🤝 The Super Connector System: David Homan on Building Relationships at the Speed of Trust
The founder journey is fundamentally isolated. You’re up on that mountain, head down, fighting to bring a product into existence, and the last thing you want to do is navigate a crowded, awkward networking mixer.
I get it. I’ve always advocated for the power of building a strong investor network early, yet I’ve personally struggled with the consistent, ongoing engagement that requires. My default is the mountaintop, not the cocktail party.
That’s why this conversation with David Homan, super connector, community builder, and author of Orchestrating Connection, was a necessary kick in the pants. He confirmed what many of us systematically-minded founders suspect: The conventional wisdom about networking is flat out wrong.
David doesn't just build networks; he builds communities and systems where trust is the fastest currency. This interview isn't about glad-handing or exchanging a hundred useless business cards. It's about a fundamental mindset shift that can turn your natural introverted strengths into your greatest networking asset.
đź‘‚ The Connector Fallacy: Why Deep Listening Beats Loud Talking
If you think you're "terrible" at networking because you're an introvert—someone who prefers a book by the fire to working a room—you need to recalibrate your self-assessment.
David calls the idea that the life-of-the-party extrovert is the best connector the "connector fallacy". The best connector is not the person giving the toasts; it’s the person who builds trust because they hear you.
The Introvert's Advantage
The skills required for high-value connection are perfectly aligned with the introverted temperament:
Deep Listening: This is an introvert's skill set. The ability to truly absorb what someone says, look for patterns in their life, and understand their core problem is what allows you to weave in the one introduction that changes their life, not the thousand useless ones.
Quality over Quantity: David's system proves this is the trade-off that matters. If you make 10 substantial introductions a year that result in a significant outcome, you are doing better than most "spray and pray" extroverts.
Intimacy: Trust is never built in a large group; it's built person-by-person, layering on intimate, one-to-one connections.
If you, as a founder, can find two or three individuals at an event and dig in for a meaningful conversation, that will yield far more value than giving out a hundred business cards.
This insight is liberating for the builder. You don't need to change who you are; you just need to apply your innate analytical and listening skills to the relationship-building process.
🛠️ Network vs. Community: The Foundational Mindset Shift
One of the most profound points David drove home is the difference between building a network and building a community.
A network is transactional. It’s a list of contacts you build for a personal outcome, such as, "Who can I talk to to get to this investor right now?".
A community is a mindset. It’s a group where you are both supportive and supported.
When you are mission-driven to go through somebody to get an immediate result, you are just networking. When you focus on a community mindset, you create local champions.
If you're a founder outside of the major hubs like New York or San Francisco, this is especially critical. The big hubs are cut-throat and highly transactional; people have their defenses up because they're constantly being banged on by everyone seeking access.
The local community is softer. The CEOs and local wealth are less guarded. When you build relationships locally, based on impact and passion, you may find that your community—say, your neighbor's connection—champions you to a local business leader who actually hears you out.
The goal is to stop trying to knock down doors and instead build a community. The trust built there increases your chance of success and gives you something much more substantial, combating the brutal isolation of the founder journey.
🔑 The Warm Intro: Reputation Capital and Early Engagement
We've all been hit with the cold ask: "Hey Lance, can you intro me to X investor?" If I don't have a relationship with you, I'm not going to make that intro. Why? Because I'm spending my most valuable, non-renewable resource: reputation capital.
Don't Damage Your Intro Partner
When you make a flimsy, lukewarm intro, you risk damaging the person who made it. The message to the investor is, "Here’s this person who couldn’t even work out how to get your email address". Worse, if the person you introduce is a "schmuck," you can ruin a relationship that took years to build "in a heartbeat".
Every opportunity is one to build that capital or to lose it.
The Non-Ask Strategy
Founders often wait until they need money to network, which is the biggest mistake. If you wait until you're already in Series A mode, you look desperate and transactional.
The strategy, then, is to spend time building relationships in advance.
David's experience with his own startup, SOAR Connect, shows how this works:
Engage Early and Listen: Spend your time figuring out the market value, consumer value, and what factors you would need to solve the problem. This means talking to people not with a deck, but with an open question: "What are you using? What did you try? What did you need?".
Sell the Vision, Not the Check: David pitched his startup to a family office by simply explaining what he was doing, stating clearly, "I'm not raising yet". The result? He had investors raising their hands asking, "When will you be?" and one even said, "I want to be your first check".
The Psychology of Desire: By selling the vision and declining the money (for now), you engage the investor's psychology. The minute they think they can have something but can’t have it yet, their desire and interest skyrocket. You make your ask without making your ask.
Instead of trying to raise, you spend 20% of your time cultivating a group of "30 cheerleaders" who, when you are ready, will advocate for you and send you highly qualified intros before you even walk into the room.
🧠Honoring the Chain: The Systematic View of Trust
For systematic, product-minded founders, the idea of a relationship being a currency is appealing, but how do you measure it? How do you keep track?
David’s entire business, SOAR Connect, is built on systematizing the strength of authentic relationships. The core concept is Honoring the Chain of Connections.
When David raised his initial $600,000, he did a deep analysis:
He traced his 17 friends and friends investors back to the 17 people who made those direct introductions.
He traced those 17 back to the 11 people who introduced them.
Ultimately, he found that the entire chain of 60 people originated with just four deep, organic friends in his core network.
This chain provides data. It’s a roadmap of success and gratitude. By mapping it out and publicly thanking the people in the chain—even if they weren't the investor—he reinforces the culture of trust.
The Impact Ask: Being Specific
One of the biggest failures of asking for help is being too vague. David created the "Impact Ask" methodology because people are good at figuring out what others need, but they suck at asking for themselves.
Don't ask for "investors." Ask for an archetype.
Example of a Vague Ask: "I'm looking for a pre-seed investor for my B2B SaaS startup."
Example of David's Impact Ask (Archetype): "I want to find people who are exhausted by constantly catering to their LPs and portfolio companies. I want to talk to CEOs who see current tech taking data and selling it, and who want to build something that restores humanity to connection. If you know people who are experiencing this specific problem and are looking to invest in a solution, I'd love to talk."
By framing the ask around a problem they are experiencing—not a check you need—you make it easier for people to go, "I know exactly who you should talk to". You hack the pattern recognition process.
⚖️ The High Cost of Dishonor: A Security System for Your Network
The most difficult, but necessary, element of David's system is the removal of people who violate the code of conduct. He enforces a rule: If you don't honor the chain, you are kicked out.
Why is this necessary? Because trust is the foundation, and opportunism is the quickest way to destroy it.
David shared two powerful examples of dishonor:
Lack of Empathy: A wealthy contact at one of his events was sexually aggressive toward two women. When confronted, he was unapologetic and chauvinistic. David removed him because he chose opportunity above empathy and compassion. The lesson: If you are not honorable to someone within the network, you won't be honorable to someone outside it.
Poaching the Network: A member David had publicly thanked on LinkedIn for helping with his book attempted to "poach" the rest of his network, misleading people into thinking David had sanctioned the outreach. This person was purged, and David posted about the removal without naming names, which became his most viral article. The consequence for the offender was a massive loss of trust and reputation.
This is more than a simple community rule; it's a discernment filter. People are desperate for signals on who to trust. When someone shows you they put opportunity above humanity, you must believe them and filter them out immediately. As David notes, "We put down all those signs honestly, because we think we need something more than we do". Don't compromise your principles for a potential transaction.
🪴 The Garden of Connection: How to Maintain Warmth
For a systematic founder, the chaos of relationship maintenance is a major challenge. You meet a thousand people, and six months later, you can't remember who they were or what they needed.
David offers several systematic hacks for managing this:
The Dunbar Limit: The science suggests you can manage maybe 150 people at a high level of connection. For a super connector, maybe a couple hundred, but that's it. Therefore, you have to be highly selective about where you invest your time.
The Consent-Driven Update: If you plan to send monthly update emails to keep people warm, always ask for permission first. David states, "Once somebody agrees to something, they will generally pay a thousand times more attention".
Targeted Subsets: Don't blast the same general update to everyone. Create subsets—investors interested in AI, partners interested in marketing, etc.—and give them a more specific update tailored to what they care about. This is more work, but it is vastly more effective.
The Feedback Loop: If you make an introduction for someone, ask them to loop back and tell you what happened. This is an action that deepens your memory of the connection and strengthens the relationship.
The Humanity Check-In: The most powerful retention mechanism is non-transactional empathy. When David's father was ill, people who just checked in, offered thoughts, and acknowledged his vulnerability—without rescheduling or asking for anything—cemented their place as friends for life.
⛰️ Final Wisdom: The South Park Theory of Success
The founder journey is lonely. You’re trying to get from Step A (the idea) to Step Z (profit). But, as David reminded us, the path often looks like the famous South Park episode about the Underpants Gnomes:
Step 1: Steal Underpants.
Step 2: [????]
Step 3: Profit.
The middle part is the journey—the learning, the failing, the rebuilding. In America, we are exceptional because we embrace that failure, learning from it and rebuilding. But you cannot do it alone.
You have to love the journey itself, however hard, and build a community of people while it happens.
If you focus on the people around you, give them value, and avoid ignoring people you don't think are worth your time, you are building the safety net that catches you when you fall. That community is what makes the impossible path from Step A to Step Z possible.
David's closing quote from Edward Albee’s Zoo Story is the ultimate motto for the relationship-focused founder:
"Sometimes one has to go a long distance out of one's way to come back to a short distance correctly."
Action Item: Stop drafting that transactional email. Instead, find three people you met in the last year that you genuinely respect, and spend five minutes figuring out one thing you could do to help them today, with zero expectation of return. Start building that community, person by person.
Podcast:
David’s Bio:
David Homan is the founder and CEO of Orchestrated Connecting, a global community of connectors; Orchestrated Opportunities, an impact-focused advisory firm; and SOAR CONNECT, a start-up focused on the strength of authentic relationships. He hosts a podcast called Orchestrated Relationships focused on developing relationship value, is an active classical composer, and is a proud father of two. From middle-class beginnings as the son of a college professor father and nonprofit-focused mother, he has built a network reaching into the most private and incredible circles globally while maintaining a code of purposeful community building called Orchestrated Connecting.
Interview Transcript:
Lance: Few founders are lucky enough to start their journey with a large list of potential investors they're already close to and are ready to write checks. Building that network, creating those connections, is an an ongoing process. Today, I'm thrilled to be talking to David Homan. He is an expert in building communities and relationships in a structured and intelligent manner to get you access to the people you need in an authentic way by building real relationships. David is a connector, composer, and bestselling author who builds relationships at the speed of trust. I think you'll get a ton of value from this interview. David, welcome to Feel the Boot.
David: It's such a pleasure to be here, Lance. Thank you.
Lance: Let's start with a brief introduction of yourself. Tell us a little bit about where you're coming from.
David: I'm currently in my parents' house in Florida, where I grew up. My dad is a college professor, a famous Shakespearean; he's six foot one and the light of every party. My mother is four foot 11 and the one really in charge. I always had this weird world of my mom being the one that made everything happen, but everyone perceiving that my father was the one in charge. As I moved from small-town Florida to New York City, I carved out a very specific world, which is what brings me to you and everyone listening today.
I'm a connector—a super connector. Over the last decade, I built a powerful private community of people who everyone wants to talk to because they know the person no one else could meet. I built this around impact, around the idea of making the world a better place by connecting the people who are always in the room, who make the room happen. They are sometimes the reason people are there, but most of the time, they're the gatekeepers, the ones who have built incredible trust. That's my world: building relationships at the speed of trust.
Lance: Awesome. I'm so excited about this because I've seen the power of finding the right super connector at the right moment, and it can absolutely transform things for me. I feel like, personally, it's something I advocate for all the time and am terrible at. So, I'm excited to talk with you about how your system works, how you approach this, and what kinds of techniques and practices founders can put into place to help leverage this strength themselves.
David: Is it fair to ask what makes you think you're terrible?
Lance: I generally don't spend a lot of time actually engaging with people on an ongoing basis. I should be doing more outreach. I should probably be spending more time having meaningful conversations with people. As a really hardcore introvert, my happy place is being up on my mountaintop with a book by the fire.
David: Being a connector and being isolated on a mountaintop with a fire, which honestly sounds ideal to me right now—I envy you for that. There's a fallacy in connection: people think that the extrovert, the person in the center of the room with the drink in their hands saying toasts and taking the spotlight, is the best connector. My experience is that's flat out wrong. The best connector is the person who builds trust because they hear you. Deep listening is an introvert's skill more than an extrovert. They not only hear you, but they look at the system, the patterns of what's in your life, and then weave in that one introduction that changes your life.
Regarding scale—this person is a super connector, they're in every room, they're at every event, they make a thousand intros a year. The question always is, "Which ones matter?". I always like to correct people on this because in my book, Orchestrating Connection, co-authored with Noah Askin, we detail eight different types of connectors, and four of them are introverts in their tendencies, not extroverts. What you feel is not akin to your natural tendency. If you look back and figure out that from the people you've helped over the years—not only with your business and your podcast—if you've helped ten people a year who had a substantial outcome from your intro, you do better than most extroverts who "spray and pray" and hope they hit it.
Lance: Okay, so it's a quality versus quantity trade-off.
David: Think about when you meet people in a group; do you actually meet people in a group, or do you have to spin off to really have a one-to-one? How could you be an extrovert dominating a group and have any substance in that situation? The goal is always to have an intimate connection with somebody, to bring a more diverse group together, and then move back to that intimate level of connection. Trust is never built in a community; trust in a community is built person by person layering on.
Lance: I like that. That's certainly how I've experienced networking events where you have 50 people in a room. The only time that's ever worked for me is when I've had maybe two or three 15-to-30-minute conversations with individuals in the room where we really dig down, as opposed to giving out a hundred business cards to people just asking, "Hey, how did you find yourself here?" None of that ever came to anything.
David: I'm a little controversial this way: I would say 99% of people do events wrong. Remember when we were both in middle school and you walked into the dance and everyone was awkward and no one was in the middle? That's how most events are done. I think it's ridiculous to step into a room where you've invited the people and not curate the people to start the event. Every event I've done in my community—about 182 events now across the world, very concentrated, 30 to 40 people—requires that within the first 10 minutes of showing up, which has to be on time, I put you into a curated group with the people I think you should meet. This way, you don't have the best meeting of your life while waiting in line for the bathroom.
Lance: I like that; it makes a lot of sense. So, if there's a founder out there, and a lot of the founders I work with aren't in the big centers of entrepreneurship—they're not necessarily in San Francisco, New York, Miami, London—they're all over the world. What do you suggest for how they can start making those connections, benefiting from them, and also trying to benefit other people?
David: The first thing is to take a look at why you're building a network for an outcome for you, as opposed to building a community where you can be both supportive and supported. That is a mindset shift. Most founders have a beautiful idea, hopefully enough to get it off the ground. They focus on the idea that when they need to get it out there, who should they talk to. Then they're on a mission, saying, "Lance, can I talk to you to get to this investor you had on your podcast six months ago?". When you're mission-driven to go through somebody, you're not working with your community; you're just trying to network. Dealing with that mindset shift is the most important thing.
The other part is that I operate a lot in the world of family offices, VC, entrepreneurs, and angel investors. When you try to do that in New York, that is one of the largest, most cut-throat cities to get access to and build from. I've been successful in it the last 25 years, but I've spent 25 years in investing, being in New York, San Francisco, LA, Miami, and all the pockets of wealth. When I am in another city, walking down the street, and going to some smaller event, I end up making more substantial connections to the local wealth, the local CEOs, than I do in a city where everyone is being asked everything all the time.
If you take that—you take all the world as these small circles of networks and community, and you look at New York, LA, and San Francisco as these big hubs. Unless you're part of a big hub, it's hard to get into that. If you're part of a community where you are, then your dentist's daughter's boyfriend's father is the CEO of the local business who might actually hear you out. But you don't know that until you start to talk about why you want to have an impact, what your passion is, how you want to help other people with what you've built. If you can get people who are your community to champion you as opposed to just thinking, "How do I get to the right person?". That mindset shift, plus the practice of both offering value as you ask for it, can create massive opportunity. People didn't know these opportunities would be in front of them unless they shifted the way they looked at how to get to their end goal, which is for their company to thrive.
Lance: Interesting. Especially in these big hubs, it does get very transactional. Everyone is banging on these people's doors every moment of the day, and people really put up very strong defenses. It's an interesting perspective that is much more available in a lot of these other places.
David: Also, the world is about the power of the intro. This is everything I do. The power of the intro is somebody you've built trust with advocating for you and telling somebody else they should take their time because of that trust to interact with you, to hear you out. So, you can try to knock down doors, or you can build a community, and by doing so, it increases your chance of success. It also gives you backing that isn't just towards that transaction of the investment, the sale, or the business. It actually gives you something much more substantial, because one of the hardest things about being a founder—and I'm one myself now—is the isolation. You feel all the pressure of this. Every exited founder story has the same journey; it's that hero's journey of "all is lost, let's see what happens from it".
Lance: I certainly have never talked to anyone who hasn't had all kinds of disasters along the way in the process of getting to their success. I really resonate with what you're saying about the warm intro. People reach out to me all the time asking for introductions to investors, but I don't have a relationship with them. Even if I made the introduction, it's going to be lukewarm at best. I'm not convinced it's not actually damaging to that person because the message is, "Hey, here's this guy who couldn't even work out how to get your email address".
David: Even if you get the access, what's the access worth? I have the privilege now of being friends with over a thousand different family offices, billionaires, and known VC funds. One of the things I'm really known for is I'm so selective with when I make an intro to them because I've actually taken the time to learn what they want. I don't just say, "You have means, you're a VC, you should talk to my friend". When people do that willy-nilly with no filter—you introduce somebody who's investing in proptech to somebody investing in agriculture—that's not the same thing. The more you learn what people care about, what they're passionate about, the more you can make that pattern an easier match.
As a founder, one of the biggest mistakes people make is simply going out to raise money when they need to raise money. If you spent 20% of your time building these relationships in advance of this, what would happen if you had 30 cheerleaders walking with you down the next path going, "I can't wait for Lance to do this Series A. What his company's done so far has been incredible. Would you like to talk with him?". When an intro ask happens when you're not in the room, it's almost invariably taken. This is the thing people don't understand about the nature of build and then find: you have to do them simultaneously.
Lance: Right. I talk to a lot of founders who say, "I don't want to talk to investors until I'm ready, until I hit these milestones". I'm always trying to convince them that the earlier you can be engaging and talking to people, getting on their radar, the better. Whether or not you ever raise money from them, they can be a useful resource, a good person to know.
How do you suggest people go about this? Earlier, you talked about giving value when you're setting these things up. How can a founder approach that when they're heads down doing nothing but building their startup, penniless, and potentially don't have much of a network yet?
David: Two different points for this. I'll make the first one quick with an example from my own world. I got access to a family office network. My friend Chris asked me to pitch my startup. I said, "I'm happy to explain what I'm doing, but I'm not raising yet". He said, "It's all right, it'll go well anyway, because I believe in what you're building". It's a connector tech meant to systematize how we actually connect and build trust—my same MO, just in a tech form. I spoke for 30 minutes; I effectively pitched this group. Somebody asked, "What size checks are you taking?". I said, "Oh, I'm not raising yet". Another guy raised his hand and asked, "When will you be?". Then this woman raised her hand and said, "When you're ready, I want to be your first check". That idea of selling what you're doing without having to say, "and will you invest?" is the reason to do it. It's the same way somebody says, "I might go on a date with you next week". You think, "Are we going or not?" Our psychology shifts the minute we think we could have something, but we can't have it yet. So, that's part of it.
The other part: what does somebody have to give? If you're a founder who's never talked to anyone, sitting in a basement coding something, then code away. Most founders built something from a lived experience. This means they lived in a community or several if they moved around. They're trying to solve a problem, which means they worked in an industry where they built relationships, where now they see the problem they want to solve. They either went to high school and college or a larger degree. Those people might not be relevant for you today, but I guarantee when you start to look at this more systematically, they might be the exact thing somebody else needs.
The idea that "I'm a founder and penniless, so I can't offer value until my startup has success" denies the fact there are a lot more things people have to give. That can be a relationship, or it can be time in some cases, if you simply ask somebody what they need. At some point, that serendipity happens, and you end up being able to help that person later. Perhaps at the next event you went to for your own startup, somebody says, "I'm only interested in supporting women in FinTech". The person who rejected you is the exact intro you make. By learning from a no, you now have knowledge of what could be a yes for somebody else.
Lance: Okay, I like that. Of course, you won't be able to help everyone every time; that's not a reasonable expectation. But you're listening all the time, then thinking about who you know, and how you can potentially support that.
David: That is exactly right. A case in point for my community: I never end up helping 90% of the people who join. Somebody else in my network does. All I simply did was support enough people and ask them to support other people that it created this ripple effect that becomes this ultimate power. If I've created something that lets somebody else be helped when they couldn't help themselves, I'm part of that chain of gratitude, even though I wasn't directly responsible. But now I know what somebody needed, I know who helped, and I know who made the introductions to get those people to each other, involving me.
This is what I call in my book and my community Honoring the Chain of Connections. It's the primary methodology for my work. It's the idea that the more gratitude you can express when something substantial happens to you, the more you actually get to gloat and talk about the success that happened while expressing the gratitude for the people involved. When you unpack that, the more you try to help people in any way, the more it layers on itself. The more that happens, the more you know what everyone around you needs, and suddenly you're at the center, even though you're not the one dancing in that middle school dance.
Lance: I like that. As you talk about that, I'm picturing some of my own situations where I mentor and work with a lot of founders. They will often then be actively connecting me with other founders, people who need consulting, people who need other things. Those have often been very interesting and fruitful relationships. It's not something that I've intentionally thought about building, but it's just come organically out of providing the support that I do.
David: And here you are at the start of this interview telling me you don't think of yourself as a connector. Case in point, what you just said is: you build value, you demonstrate value, people connect, people keep connecting you, you keep connecting them. This is why I say relationship value is the most underrated commodity. What would happen if we valued that relationship value the way we value time and money? The challenge is that relationship value isn't seen as value because you can't see the end result of that value. But having studied this now, I can tell you something always works itself out when you have high integrity and recognize everyone in that chain to get where you need to go.
Lance: Let's unpack that a little bit. This recognizing everyone in the chain—how does that work in practice? How do you implement that?
David: Sure. My startup is called SOAR Connect. It stands for Strength of Authentic Relationships. The idea is it's a personal CRM and an ecosystem CRM. No one owns your data. Only you have access to how you connect with people: the strength of that trust, your email, cell phone, WhatsApp—all these things go into a very sophisticated scoring system and algorithm.
The other half is: you and I have now connected. Maybe one of those investors who doesn't want you pitching random founders from your podcast is actually looking to get more into marine climate tech related to defense. That specific thing is my friend Matthew. So, how do you get from you and me, through how we first interacted before this podcast, to meeting my friend Matthew in Palm Beach? That's what I'm working to solve. It's not a LinkedIn or just a social media; it's a systematic way to make asks and get to other people's asks.
I give you this example because when I raised the first $600,000 for my startup, I had 17 friends and friends for my round. I don't have family that invest, so I always qualify that it's not "friends and family". I traced back those 17 people from the 17 different people who made those introductions. Then I looked at how I met those 17, and that was from 11 people. I realized the initial catalyst to get those 17 investors through a total of about 60 people were four friends who were deeply and organically involved in my network since the beginning. That chain gives me data, which is also what my tech does. I know that my friend Michael Roderick, my friend Marcia Nelson, and my friend Josh Tanenbaum—three of these people, each in different worlds—the chain they sent me on got me to the people who said, "Yes, I'll invest in you".
It's practical. It allows me to understand that in my current round, some of the people who introduced me to those investors now are going to invest themselves. If their friends invested, now that the startup has a higher valuation and an MVP coming out, maybe it's time for them. It's all this idea that once you start to map it through gratitude, you end up seeing what we cannot visualize. That is that web, like a mycelium network, or looking at that galaxy world. You don't see how far it gets to get from planet to planet or mushroom to mushroom. What you end up seeing is that the strength of that is deeper when you have an outcome like "invest in startup intro to invest in startup intro to intro to intro to invest". Once you map that out, it's a roadmap of how to have more success and how to have more gratitude while doing it.
Lance: Do you make a point then of sharing that, shouting that out, letting people know they were in that chain?
David: There's literally an article on my website about my startup where I don't mention the investors. I wanted to protect their privacy for this first round. Now they'll become public when my first close for my next round happens soon. But I do mention everyone else in gratitude for getting me to them. I mention the investors' first names; I just don't make them targets. Otherwise, everyone else who doesn't understand connection will be like, "Rachel so-and-so invested this, and now I'm going to ping her because I heard David's podcast with Lance," and people will seem opportunistic.
I did that all as a practice. It's the way to stay in my private community; unless you honor the chain, I kick you out of it. The element of risk in community is something a lot of communities don't focus on. I've done it 47 times to date within my network. Almost every time it's happened because somebody doesn't honor or respect the relationships they've built within my network. They then lose access to Hollywood and Bollywood, human rights activists and billionaires, and all the rest that are within the reach of my community. If you're not honorable to somebody in my network, how are you going to be honorable to somebody outside of it?
Lance: What would be an example of not being honorable? What qualifies as getting someone kicked off the island?
David: I'll give you two examples. I can't name names because there's obviously this thing called libel in this world, and I'd like to stay on the good side of it.
This is one that Noah and I cover in our book. Early on at one of my events, there was this guy—his name is not Drake, but that's the name we use in the book. My events are not singles mixers. My events are purposeful, intentional—"let us get to depth". Honestly, you as an introvert would love them because they're designed for introverts and people having bad days, not extroverts. Even though I have the appearance of an extrovert, that's just how I learned from that six foot one father how to step out of my four foot 11 mother.
So, this guy, Drake, was at an event. Drake was speaking to a very incredible female friend of mine. I noticed he was getting a little bit flirtatious with her. When it didn't go the way he wanted, he moved on to number two. This was early on in my network; I didn't vet as well. The second girl was talking to him. They ended up going to have a drink afterwards, and the woman called me the next day. She said, "Nothing happened, but I was extremely uncomfortable". "I didn't want to say it, but you run a network where you literally would leave your kids with everyone in it. It was extremely pushy and then insulting to me".
I apologized. It wasn't my fault, but it was the circumstances of my event. I called up the two people who introduced me to this guy, and they were so apologetic that they offered to call this woman they'd never met—because they were not at the event—to apologize to her for bringing him into that event. I asked if one of them would address it with him because they knew him better. His response was that chauvinistic alpha male line, "She was asking for it". He expressed no empathy, no concern for her being uncomfortable, nothing about her welfare. So I called him up and said, "That's not the appropriate response". "I understand that things are mixed, and maybe there was a different signal". "But if somebody says no in that moment, if you really like them, then just go have coffee the next day if they want to see you. There's nothing that had to happen". "The fact you had no empathy for her—you can't come back".
Now, this guy is the son of a very wealthy human being. Everyone would want access to him. He no longer has access to my network, as it has grown almost 30,000% over the years, because he had a moment to have empathy and compassion he chose not to.
The other example is totally different, but same sort of mark. I was really nervous. August 5th, my first book was coming out. I wanted it to be a bestseller. I didn't know if it was going to happen. I had gotten thousands of my network to promote the book. I had hundreds of people each post on LinkedIn, to the point that one of my new friends' entire feed was people posting about me and my book, like 20 deep. He said, "How did we not know each other?". That was the outreach. The guy was a connector in Europe, not in the US where my network isn't as big. I made the choice, Lance, to thank everyone by tagging them who had been a founding part of my network. I thanked about a thousand people. I thought it was great, also good for the LinkedIn algorithm and all that stuff. Then my book became a USA Today bestseller. I think part of it was the amount of people who heard of my value and my co-author's value without having met us, because I certainly did not know that many people myself, all of whom I could pressure into buying a book.
About a month goes by, and here's what happened. I'll be brief. One friend calls, then another friend calls, "Hey, I got an invite to this person's event." "They say they know you, they think they have a lot of value, but something smelled fishy." "Do you know [and they name this person]?". Other people call. They say, "Hey, somebody said they saw you thank me on a post on LinkedIn, and I'm going to go to their event because if you trust them, I trust them".
Somebody who was now formally in my network tried to poach my network without recognizing me or misleading people to say I had asked that they be reached out to. There were a lot of variations to this. When that person was approached, they were untruthful. They didn't think of it as a big deal. I built trust for a decade, and somebody tried to take it in the span of me tagging them on LinkedIn. Based on how this person handled it, I not only purged him from the network, I actually posted about it without naming the business or the person. It's my most viral article—10 thousands of people reading why I removed somebody because they wouldn't honor the relationships that had been made through my network. That person's insane opportunism cost them hundreds of LinkedIn contacts who unfollowed instantly. Now, there's a pariah complex in my network of people having heard about it and saying, "Don't go to that one". "Not even for me, because if he's going to get involved with you, Lance, and then he starts poaching everyone who's been on your podcast, it shows a pattern of choosing oneself above one's integrity". I'm trying as best I can in my own flawed way to advocate that you have to take the higher course in relationships, because it's the only currency we have that we can't own—we just have to keep nurturing.
Lance: For a book like yours, the approach you took and the mechanisms of using LinkedIn are really interesting. They exactly exemplify what you're talking about, and they're absolutely aligned, which is very interesting. We talked a little bit about the importance of introductions and the authenticity of that—having someone who actually knows you—because when you're making that introduction to someone, you are spending your own reputation capital. I think you need to be very careful about that.
David: Every opportunity is one to build that capital or to lose it. Unfortunately, you can lose it in a heartbeat, but it takes months or years to gain it. If you put tons of time and money into something, you would want it to maintain its value. You go to a conference every year, you meet people, you take people out to eat, you fly somewhere for an event, you take the phone call—all of these are interactions for which you're taking known commodities of time and money, and you're putting them into this thing that seems more evasive and ethereal, which is the person you know.
Then you say, "Hey, I really like this guy Tom. You should meet him". I've purportedly said he's going to be a great exited founder or podcast guest for you. If he's a schmuck, what do you think of me? I could have spent years in a relationship building something with somebody, and it can be ruined in a heartbeat if you get it wrong. Why would you not take the time to invest in those great, introverted skills of deep listening, actually developing empathy and curiosity, and exhibiting vulnerability to somebody to get to the core? This is to make sure that when you're giving that value to somebody else, it's actually valuable.
The person knows—and this is a big point for my network, because connectors have historically failed at this—that when you're making that intro, you're bestowing that value onto them. For both parties that you've put value into, you need more than the receipt back. You need to understand the power of what happened, which is why I use the term honoring. When you ask people to honor what happens, they have a choice. In every culture, in every language, it's the same: there's honor and there's dishonor; there's no gray area.
You say, "Keep me posted," or "Keep me apprised". Somebody might be like, "Well, I didn't think you needed to know. We just had lunch". Somebody else would go, "I didn't think you needed to know. They introduced me to somebody else". Then you go, "Yeah, but that somebody just founded your startup. That's a substantial interaction from the person I got you to". People don't seem to value it because they think they matter more than the people helping them.
If we take all this and you unpack it down to, "Why would you not put that time in? Why would you not spend time building it?". If you're building it for an outcome to get through the person or get something from it, everyone thinks they're so smart. "Lance, I know exactly how to butter you up on this podcast so when I come back to you with my email and say, 'Hey, I'm trying to close the rest of my round. You know investors that will help me,'" you're going to read that and go, "What was that guy thinking? I said I wanted to interview him. I'm leaving tomorrow for a trip. I'm not going to help him now". People think they're so smart at doing it, yet they see through it when it's done to them. This is that hypocrisy of how people think that what they desire and want matters more than what somebody else actually needs.
If you spend the time addressing your need, advocating for it, and learning about somebody else's, you end up with harmony. Even if I can't help you, but you can help me at some point, if you do this repeatedly with that intention, that serendipity everyone talks about ends up becoming something substantial. This is especially true in the world of entrepreneurship where you're trying to get outside of your circle to build something bigger, to get into all these other circles that have rules that aren't written down, that have networks that seem like they're inaccessible, that have people that seem like they belong there and you don't. In every case, all it takes is somebody going, "You should meet Sarah. She's a friend of mine. I've known her for 10 years. You should hear about what she's doing," and the entire world opens up because I built the trust without an ask.
Lance: You talked about the multiple layers of getting to the people who backed your F&F round for your company. What sort of advice would you give for people on how they approach that? Were you thinking in terms of trying to be networking towards people who may be able to back the company? Were you focusing on just meeting people, talking about where you are and what you needed? Or is it more of just a pure serendipitous strategy?
David: It's completely strategic. I don't really have time in this world. I have two kids who are 11 and eight. I have ailing parents. I have my own creative career as a composer. So for me, I am efficient with my time. Free time is something I look forward to; I don't know how long it's going to be till I get that again. So, it's actually completely strategic, but it's not manipulative—that's the way to understand it.
I think there's a problem in the world of technology. I think it's insanely stupid that when somebody texts me and I don't have the time to save their number on my phone, that I'm not in touch with them for six months. I can't search and find that number. I think it's insane that you and I connect, not knowing those investors you're talking about might also be my friends. We can't actually figure that out, even though if you've emailed them, I've emailed them, and we've had calendar entries, or you've interviewed them, or I have. The data should exist. I see all these problems in connection because connection is not that you're a first-degree LinkedIn connection, you're a follower on Instagram, or you've known somebody for 20 years on Facebook. None of those mean anything.
In the world of meeting people, as opposed to going out to say, "Here's what I'm going to build," I kept asking people what they used and what they thought was the solution. They kept coming back to me and telling me what they needed. They kept telling me they can't find something. Many said they invested in something that didn't work. They built something for themselves. "How do I manage it?". Suddenly, I had hundreds of organic dialogues with people, many of whom could be, or became, my investors, or introduced me to it because they saw me as somebody thinking through this problem before I said, "I have a deck. Can I pitch you on this?".
If you're actually an entrepreneur trying to solve something in the market you're in, why not spend that time first figuring out your place in it, your vision in it? You don't have to give away your trade secrets. But if you network within that for the larger goal of figuring out consumer value, market value, what people might pay for something, whether they see you as the person who can build it, or what factors you would need to take to actually solve this. Or besting the competition. What have people used? What I heard endlessly adopting over a hundred cases now, even with current products in the market, is, "Have you tried this thing?". I say, "A little bit. What about you?". They say, "I tried it. I don't use it anymore". That for me is the reason to have these conversations in a different way. Not to convince them that what I'm going to do is going to be best, but to demonstrate for them that I've given enough thought to this that if it's going to change the way we connect with trust, maybe I'm the one to do it. Then the money came much more quickly in these really horrible venture markets we're currently in. It came more quickly because I made my ask without making my ask. That's the more effective way to do it to start a relationship.
Lance: It sounds like the conversation to be having is putting it out into the world what you're working on, what you're thinking about, what problems you're focusing on without a specific ask. It's just to get feedback, to listen to the other person, and to be interacting with them.
David: So, 80% yes. But the reason I built something called the Impact Ask years ago in my network is that people are actually really great at figuring out what other people need, but most suck at asking for themselves. When somebody asks me what type of investors I want—and now I'm dabbling into venture but focusing more on family offices and ultra-net-worth friends of mine for this current round—I don't just say, "Investors". I say, "I want to find people who spend their time endlessly going to conferences and can't manage or keep track". "I want to find investors who are exhausted about the amount of time they have to spend catering to all their other LPs, all their friends, all their portfolio companies". "I'm tired of people who run conferences not knowing the outcome of what happens from TED or Summit or Davos". I took all the things that people were expressing a need for, and I turned that into specifics of the archetypes of the type of person. Most people are incredibly dense unless you spell out for them the type of relationship that you need. Once you are able to say it in a certain way, then people come back and go, "I know exactly who you should talk to". This is what people often fail to do because, one, they're afraid to ask for themselves, and two, they don't realize they are asking for themselves.
If you stated what your impact is going to be: "I want to solve the problem of connectivity so highly ethical people can build trust with each other and filter out those that would take advantage of them." "I want to amplify that so not only every investor network or conference can have this, but every community, whether it's a local bake sale or a cancer walk, has the ability to mobilize people together with trust to have an outcome that's bigger than themselves." "I want to talk to investors and CEOs and thought leaders who see that the current way technology works with us is it takes our data and it sells us something." "And the way that LLMs and agents and all the sophistications of new technology can give us back some of our humanity by helping us demonstrate how we build trust." "I want to talk to people who really care about this as a problem because they're exhausted maintaining their current network, knowing they have to constantly build more." "If that includes people you might think would want to invest in this or be alpha users or be partners down the line as I build this out for their business or network, I'd love to talk to them." "If not, I appreciate you listening and hearing me".
That's basically my pitch for SOAR. If you can demonstrate why this is more important than you, and then you can spell out what happens for somebody who you're talking to—maybe for them—then two things happen. They go, "Oh my God, I went to 15 conferences in the last couple months. How do you keep track of LinkedIn and WhatsApp and email, and who's worth talking to, and who was just some annoying person that you gave your card to that keeps hounding you for an interview?". Then they go, "You know what? There's this guy. He sold his company like seven years ago, and he's been trying to figure out this problem. Do you know Tom so-and-so?". I'd be like, "I know what company he sold". They'll go, "It's my college roommate. You should talk to Tom". It's this idea that you can get to that pattern recognition, especially as a founder, just by hacking that psychology of, "I built my thing, it's great, I need something," into that different way of framing the ask. When you do that right, you'll be surprised how many doors open.
Lance: I like that. What is your suggestion for keeping these things alive and relevant? That's a challenge I always run into. I meet an enormous number of people. They talk to me about what they're doing. I want to try to keep that in mind. Then six months later, no. Someone might even ask for the same thing, and I have no idea who that was. I don't have that live connection. So, how much care, feeding, and gardening do you suggest people do around this?
David: There's data science on this, and then there's my own sentiment. The data science is that you could maybe manage 150 people. For a super connector, it could be up to a couple hundred, but that's it. So then you have to think about why you want to manage people and what it takes to really connect with them.
My biggest hack is just to focus on, "Let me figure out what you need, and I'll try to remember it". But if you take an action to help share what you're doing with me, I'll remember it more. Meaning, email me, text me, tell me what you're doing. If I take an action to make an intro for you, and then you give me the feedback loop of what happened from it, I'll remember it even more. If it's an interaction with no opportunity for six more months, that's incredibly hard to manage. It's part of why I'm building SOAR. That ask in six months could be matched with somebody else's ask that came to you 18 months before, if they're still doing the same thing of the same need. Otherwise, it's incredibly hard to understand how to do all of this.
So then I think about, "Who would I want to spend time with?". Last month, I had an enormous amount of opportunities put in front of me. This week—the third week in October—I had an incredible number of meetings. "How did I get to those people?". I really only kept this podcast with you and one other call for the entire week because my dad has been in the ICU. He nearly died, and fortunately, he's pulling through. I told everyone I was meeting what happened. Everyone wrote back with great empathy. It was actually pretty incredible. But six people I have not yet met have checked in on me twice. Not to be obtrusive, just to say what they've gone through or just to let me know. Do you really think I won't be in touch with those six six months from now? They proved something. It wasn't the opportunity to talk to me or what the outcome was. They demonstrated a humanity based on my vulnerability, which cemented for me that of course, I'm going to talk to them. Of course, I'm going to help them. I'm going to reach out because the thing they didn't ask that I needed was people who simply didn't check in, but just said, "I'm still thinking about you." "The fact I haven't heard from you means this must be incredibly hard." "Whatever happens, we don't need to connect unless you want to, but just know that you're in my thoughts". Some said prayers. I'm not a religious person, and that mattered a lot last week.
That curiosity, vulnerability, the opportunity to just be human. If somebody starts with that or ends with that, then you would never have that question as to whether six months from now they matter or not, or they're in your world. This is what I advocate when I say build a community, not a network. It's why I'm vulnerable, even on a podcast, not knowing who's going to listen. This is the first public stance I've taken to talk about what I'm going through with my father. But I tell you, there are people who have said, "Hope your dad's okay. Now, when can we reschedule?". Wow. I'm not rescheduling with them. They showed me within the span of one week they were not going to be my type of person by putting opportunity above empathy.
Lance: It's that saying, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time".
David: If only we would see the world that way. But when we think we can get something from somebody that will help us, we get rid of a lot of those red flags. It's what people have problems with investors this way. They have problems with romantic partners this way. They have problems with toxic friendships this way. We put down all those signs because we think we need something more than we do, because we're not sure what other options there are.
Lance: These are non-transactional activities where you're doing it out of just that personal connection, not because, "If I say this, I will get X, Y, and Z". So, I live out in the boonies, an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Every once in a while, someone will say, "Hey, I'm in the city. I'd love to get together. Can we have a coffee?". They're just trying to be networking. I'll say, "Well, look, I'm an hour and a half north, so it's probably not worth your while. I don't want to lead you on with anything transactional". Every once in a while, someone will say, "Hey, no, I'd love to come up and talk anyway," and they'll drive up. Those people make an impression. Especially if it's not a bait and switch, and they're not trying to immediately pull out their pitch deck. They just want to get the benefit of experience, want to talk, want to share what they're working on. Those people definitely stick in my head.
David: Where you live in Northern California is one of the most gorgeous parts of the entire world. Why would one not want to go there, as opposed to Mission district, where it's pretty dirty and grimy at the moment? More than that, if the intention was to build a relationship, of course they'll take the drive up. If the intention was more opportunistic or just a passing fancy, that's a lot to ask you to come down, which is probably a five-hour part of your day. Based on San Francisco traffic for Marin or anything else, it could be seven. Why would you want that, unless you'd already built that relationship, or if they'd come up to you once, of course you'd go down to them.
I had a new friend in my network; he's actually fifth-generation billionaire, Hollywood actor parents, all these things. He called me up. I answered the phone and said, "I have to call my mom. I'm heading down to Florida. I'm not sure if my dad's going to live". He said, "I'm hanging up now. I hope you're well. Goodbye". Next day, he texted me. Three days later, he texted me. He's now sent me an email not asking for anything. I know what his ask is. He dropped it all because he didn't care about what he needed from me. Now he's a friend probably for life, from just dropping opportunity to give humanity to value time.
These are all the things that people are doing to us. We look at what are they taking from us, yet we somehow think we can do the same to others. This is the biggest fallacy every founder has. Maybe your idea isn't the best idea. Maybe you should have listened to people as you've built it. Maybe you do have the best idea, but because you're not a white dude living in Santa Monica or Manhattan or Bay Area, maybe you don't get it. But the statistics are all the same. Incredible VCs have what, a 30% track record of having success, which means the majority of what they pick fails. It's an incredibly hard market to invest in, until you understand the market behind it, which is people invest with people that they trust. They will go out on a limb as an investor to invest in somebody they've built trust with, even if that person has introduced them to five failed deals. Somebody will invest with a founder who worked with somebody on another team, even if they've never met them.
Anything where you can say, "I've built trust with this person. Give your time to see if you might want to trust them". This is how the actual market works. It's not a Shark Tank world where you get on it and you suddenly think you have the opportunity. There's a network behind that that gets those people to that place. There's a network behind all of these things, which is people saying, "Lance, I heard your podcast. You should talk to this person". Somebody else going, "I know you've advised my friend's startup. They said I should call you. Can I work with you?". Somebody else going, "I'm an investor. I'm trying to find this type of founder. Do you know them? My friend So-and-so was on your podcast a year ago". We live in a world where we're desperate for people to tell us who to trust, because it's hard to filter everything else out.
I walk into rooms now and I go, "I'm not really sure I want to be here". I faced my father's mortality, and like the Red Sea parting, there are four people on one side, and those are the people worth my time. Everyone else either assesses me as somebody—because I'm not ultra high net worth myself—as not worth their time. I love it when all this happens, when people show their cards, because then you can filter to the best so much more quickly. When you do that with a discernment, which most people unfortunately don't have to the degree they should, you end up with an incredibly powerful network for you and you for them where transaction might happen, but relationship value stays.
Lance: When we were talking about maintaining that warmth, you said it's much easier if you have that ongoing connection. One of the things I recommend that founders do, in addition to reaching out to people early, is to connect with an investor way before they're raising money. Then I recommend a monthly update email. It's real short: "Here's what we're working on, here's what we've accomplished, here's the next goals that we've got". And potentially an ask at the bottom. Sometimes it's an introduction, sometimes it's advice, sometimes it's suggestions. But nothing too heavy, so that in six months, this person is still fresh in their mind, they remember you, they've maybe answered some emails you sent over that time, and things are warm. What's your thought on that approach?
David: I think that, although current politics aside, we know we need to ask for consent. If you and I were meeting, Lance, and I was talking about my startup, and you said, "Hey, this just isn't the thing for me," and I said to you, "Well, I appreciate your honesty. Would it be okay if I gave you periodic updates?". Once somebody agrees to something, they will generally pay a thousand times more attention than just giving somebody the update, because they took the time. The more you ask for somebody to value their time, the more they feel valued by giving it back. I'm not saying you didn't say that in this case; I just wanted to qualify it.
Lance: That's a great point, because I always make that point that you ask for permission to put them on that list. You never just default-add someone to your spam list.
David: Exactly. Then you have to think about it. Is this really worth doing something in a group where it feels like a group? Is it worth taking a little bit more of a subset from it? Within my community, I have investor networks, creative music networks; I have all these different subsets of the people within my group. I have a very specific, very small network of people who are deep in the world of AI, LLMs, all these different things. I'm keeping them apprised on what I'm building within my tech, one specific component of it, because it's what they care about. It takes more time for me to give them that update, but it's much more effective because that targeted list is so useful.
Somebody said to me, "Hey, you should talk to Joe about your startup". I was like, "Well, who's Joe?". They're like, "Well, he's both an investor, but he also runs a newsletter with 200,000 people on it, talking about sophisticated search within AI". I talked to that guy. He not only joined my network, he also helped promote my book. But he's going to help promote the next phase of my startup when I want the tech investor world to hear what I built, which is the solution for them. By keeping a subset active, I then got to several hundred thousand people with the press of a button.
Lance: That's fantastic. I can see it. One of the nice things about the product you're building—when we were doing a little bit of a pre-interview, I was getting super excited about the SOAR product. I could imagine using it. It so fits into that challenge that, and I think a lot of especially technological founders like me, feel like they don't know how to do this. Having some kind of tool or support mechanism is terribly useful to a lot of us.
David: I certainly hope so. We are getting closer. It is so complex that my dev team, some of my investors, everyone's going, "I cannot believe you cracked this, but we didn't realize it would be this hard". So, like a lot of founders, I'd hoped to launch in March. I'm hoping to launch by the end of the year. What I'm trying to solve is a systems problem, not an intro tech problem or a new Rolodex. I solve a lot of those in what we've built. But because there's the larger problem—because my pitch isn't, "It's a new smart address book"—it's "How do you really understand how to visualize your level of trust with people?". When I explain that, people get it. I asked for what their problem was. Everyone's problem is, "I have too many people I've met, I don't know who to follow up with. Who do I know? How do I know who they know?". Everything comes back to, "I don't want to give my data to another company to market at me or to sell it to a third party". So, I had to build something that kept that data for each user with so many layers of encryption. It cost a lot of money for an MVP, because unless I built the trust for you to trust your data with me, you wouldn't even touch me.
Lance: Right, because this is super valuable information, particularly with all the context wrapped around it, that makes it that valuable thing. Obviously, we don't need another LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a classic example of that problem. I have many thousands of connections on LinkedIn, and someone says, "Hey, can you introduce me to this guy you're connected to?". Well, a lot of them are real flimsy connections.
David: It's a problem because it's not the need for which LinkedIn makes its money. Therefore, we want it to be something that it was not able to be designed to commercialize in the same way, because recruitment and all the rest became a massive part of their focus. This didn't stay as their focus, even though it was a larger intention. Every one of these groups—big tech and even smaller tech companies—they keep trying to solve something to circumvent the human, to automate it. I think that's the wrong way to build tech. I think we have to augment people who build relationships. There's no way that next time we did a pre-interview, my AI avatar talks to yours, and they come to an agreement we should do another podcast. Tech is never going to get to that point where you're like, "Alright, well if my AI told me to, then I guess now we should spend an hour together on a podcast". We humans are going to rebel against that part. But you can augment every part in the lead-up and in the follow-up to allow us to focus on the people, not to focus on a prescribed outcome from it.
Lance: I love that. I think that's a great closing point. Are there any final bits of advice, wisdom, or suggestions for founders out there who are starting to think about following this path?
David: I'll tell a quick anecdote. Years ago, I met these incredible two founders who told me their vision. The vision was beautiful. It was way off on the horizon, but it was there. Then when I asked them how they were going to get there, that was the silence I heard. So, I started to explain to them the famous South Park episode about the Underpants Gnomes.
Lance: I love that one. Yes.
David: For everyone who hasn't seen it, go Google it. It's incredible because the lawn gnomes who are alive at night steal underpants. They say, "Step one: steal underpants. Step two:" and there's this sign that has nothing above it. Then they go, "Step three: profit". There was no understanding of what that middle part is.
That entrepreneur journey, all of this, is incredibly lonely. If you think you're going to start here and get to there, the only part you have to love is the journey itself. You have to love every part of it, however hard. If you keep thinking you deserve your success, you will never get it. If you think you're going to love the journey of it, and you're going to build a community of people while that happens, this is why entrepreneurship in America is exceptional compared to the rest of the world. There are a lot of amazing entrepreneurs all around the world. But in America, it's an incredible thing to fail, to learn from it, and to rebuild. In most of Europe, in Australia, and a lot of the world, it's not okay to fail.
But when you fail and you can fall and have people catch you, you look at the success of most founders. Most millionaires—I believe a majority of millionaires living today made their money in their lifetime—it's a staggering percent. They didn't do it alone. They did it because of their community around them. No one ever says they did it on their own. So that's the advice. You've got to love that journey and focus on the people around you for whatever value one can give. Don't focus on getting to that "grass is greener" horizon and ignoring the people who helped you or could have helped you because you didn't think they were worth your time.
Lance: What you were just talking about, that entrepreneur story, reminded me of an experience I had that I hadn't contextualized this way. When I started my company, I was focused on consumer privacy. I was building tools for anonymity and a bunch of other things. We pursued a bunch of different directions. I had been doing this in the open-source community. I had been running things, volunteering, and involved in mailing lists. Then one day, I got an email from another guy in the community who said, "Hey, I've been helping this grad student who built this amazing privacy tool." "He's getting too busy to run it. I don't have time to run it." "You're the only person I trust to take over ownership and control of this thing and run with it." "So I want you to talk with him and do a deal to basically acquire that tech". It became the core of the business I built at the end of the day. It was just because of these relationships that I never in a million years thought would be relevant in that kind of way.
David: I love that story, Lance. I'll leave with my favorite quote, which is from Edward Albee's Zoo Story. It starts at the opening of the play: "Sometimes one has to go a long distance out of one's way to come back to a short distance correctly".
Lance: I love that. That's great. Is there anything you'd like to plug, or where can people find you?
David: I think I plugged enough, hopefully eloquently weaving in my book, my startup, and my community. That's basically everything I do, except for my creative side. If somebody Googles the last name Homan and the word "music," you'll find over 200 of my works as a classical composer: symphonic, string quartet, chamber, solo piano, and one rock album. My whole world is about orchestrating connections, orchestrating relationships. I took that world of being a pianist and composer and made myself really easy to find.
I'm always interested in meeting connectors. I'm a founder obviously looking to scale my startup. But more than that, I'm trying to solve this problem of relationship value not being valued. This is why I'm grateful for the way you've run your businesses and your podcast, because it's really about understanding that core of what a founder needs to see in order to succeed. I hope I've imparted some value—not as an exited founder yet on this, but somebody who's built the product for which my product is being built, which is a global network that works substantially to help people get to the right people.
Lance: I think you're doing amazing things. I guarantee there's a ton of value in this podcast for my listeners. Thank you so much for joining me.
David: My pleasure. Thank you all for listening.
Lance: Thanks for watching this episode of Feel the Boot. I hope you found this interview as useful as I did. I got a ton of good information out of it. If you are struggling to raise capital for your startup and you don't have a network, of course start following his advice and build that network. But also, I encourage you to check out my workshop on cold outreach. I'll put a link up there and down in the description. It will show you all of the steps for how to warm up cold connections and how to raise directly with just cold outreach. It's been hugely effective for the people in my program, and I know it'll help you. Until next time, ciao.
