Tom Friel: How to Network

[Music] we talk a lot about networks most people don't have any idea how big their networks in fact really are your networks are enormous i mean you start with the people in the room you start with everybody they know you start with people that they know you you look at graduates of stanford you know people that they know the places that they've worked before you know it you can define your network literally as being hundreds of thousands of people because any any anybody who can make a connection to somebody that might be willing to help you is in fact part of your network and you may not even know who they are but they're part of your network and you can make that work for you if you want to meet somebody somebody usually somebody in the stanford business school alumni community will make that introduction for you if you can figure out the right way to get to them and the right way to ask that question gsb alums will usually help i'll make this point because i i always make it and that is almost anybody is going to be willing to help you i'd be willing to help you your classmates will be willing to help you your professors and alumni will be willing to help you but very few of them are going to be willing to do your homework for you and so an example if you call me and say tom i want to get into you know i don't know venture capital would you introduce me to some venture capitalists what that's a lazy question okay but if you said i've got two years in the venture capital industry and i worked on a project that you know you know josh green at more davidow is a board member of i know you know josh because i know you work with him on a board would you be willing to introduce me to josh uh josh green so that i could have a conversation about this project that i know he's interested in okay that now the night and day those two questions the first one general requires work on my part and i'm not going to go do a lot of work to try to figure out what you could have figured out and didn't but the second one if if i believe that that's a very credible question it takes me about 30 seconds to pop off an email to josh and say look this is somebody i think i think you ought to meet and they've they've specifically picked you out of the hundreds or thousands of venture capital people because of your experience in this company and they're interested in that and they think they have something to add would you meet with them for you know 15 20 minutes specific on the one hand general on the other hand as i said pick specific targets make specific requests and if somebody does you a favor particularly somebody who didn't have any reason to do it other than they were just trying to help you after the thing is done you met with joshua water go back send them an email and tell them what happened hey i met with josh thanks for setting that up i'm not sure what's going to come out of it but i really appreciate it we're going to stay in touch thank you believe me that will pay dividends later first of all it's just good common courtesy if somebody did something for you that they didn't have to do to call them up and thank them and tell them what happened because they're probably curious it also leaves that door open to go back to him again in the future because they've got a good good feeling about you this is somebody that handled that right and they'd be willing to go do another favor for you down the road whereas you know i've got a lot of people i i won't name them maybe i will later if you but who seems like every couple of years would call me up and say tom it's been so long since we've talked i would want i really wanted to get back to you and see how you were doing well i'm doing fine how are you doing well i you know i didn't work out i was looking for a job well what happened with the last thing that you called me about two years ago that you never came back and told me what happened about that and you know maybe i'll be polite to them maybe i won't more likely they don't somehow i'm out of town or something when that call comes in and and my ea just handles it and it never sees the light of day stay connected to the people who've helped you [Music]

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Views: 16,882

Rating: 4.9694266 out of 5

Keywords: stanford, stanford gsb, stanford graduate school of business, mba

Id: rW-Ui6j60AM

Length: 4min 33sec (273 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021