Ask someone how big their network is and they will picture the people they talk to every week. A few dozen, maybe. The truth is closer to a few thousand — and the few dozen are not where the opportunities hide.
The strength of weak ties
Decades of research into how people find jobs, deals and opportunities keeps landing on the same counterintuitive result: the breakthroughs tend to come not from close friends, but from people on the edges of your network. Your closest contacts know what you know. The people one ring out know things — and people — you do not.
Opportunity rarely comes from the people you talk to every day. It comes from the ones you have half-forgotten.
That is the cruel math of networking. The most valuable part of your network is also the part you are least likely to maintain, because there are too many of them and too little time.
You do not have a reach problem
You do not need to meet more people. You need to stop quietly losing the ones you have already met — the colleague from two jobs ago, the founder you had one great dinner with, the investor who said “keep me posted” and meant it.
Maintaining that long tail by hand is impossible; there are simply too many people. Which is exactly the kind of problem software should solve: keep the whole network warm in the background, and surface the handful worth your attention today.