A lot of younger people who’re new to the industry ask me how to do “networking”. How do you go from knowing no one in San Francisco to having a network of people that you can do business with, learn from, hire, etc. The trick is I never set out to “network”. Maybe due to Tylenol exposure in womb, or just pure intuition, but I could never fathom that I’d go to an event or reach out to someone to “network”. “Hi this is G and I’m here to network”. Instead what I focused on was creating value for others and focus on positive value exchanges. Creating open source projects is the “hyper scale” version of this. You’re networking with the world, but you’re doing so by leading with value and with content. Writing essays, teaching people things, giving lightning talks, vibe coding an experiment, all more valuable. What you’re going to notice is that networks build around value, not the other way around. Even today, whenever I reach out to someone, I try to lead with some insight, datapoint, maybe a bug report or suggestion for their product… something tangible. If they have a product or platform with APIs, I start by networking *our systems*. I’ve made amazing, close connections to people who I frequently chat with and I’ve never met IRL. I also make it a point to talk to everybody. Anons, interns, juniors, seniors, CEOs, board members, trolls. tl;DR: Focus on creating value, think long term, don’t be transactional.