If you have kids, there’s a good chance you saw the recent screen adaptation of “The Wild Robot.” While the story addresses much deeper themes, the opening few minutes made me reflect on networking and product-market fit.
After washing ashore on an island, the eponymous robot starts covering wild animals with stickers that say “Future Customer,” eliciting responses of consternation and violence. “Been there,” I thought.
The highs and lows of building a network
When you are an entrepreneur in sales mode, all your relationships can take on this commodified quality.
I can’t remember the first time I composed a weird e-mail to all my friends that partially relied on copy-paste, but I’ve probably done it a dozen times since.
“Hey, I’m doing this thing. I’ve published this book. I’m offering this workshop. I’ve got a GoFundMe. I’m here, look at me. Give me some money–or at least tell me you would if you could. Click on my button, please.”
Before 2010, this kind of activity would have been inconceivable to me. My plan was to become a professor and alternately give my soul to my students and hide in the library. When that didn’t work out, my plan was to write novels in my in-laws’ basement.
Then at some point a freelance project turned into a real-life entrepreneurial gig with my friend Jeff Leitner, who had given me my first job after undergrad. The project was called Insight Labs; a sample of its rich history is here.
Our organization convened groups of people from a wide range of backgrounds to lend their brains to organizations facing existential challenges. We worked with NASA and TED and Starbucks and other people you’ve heard of. We took on issues as varied as teaching empathy, redeeming corporate law and stopping genocide. We traveled the world and had a grand time.
We are in a time when all of us need to re-learn slower and more traditional ways of relating to each other; we digital entrepreneurs even moreso.Andrew Benedict-Nelson
Those years taught me to be a strategist. But what matters for this story is that Insight Labs was an accidental networking marvel. Most Lab participants didn’t know each other going in, yet many came out eager to work with each other again. And almost all of them ended up with warm relations with the principals–Jeff, Howell Malham and me. In my twenties, I suddenly had that thing so many of my peers were wondering how to get: a network. And it wasn’t based on my alma mater or a secret fraternity, but on actual work I had done alongside these folks.
In those years, my relationship with that network formed a significant part of my identity. And like many of us did online in the 2010s, I related on blast–where I was, what I was thinking, who I was meeting with–it was all part of the mix I presented to the world. I remember one Lab alum tweeting something like, “In SF, who’s around?” and I was amazed–not just by how many people replied, but by how many of them I knew. It felt like a lifestyle that could continue forever.
But nothing does. Interpersonal conflicts caused the core Insight Labs team to resign. A new organization arose and collapsed, then typical startup breakup issues followed. For the first time, I registered my own LLC and sat at my desk wondering how to make a living by myself.
Most of the network centered on the Labs had no idea any of this was going on, but it necessarily changed the way I related to the hundreds of people I met in those years. I did lots of posting and e-mailing that was still in the style of “Insight Labs guy coming to you with new insights.” But it made less and less sense for my business or myself. I was conducting a marketing strategy in pursuit of a value proposition; a robot covering animals with stickers.
From transactions to true connections
I can’t even remember which of the many scandals over privacy or politics pushed me over the edge, but I quit Facebook and Twitter. Somehow I’m not allowed to delete my old Insta; I suppose Meta is keeping it up as a monument to who I was a decade ago. That person would be very surprised to find that these days I’m only on LinkedIn and Mastodon.
But it wasn’t just me. In those days, many of us lived that way–with our networks of friendships and colleagues and clients and mutuals all intertwined. We believed it was natural and noble. We may have snickered when Justin Timberlake said in “The Social Network” that one day we would all live on the Internet, but we only laughed because we thought we were better at it than everybody else. We were Burners and Tedsters and scenesters of so many kinds.
The impact on our mental health is so well-documented I don’t need to elaborate. What I want to address here is its relationship to how we entrepreneurs make a living.
Like a lot of people, I feared that stepping away from a certain style of relating to my network would mean the end of my income. Yet it turned out that mindset was a trap. The relational style of “be clever on the internet” and the value proposition of “innovate with anyone, anywhere” feed each other forever. I was so committed to being all things to all people that I never stopped to consider who I really am.
Finding my purpose in helping others
As usual, the universe did it for me. After I struck out on my own, I kept getting gigs with nurses and social workers. At first, I viewed this as some sort of failure to realize my potential. I worried I was becoming more intellectually and socially narrow. But narrow can also be deep.
Another new way of relating to others began with having students again. I had enjoyed teaching in my former academic life and usually took the lead when Insight Labs ran a training or seminar. After going solo I took on an adjunct gig with a program my colleagues and I had designed for the University of Southern California’s social work school.
In this program, I wasn’t just thinking out loud with folks; I was exploring how to create an environment where students’ ideas could grow into robust capstone projects. I also took on coaching clients–these relationships usually started with work on a single project, but before long we often found ourselves asking, “How can we design your career in a way where this kind of work keeps happening?”
For years, this all seemed like an accident. It took bigger changes in my life for me to accept it as a kind of purpose.
Starting in 2020, one of the senior men in my family died each year: father-in-law, stepfather, uncle, Dad. I also became a father, with all the joy and stress that goes with it. With the pandemic and political turmoil and climate change in the background, I found a deeper desire to find what aspects of work truly sustain me, not just what problems my skills can solve.
The answer turned out to be people, and a specific type of people. On my website I call them helping professionals, or more often just “helpers.” “Healers” will also do. The obvious candidates are professionals like nurses, social workers, physicians, and teachers. But they can also be found in foundations, museums, universities, and government.
The key trait is usually organizing one’s life around a vocation to help others, though there are as many ways of thinking about vocations as people who possess them. I help them follow the path of their vocations beyond the usual professional boundaries into the territories of innovation, strategy, social change, and design. I believe my fate is intertwined with theirs–as a human, not just as an entrepreneur.
Lessons for connecting with your people
Sure, I’ll share stories from my Insight Labs days with my students and clients. But I’ll also share the stories of my parents, both of whom were gifted clinicians who died premature deaths of despair.
We talk about our ongoing work projects, as well as the projects of parenting and caregiving. We survey the heights of innovation and the depths of mental illness. Diving into all of these topics motivates us to take on problems that interface with our institutions of healing, from burnout and workforce issues to the social determinants of health.
While strategy skills are a necessary component of this work, they aren’t the most important. The essence lies in the unwavering conviction that helping others is one of the most noble pursuits in life, paired with the determination to turn that belief into action.
Some days this logically translates into a business model; other days it feels more like a personal quest. But I stay grounded by remembering that regardless of whether I bill them or not, my people are out there.
One relationship at a time
Though I can’t claim to be a networking guru, there are a few principles from my new outlook that seem worth sharing here:
- Networking should be relational, not transactional
- Design for just one person at a time
- Care for people as the precious resource they are
Networking should be relational, not transactional
I’m far from the first to say this; I just heard it again recently from real estate expert Alex Ruggieri at a meeting of The Connective, a networking group that shares this ethos. But it’s hard to do when you’ve spent years convincing yourself that the perfectly timed post from your desk will send all the clients your way.
We are in a time when all of us need to re-learn slower and more traditional ways of relating to each other; we digital entrepreneurs even moreso. All of us need to try leaving the latest clever post in draft and instead check in our colleagues’ kids or parents or cats. As another friend recently told me, “They have to know how much you care before they care how much you know.”
Design for just one person at a time
Choose a persona or ideal customer profile (ICP), if you’d like. But I think the best approach is to start with one specific (actual) person and then telescope out to a group. I have taught this design principle dozens of times, but it’s always hard to apply it to yourself. I needed to give myself permission to design for just this social worker or just that nurse, not everyone who might be my client someday. I’m currently designing an offering completely focused on a subset of chief nursing officers, which a colleague recently called “the loneliest job in the hospital C-suite.” My soul took that as a sign I should help.
This principle is also an antidote to our social media-induced tendency to see our network as an audience. Of course, we all need to think about audience when we communicate. But as messaging maven Margo Aaron has said, before you cultivate an audience, you need to know what you are cultivating them for. Those answers come from a closer coterie of collaborators who really understand who you are and what you have to offer.
Care for people as the precious resource they are
I recall a principle I learned from entrepreneur Tom Higley, who built a later career helping startup founders take on social challenges. The most precious element in a startup, he said, isn’t the funding or the technology, but the people brave enough to spend their time weaving it all together into something new. I respect that he found his people and lived in a way to create value for them; I feel the same about people willing to build their lives around care, whether they do it as kindergarten teachers or executive directors. I need them and they need me.
That’s how it worked out for The Wild Robot too. I won’t spoil the story, but one deep, caring relationship gave our hero the opportunity to transform herself and the world around her. I’m also out to do it her way, one relationship at a time.