There’s a version of networking that looks productive from the outside.
You go to the events. You collect the cards. You follow up once, maybe twice. You add people to LinkedIn and watch the number climb — 200, then 400, then past a thousand — and somewhere along the way you start confusing accumulation with capital.
They’re not the same thing.
I had a coffee last year with a founder — let’s call him Marcus — who had built what most people would describe as an impressive network. He’d been at it for a decade. Conferences, dinners, warm intros. His Rolodex was genuinely enviable.
But when his company hit a rough quarter and he needed to make a fast, high-trust ask of someone in a specific market, he realized he couldn’t. Not because the right person wasn’t in his contacts. Because they didn’t really know him. They knew his LinkedIn headline. There’s a difference.
He said something I’ve been thinking about since: “I spent ten years building a wide network and zero years building a deep one.”
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