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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I liked the article but it doesn't explain how to start a network... much of its advice is about how to manage an existing one.

Examples: it mentions that you should sometimes offer stuff to people you already know, instead of only interacting to ask. But what to do when your network is nonexistent and you have nothing to offer?

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Are you saying you have no skills or interests or abilities that you could share? And that you don't know any people at any level. Work colleagues, neighbours, people you meet/met in school/college/university. As for "things tovgive". - almost everyone has time, and can talk/be a pair of arms or legs, or can read something or drop something off.

I like to think of networking as being loosely analogous to an optimization process like gradient descent [1]. You start with an initial "guess" of what your optimal network could potentially be. In practice, this will be the people you already know through school, work or through friendships. From there, you follow an iterative process that improves that guess through successive iterations, consistently applying strategies like those described in the article.

It's hard to say when this process would "converge", but looking for an answer to that may be straining the analogy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent

Start with your friends in the business and ex colleagues.

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