5 ms·

I'm curious if you wouldn't mind sharing what was the context around that pitch, and your subsequent response. It sounds like you didn't go forward with impleme

I'm curious if you wouldn't mind sharing what was the context around that pitch, and your subsequent response. It sounds like you didn't go forward with implementing that ... was it your decision to not move forward, or were you in a team and that's just what ended up happening?

derefr 7y ago
The startup that I was working at, that came up with the pitch, fell apart before we ever had to make the call to implement it. Which I’m somewhat glad of; I don’t really like the idea of being forced to choose between ethics and helping a few friends survive. (And don’t get me wrong, building this extension would have been a matter of survival for the startup—we were depending heavily on piecing together a unified social-network graph to do Dynamic Network Analysis to, and social-network services actively resist having this data pulled from them.) If you’re curious, the point of the startup was to path-find between you and people you want to be connected to but aren’t (investors, say), telling you which friends-of-friends to prioritize getting to know in order to later leverage them as intermediate links in the chain to meet the people you really want to meet, that are three or four or five steps removed from you, and so entirely invisible to your local part of the network. (And yes, that’s a really darn cynical play. But the data that we did have showed that the intermediate “links” in your chain would almost always be business-people, “growth hackers”, etc. for whom getting to know you was valuable in its own right—they would value any chance to grow their Rolodex. So it at least seemed like a positive-sum interaction on the surface.)
- epicide 7y ago
  So basically Tinder for Recruiters? On the surface, it sounds useful, but also like Tinder, would've likely been abused.
  - taneq 7y ago
    More like a creepy(er) LinkedIn.

derefr 7y ago

The startup that I was working at, that came up with the pitch, fell apart before we ever had to make the call to implement it. Which I’m somewhat glad of; I don’t really like the idea of being forced to choose between ethics and helping a few friends survive. (And don’t get me wrong, building this extension would have been a matter of survival for the startup—we were depending heavily on piecing together a unified social-network graph to do Dynamic Network Analysis to, and social-network services actively resist having this data pulled from them.) If you’re curious, the point of the startup was to path-find between you and people you want to be connected to but aren’t (investors, say), telling you which friends-of-friends to prioritize getting to know in order to later leverage them as intermediate links in the chain to meet the people you really want to meet, that are three or four or five steps removed from you, and so entirely invisible to your local part of the network. (And yes, that’s a really darn cynical play. But the data that we did have showed that the intermediate “links” in your chain would almost always be business-people, “growth hackers”, etc. for whom getting to know you was valuable in its own right—they would value any chance to grow their Rolodex. So it at least seemed like a positive-sum interaction on the surface.)

epicide 7y ago
So basically Tinder for Recruiters? On the surface, it sounds useful, but also like Tinder, would've likely been abused.
- taneq 7y ago
  More like a creepy(er) LinkedIn.