See your Career as a Product

Optimizing on building your network before having a rare & valuable skill/knowledge base is like focusing on growth before product-market fit. Nail the product first.

Every great product should have a moat, and careers are no different.

Product Tropes that Apply to Careers: Capitalize on unfair advantages, insights, or relationships. Disrupt orthogonally, often from below—try not to compete head on. When you’re younger, take more market risk; when you’re more experienced, take execution risk.

It is yet (yet!) another thing to be well *respected* among these strategic networks — as in, they not only like you, they deeply respect you and would, say, let you invest in their company at better terms, pay you for your expertise, or some other metaphorical equivalent.

Loops, in other words, are what lead to sustainable, compounding, growth. In a career context, this means asking: “What are the things you can do today which make it easier to obtain your desired resources and career opportunities tomorrow, in a way that’s defensible and compounds overtime?”

Knowledge and skills is another great loop to attract the other loops. Unique network access and strength? Knowledge and skills allows you to build this as well. Specialized knowledge and skills makes brand legibility much easier too.

It’s one thing to be widely networked. Another thing to be strategically networked. And yet another to have created networks that compound over time (e.g Thiel Fellowship, Paul Graham and YC).

You’ll need the “minimum viable money” to keep going and not have to take a job that doesn’t increase your specialized knowledge & skills. You’ll want the “minimum viable network”, to know the right people to help, and the “minimum viable legibility (reputation)” to get them to care.

do find your tribe of collaborators and go deep with a handful, involving them in the value building process — developing skills, building something together, etc.)

networks are heat-seeking missiles for value. Provide the value, and the network is there.

the best companies not only understand their “funnels” (where their users are coming from and convert down the stack), but also their loops (the process by which one cohort of users not only retains but leads to an additional cohort of users).