OP #259: Deep Dive on Leveraging Your Network

An in-depth piece on enabling and accessing your personal network using technology.

Author

Darren Herman
May 28, 2024


Happy Tuesday OP Community-

I hope you had a nice Memorial Day Weekend (if you are in the US). I spent some quality time with friends and family in a super low key way. My vegetable garden is now planted and that’s where you’ll find me taking phone calls in the summer and tending to the plants. I never thought I’d enjoy tending a garden but I’m slowing getting a green thumb and find it very zenlike.

This OP is a bit different than others I’ve sent. I went deep on one particular topic which is near and dear to me: enabling and accessing your professional network. I can’t stress how important this is in business and those who invest and build their network in a real and meaningful way will have advantages.

I believe the saying is true: it’s not always what you know, it’s who you know.

I hope you enjoy the modified format this week. Please let me know as it’ll help me understand if this works for future OP letters.

But before we kick off, here is the quick-links section that you’ve come to expect from the OP:

⚡ On June 5, I’ll be paneling at the Boston June Generative AI Meetup, hosted by my friend Judah. The event is hosted in Cambridge at the MIT/Microsoft NERD campus.  I’ll be alongside Klieda Martiro (Glasswing), Mike Gualtieri (Forrester), Jason Burke (TBD Angels), and others to be announced.  If you are interested in attending, I have 5 free passes to giveaway. You can use the following code at checkout: DARREN100OFF.  Hit me up if you are planning on attending and would love to say hi. Sign-up here.

💡 Bain Capital Ventures has a nice piece on Crunchbase about how they incubate AI out of their lab. To date, they’ve made four seed investments from this incubation.

Here are a few articles to get us started:

Thank YOU for reading. If you received this OP letter from a friend and want to sign up, you can do so here.

Darren

Enabling and Accessing Your Professional Network: The Next Generation of Network Management

I'm going to say something potentially controversial: out of all the business apps and platforms, LinkedIn is my #1 go-to tool.

I've been on LinkedIn for as long as I can remember and even pay for the Premium features. I get immense value from the platform and usually always have a LinkedIn tab or two open in my browser. A quick Perplexity search tells me that LinkedIn has over 1 billion members worldwide and over 67 million companies on the platform.

I use LinkedIn to search for talent, learn about companies, and increasingly, to consume content posted by those I follow. When searching for talent, I'm constantly on the lookout for great people for our portfolio companies, conducting in-network searches, and learning about the backgrounds of people I'm about to meet.

LinkedIn excels in several areas, as mentioned above. However, I'd like more from LinkedIn, and they aren't delivering what I need as a customer.

I've previously discussed the need for a personal CRM tool in this OP and explored better ways to understand and leverage my existing network for talent needs as an employer or hiring partner for my portfolio companies.

As with any industry, if the titan (LinkedIn) doesn’t address consumer needs, someone else will.

I've met hundreds of executive search firms over the years, and they all operate the same way: you're essentially buying the network of the partner handling your search. If you have a great relationship with the right partner, you’ll likely have a great experience. But I've always kept an eye out for a truly innovative search firm that does things differently.

Enter the Hunt Club.

For the past five years, I've used the Chicago and Boston-based Hunt Club for various professional and executive searches across the portfolio. I was introduced to them by OP subscriber and friend, Dave Knox, who sits on their board.

At the core of Hunt Club is a technology platform called Atlas. This platform helps Hunt Club find the right talent for a particular search, secure introductions to talent from their “expert network,” and, in turn, expedite and broaden searches. Some of the best talent I've hired for my portfolio companies came from Hunt Club, as their platform identified candidates other firms might have overlooked.

Okay, enough of a commercial for Hunt Club—let's bring this back to LinkedIn.

As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn is missing some key features that I need. And that's okay; maybe LinkedIn doesn't want to address these specific needs. I hold no ill will here.

Recently, Atlas has been made available outside of Hunt Club as a platform anyone can use to manage their network, run their own light CRM, etc. Is it perfect? Not yet. Is it pointing in the right direction? Absolutely, in my opinion. Is it relevant for OP subscribers? Yup.

One of my good friends, Cammy Keiler, runs CX for Atlas so I sent her an email for an inside OP scoop which y’all might find interesting. I told her this is not an advertisement or paid promotion but rather, learnings that the OP community may find useful.

The good news is that Cammy opened Atlas up for Operating Partner subscribers. Read to the bottom to find out how to access it.

Below is our asynchronous interview.

Darren: What is Atlas?
Cammy: Atlas, developed by Hunt Club, is a trusted relationships product originally designed to enhance the executive search firm's customer and candidate interactions. Now available to any organization, Atlas centralizes and organizes your team's collective networks, transforming contacts into dynamic, actionable data. This enables you to uncover the warmest paths to key individuals who can drive your business forward. Imagine a beautifully organized database of every valuable relationship your company holds, complete with features to tag, automate, and fully leverage those connections.

Darren: Why did you build it – what was the spark/insight that led to the development?
Cammy: From the beginning, Hunt Club focused on using the power of its network to support customers and grow its business. As the company expanded, managing this network became more challenging. They identified three key solutions to their problems that led to the creation of Atlas:

  1. Centralize everyone in the network, including experts, candidates, clients, shareholders, and friends.

  2. Make it easy to search for connections with the right experience for various business and talent needs.

  3. Find the best warm introduction to the right connection.

When we shared our technology with customers, we realized Atlas could help any network-oriented organization tap into their team's trusted relationships. Over the past two years, we rebuilt Atlas based on customer feedback to improve enrichment and usability. Today's Atlas is designed to help organizations and professionals easily manage, collaborate with, and expand their networks.

Darren: Who is the primary ICP? Secondary ICP?
Cammy: The primary Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for Atlas includes network-first organizations, such as venture capital firms and growing companies that need to engage their networks effectively for various business purposes. For instance, when a founder asks an investor, “Do you know anyone who can help me ___?”, Atlas allows the investor to easily search and share a list of relevant contacts. Some firms even provide their founders with direct access to Atlas, enabling them to find the right connections, request introductions, and proceed efficiently. Unlike LinkedIn, Atlas offers clearer visibility into the actual relationships between the introducer and the target contact.

The secondary ICP includes enterprise sales teams and smaller startups or growth-stage companies that recognize the strategic value of leveraging their networks for sales, fundraising, and talent acquisition.

Darren: What immediate value does a user receive?
Cammy: Syncing your personal network with Atlas is an incredibly satisfying experience. It centralizes your contacts, showing the most relevant data without the clutter of a messy content feed. Many people are unaware of their own reach, especially across different fields, job functions, or companies at various growth stages. By creating your own personal Atlas instance—available for free—you can see the power of organizing your network. You can create lists of reliable contacts for various personal and professional needs. Once added, profiles are enriched with additional data, revealing insights and ensuring information stays up-to-date.

For teams, Atlas offers even greater value by visualizing the strengths of their collective network. Teams can automate the monitoring of network growth as new people sync their information into Atlas. Key benefits include centralizing the team network, mapping relationships to business goals, and identifying the warmest paths to the most important contacts for the business.

Darren: What does the next 90 days look like for Atlas?
Cammy: Currently, our focus is on enhancing our data strength and improving the user experience, especially around list-making and collaboration. Soon, contacts will enrich within seconds rather than minutes, and you'll have the ability to edit profile data and use Smart Search (e.g., "biotech CMOs connected to me in Boston"). We are also releasing mobile access, recognizing that network growth often happens away from the computer. After perfecting these features, we'll work on integrating Atlas seamlessly into our customers' complex workflows.

Our long-term vision is to create the ultimate relationship source of record—one that values your privacy, allows you to take your network anywhere, and significantly boosts your personal "enterprise value" through a well-organized and actionable network.

Cammy is offering 1:1 time to learn how to use Atlas: personally or for your company: https://calendly.com/cammy-k/30min or, click here to sign-up for your own personal account which is what I’m using too.

Again, this was not a paid promotion.  This was inspired by the top b2b tool that I use, LinkedIn, not meeting a need for me, so I found Hunt Club, and I wanted to share their tool.

For the OP Community, I’d love to know your relationship management tools and can share them back out with everyone. Ping me with an email.

Also, do you happen to like these longer in-depth posts?

The below links are articles that I read during the past week. I am sharing them because I think they are interesting. I may not agree with everything in every article. If you come across an article that you might think I or the OP community would like, I encourage you to reach out and share it. I reserve the right to select whether or not it gets shared in the OP.

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