I've been hosting events in Austin since 2017. Dinner parties at my place. Happy hours. AI meetups that started small and eventually drew a few hundred people. Investor dinners where founders pitch to a room of pre-qualified angels.
Over nearly a decade of this, I've built what most people would call a big network.
But here's the thing I've noticed: the size of the network isn't what makes it useful. I know plenty of people with enormous contact lists who still struggle to make effective introductions or close deals. They have the contacts, but they don't know what to do with them.
The gap is almost always the same. They built a network. They didn't build a map.
What a Map Actually Means
A map of your network isn't complicated. It's just knowing what each person in it is actually looking for.
What industries does this investor focus on? What stage? What check size? Is she actively deploying right now or sitting on the sidelines?
What kind of introductions does this person actually want? Is he looking for clients? Operators? Co-investors?
What problem is she trying to solve this year that she might not have mentioned publicly?
Most people can't answer these questions about more than a handful of people in their network. They know the person exists. They have the LinkedIn connection or the email. But they don't know the thesis — what the person is actually trying to do and what would genuinely matter to them.
The Moment When It Shows
I was talking with Josh, a legal tech founder doing a pre-seed raise, about how I work with investors. He asked how I'm able to move quickly when a deal comes in.
The answer: the prep work is already done.
When a new opportunity lands in my inbox, I can usually think of five to ten specific people to text within a few minutes. Not a broadcast email to everyone I know. Targeted texts to people I've been paying attention to for months or years. “Hey, I've got something here that matches exactly what you told me you were looking for.”
That's a fundamentally different ask than cold pitching. The person on the other end doesn't feel like they're being solicited. They feel like someone remembered what they said and found them something relevant.
That difference — between being the person who sends mass emails and being the person who sends targeted texts — comes entirely from whether you've done the pre-work.
How the Pre-Work Actually Gets Done
It doesn't happen in a single session. It accumulates.
Pay attention when people tell you what they want. When an investor at a dinner says she's focused on B2B SaaS with a particular kind of ARR profile, write that down somewhere. When someone mentions they're looking for a specific type of operator for a portfolio company, make a note.
Most of this information gets shared in normal conversation. People tell you what they care about all the time. The difference is whether you're capturing it.
I keep a rough mental model of each person in my active network — what they're working on, what they told me they wanted to see more of, where they are in a deal cycle. For the people I work with most closely, there's a note somewhere that tracks this more formally. For others, it's just a habit of paying attention and remembering.
The tool matters less than the habit. The habit is: treat what people tell you as signal, not small talk.
Why Most People Skip This
The honest reason is that it doesn't feel like networking. Collecting contacts feels productive. Going to events feels productive. Following up and adding people on LinkedIn feels productive.
Taking notes on what someone told you about their investment thesis six months ago feels like homework.
But that homework is exactly what creates the asymmetry. When a deal lands, the people who've done it can move in minutes. The people who haven't are starting from scratch — trying to figure out who in their network might be relevant, crafting a mass outreach email, hoping for the best.
The speed difference is significant enough to matter. In fast-moving situations, being the person who responds immediately with the right names closes more deals than being the person who follows up a week later after doing research.
When I Hosted Gary Vaynerchuk
A few years ago, a friend of mine named Robbie moved to Austin. He'd noticed how I built my Austin network — through dinners, hosting, creating environments for people to connect. One day Robbie invited Gary Vaynerchuk to town and brought me in to host Gary, show him around, introduce him to the right people.
What made that possible wasn't that I happened to know who Gary was. It was that I'd spent years understanding who in Austin would genuinely matter to someone with Gary's interests and what he was working on at the time. I could curate the room because I'd done the homework on both sides — I knew Gary's thesis and I knew my Austin network's interests.
Hospitality at that level isn't really about being nice. It's about having done the prep work so well that when the opportunity appears, you can add value immediately.
That's true whether you're hosting a dinner, making an introduction, or responding to a deal that just landed in your inbox.
The Practical Starting Point
You don't need to audit your entire network this week. But here's a version of the question worth sitting with:
Pick five people in your network who you'd consider in your “inner circle.” For each one, write down:
- What are they currently working on?
- What would a genuinely useful introduction look like to them right now?
- What did they tell you they wanted — a deal, a hire, a partnership, a customer — the last time you had a real conversation?
If you can answer those questions for all five, you're ahead of most people. If you can't answer them for any, that's your gap.
The network you can actually use is the one you know well enough to deploy without researching it first.
On building leverage in your work and relationships: Most of the systems I use to stay organized and effective are covered in the 25X Productivity System — including how I track information that matters for relationships and deals.
