, include a sincere apology for having to do so because you’re overloaded. Or, better yet, personalize each message even if just a bit.
If someone ends up helping you, let them know what comes of their effort. Keep them informed on progress they’ve helped you achieve. Offer to help them. Acknowledge them publicly. Include them in opportunities which open up as a result.

Remember, you may need them again. Ghosting after someone has helped you, only to reappear the next time you need them, guarantees they will not come through for you a second time and may even thwart you in the future.
When someone decides to help you, and you acknowledge them and make them feel appreciated, they’ll be more willing to invest in your success and double down and help again! We are biased towards believing we made a right call and were instrumental in creating a success, and we will work to maintain that belief and make it come true.
Put in 120% goodwill and effort. You will surely fall short in an interaction sometime, but having built up credit with your prior track record, you’ll be treated generously.
Talk less than 40% of the time. Be an active listener. Most importantly, you already know what you think; while you’re talking you’re not learning anything. Secondly, letting people be heard is a prerequisite to have them engage and listen.

Networking and Introductions

Don’t take up much time; people are busy. Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures and Both Sides of the Table, says it well in Never Ask a Busy Person to Lunch.
Be succinct. Don’t barrage someone with all the information you want them to ever have all in one go. The goal of your first contact is to get a second, more in-depth, interaction, not to close the deal.
Take time to polish your communication to the essential and nothing more. Don’t expect others to do the mental work of figuring out what you’re really trying to say.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
— Mark Twain

Don’t ask others to do your homework: If you are asking for help or introductions, include a short paragraph with your ask which includes all the language they are going to have to use themselves, in a voice that is appropriate to them. Make it short and usable as is. Very few people will be willing to take the time to understand your needs and then go to the trouble of synthesizing an argument for you. It is your job to provide that.
Research the person you’re reaching out to. Offer to help them with something they care about. Make your appeal personal. The more specific and personal you can be, the less likely they are to ignore you.
Get warm and enthusiastic introductions to the person you’re trying to reach from people who are closer to them, like “this was one of the most talented AI students I ever taught.” Someone staking their reputation on you raises the chance that you’ll be taken seriously by their contacts.
Explain your existing connections to the person you’re reaching out to, especially if those overlaps are not superficial.
Use LinkedIn or other more specialized sites to connect. Research the person you’re trying to connect to and be clear why you’re reaching out. Always include a personal note in requests to connect. (One of my own rules for filtering LinkedIn requests is “if they can’t be bothered to include a note as to why we ought to connect, I can’t be bothered to study their profile to try to figure it out.”)
Share your network. You probably have access to people and resources the person you’re reaching out to doesn’t. Whether it is other investors, connected individuals from a different field, hard-to-find, quality potential hires, or access to audiences or journalistic venues. If you offer to share some of those selflessly, others will share with you.
When someone makes an introduction they are staking their reputation on you. If I make an introduction for someone who turns out to be rude, entitled, or ignore the contact I introduced them to, my hard-won contact will likely ignore my requests in the future. Consider the high cost of that. The connections you’re asking for are the result of years of effort, and you’re asking someone to risk that to help you. You need to meet a high standard.

Always be polite and act with good intentions.
The flip side of the prior point is that when someone petitions you and you’re not interested, decline politely. If you are dismissive towards someone who introduces you to an opportunity, they’ll skip making the next one. And that one might just turn out to be one you wanted: like the next unicorn, an early Canva or Slack.
If someone you’re reaching out to asks you for something in turn, be extra responsive! This is your golden opportunity to inspire gratitude, and makes them much more open to you after.
If your request goes unanswered, which is very common, don’t assume the recipient is being rude or that you’re beneath their notice. They’re likely not being dismissive, but just don’t have the time, or your request may have gotten buried in their inbox or aged out, meaning they think it pointless to answer late.

Be patient, wait a bit, then follow up politely. See if you can offer anything up, even if unrelated to professional life, like, “I see you are a skier. Have you skied in Argentina, where I’m from? I know incredible ski areas there, so if you ever decide you’d like to go, I’d be happy to tell you about the best places.” Continue to write them as if they’d been writing back all along, without implying you’re expecting an answer. That will encourage them to not feel guilty and shut you out, but to make an elegant recovery by answering eventually.
If you’re looking for opportunities in Silicon Valley from outside it, focus on contacts who have come from where you are, from your school, or from companies you’ve worked for. They are your easiest entry points to communicate with, and best situated to help you, as they have firsthand knowledge about your situation and have overcome the same barriers you face.
Don’t “burn your bridges.” People remember when you fail them and will block you in the future. They may not do it maliciously; they need only be unenthusiastic about you. Regardless how unimportant to you someone seems at the moment, people you’ve dismissed have a knack of turning up in as references or gatekeepers when you want access. If they foil you you won’t even know what happened! It will appear like something you were on track for — a sale or a financing round — mysteriously withers and disappears.

It’s easy to assume one is dealing with individuals, but remember you’re interacting with a node intricately connected to the very network on which you depend.

Reputation Building

At best, your reputation precedes you. You reach out to someone and they know your name and your fame. But that’s a high standard. Even before you achieve fame, you can build a reputation which, if not widely known, is at least verifiable. Seed now what someone will find about you when you reached out to them later. Do it today, without being an “influencer,” and it may help you someday become one overnight!

Things that help build reputation:

Working, even on small projects, for notable people or companies.
Significant work on open-source projects of your own or others.
Published papers.
Articles published on LinkedIn, Medium, or elsewhere. Talks at conferences published online.
Enthusiastic recommendations on Linkedin.
Quality answers on platforms like Stack Exchange or Quora.
A good personal website.
A wikipedia page about yourself (though someone else has to write it initially).
Substantial and positive engagement on social media and online platforms.

Comment/Upvote/Like/Repost/Retweet/Discuss. Engage in constructive dialog online with content from influential and connected people. If you’re a significant follower and commenter on someone’s social or professional channels, they will come to recognize your name, and they’ll already be positively inclined towards you when you reach out for something concrete. Praise specifics of what they’ve done in ways that let them know you’ve spent time with their thoughts or works.

Accelerator/Incubators

If you’re a new entrepreneur, or breaking into the Silicon Valley from elsewhere, there are many incubator/accelerators which can help you start and get connected to amazing mentors, advisors, investors, and collaborators, not to mention teach you best practices and rules-of-the-road.

Among the best are Berkeley SkyDeck, Y Combinator, Alchemist, Techstars, 500 Startups. There are many. Not all are equally good. Do your research.
If you have co-founders, and an idea for a company or, better yet a start on building one, accelerators can be great for honing your business ideas, building skills, and helping you get funding.

Finding Jobs

If your goal is to find employment or contracting, I’ve broken out some few specific actions you can take at the addendum here.

Finally, Polish up your Past

This should be obvious: your best connections ought to be the people you’ve worked with in the past!

Bosses, co-workers, and those you’ve led will be asked about you. They’ve seen you work. Cultivate them, check-in occasionally, inquire after them, promote and help them where you can.

It’s tempting to walk away from a job at the end of your tenure and discard the connections you’ve built. Don’t, and, if you already have, reach out and connect, even after years.
Manage up and down. Tend to relationships not only with your bosses, but also with your subordinates. You never know what they’ll accomplish, when you may need them, or when they’ll be asked about you.
We all leave a job eventually. More often than we care to admit, the reasons for parting are felt by everyone involved — the best of the collaboration was over. The period preceding your leaving may not have been the happiest of times. It’s a very common scenario.
Psychology tells us people mostly remember beginnings and, especially, endings. They’re hazier about the in-betweens! This is called the Peak End Rule. So, make your partings positive and memorable. Don’t use departures to finally express built-up frustrations.

If your parting wasn’t the best memory at the time, patch up the past and create a new ending by reaching out with positive messages: nostalgia, goodwill, and camaraderie.

In Short

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.”
— John Donne (1624)
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
— Al Gore, attributed to an old African proverb
“I believe that you can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
— Zig Ziglar

Art of The Start

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