Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

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I was on Linkedin yesterday as I unexpectedly have to begin searching for a job. I also found out my Digitalocean credit was expiring because of some new policy where they are retiring them.

I ended up inmailing the CEO of digitalocean (brian uretsky) to ask if they woul reverse the expiration of my credits (they did, great company although I also went through the support channel) but when I pressed send on the inmail it said:

This user has an open profile, your 1 free inmail sent. i forgot the exact language, but this was close.

It just made me feel like they(linkedin) felt like it was doing me a favor because Brian Uretsky has an open contact policy for some reason. Despite what is probably an unmanigable inbox.

Si if we accept this isn't the norm(it isn't) some people may be keen on this implementation, myself included.

However, the problem is a value mismatch. I was working on this with a buddy and persuaded him to pivot, the Value Prop Mismatch, is hard to correct.

Sure, wealthier but idealistic people might ask you to donate to charity, or some other option. Maybe answer a few emails of people below you, but if I needed/was hoping to, contact a guy who is the ceo of a company to do something other than beg for his product for free, what would I offer him/her?

The people at the top (typically) have money, influence and connections. they don't need linkedIn and have enough friend-of-a-friends to read biz plans and advise & mentor them. they don't care about money (withon reason), so why are they using it?

the idea we had was foreign-local mismatch for high end professionals in places where both parties would need something: buyer, seller, partnership, mutually strong connections.

but it just isn't that sticky. on balance, i like the idea, and it works for linkedin as they have all the users, but if they don't...well it just becomes a consulting marketplace like whatever the new current odesk-esk company is.

Great anecdote. Brian is a great guy though. I am not sure I completely understood your concern but I think it comes down to how do you create value for influential people. I think this is exactly where having customizable contact questionnaire would help. Someone on the influential person team or ideally the person himself will do a onetime thing that people have to fill in to contact him.

That enables two things - it gives the system well structured data. And then we can give the user a UI which enables them to filter out interested reach outs than not so interesting reach out.

So in your case Brian can have a form titled digitalocean customer. You can use that to connect/contact him. He can either chose to accept it, ignore it, or if we can make it downloadable/forwardable he can send it to head of customer support etc.

One challenge that is posses is to have limited number of such contact forms do the trick and its relevance to the person who is connecting.

> Great anecdote. Brian is a great guy though.

That was my concern. Brian (didn't here back, but everything got taken care of) seems like a great guy. I was raising the concern that; and this is rather unfortunate, he is atypical.

If I am simply in it for the money/selling favors. Well then the business ends up being a consultancy. The other end, would be the example above. However, the ratio of really successful and thoughtful people willing to read unsolicited email and provide feedback likely isn't very large.

The gap between the people at the bottom- their perceived value, is much lower than the people at the top.

Your model works really well for the middle third of the social network. People in the middle may or may not be willing to help ostensibly equal people do something (advice, get a deal done, talk politics, etc.)

The problem I found was the people in the bottom (me in this example) and Brian[1]. But not actually Brian, but a character representing how the media portray Travis Kalanick.

Travis has a lot of money, success, insight and power. He has a super small amount of time. I on the other hand have more time now as my recent contract negotiations didn't go super well.

The problem, we found doing the model is what the people at the bottom could provide of value to a guy like travis that would be equal in value to his perception of time.

So I like the model, there has to be something interesting to bridge the gap though, a twist that would tie it together. I don't love just limiting people to castes or something, or only letting high value or mid-value people on.

My buddies Idea was basically a reverse syndicate. Actually turned out to be interesting, but I don't thin workable, where I (a person at the bottom) am an entrepreneur.

1. Entrepreneur [me]

2. You [you]. You and I know each other, and you know Brian. I am raising a seed round and I want Brian to fund me, but I don't know him at all. Well, you know me so we are a degree of separation.

3. However, that isn't really enough for you to leverage your friendship with him for an acquaintance. His idea was something like:

I would give you micro equity to introduce me if you got a deal done. maybe some bips if you can get him my deck, and the guy get's me to invest

4. So I am bridging the gap with a maven in the middle. However, it get's crazy as some people are social connectors and some aren't and then you just end up trying to remap society into a sql/graph database, or distributed ledger if your trendy.

I really like both the ideas (yours and his), but really cracking that code is the win, and while I trivialized it above, it is both high value and a super hard problem which is not solved at all. Especially, if I need to/want to connect with some subset of the billions of people like me, but who don't speak my language.

The idea is pretty decent. Execution is hard as it always is of course, but really connecting the dots here on ux and psych will be interesting to tackle.

Jeez. I realized I have been invoking this guys name a ton, and I don't know him at all. I mean, I assume he is a great guy based on the fact that I was able to email him, and you said he was a cool guy, so I am making him out to be a social network hero, but this is an example. Brian, if you read this, hit me back man, I could use some more DO credit.

Thanks for such a detailed advice. Couple of things regarding the example of a regular person trying to connect with say Travis, Mark cuban or trump. - First of all I think those might be desired but are mostly less frequent cases so designing a platform around that is not ideal IMO - I like your friends take on it. But like you said there is a problem with it. I think this idea can really solve the problem of introduction through mutual connections though. Because lets say you asked a friend for an introduction to somebody influential. Because the platform knows how your friend initially connected with that influential person( By contact forms or well defined edges), the platform can hint you the quality of your friends connection with that person.

It is a tough but interesting problem.

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