Initiatives
AI Superconnectors
Every member gets one, and so does every colleague. It works for you alone, and it cannot pass on what you told it.
The introduction that never gets made
Most of what a business needs is held by somebody it has not met. The distributor two economies away. The buyer who has spent a year looking for what you already make. The engineer who solved your problem in 2023.
Putting those two people in a room in the right week is worth a great deal, and almost nothing does it well. Referrals do, and they do not scale: a good connector holds a few hundred relationships and gives away an hour a week.
The professional networks fixed the size of the problem and none of the rest. People post what makes them look employable, not what they need, and the volume passed what anybody reads years ago.
What your Superconnector does
It is an agent with a name, assigned to one person in one job. It reads what your company does, asks what you are trying to achieve, and keeps the answer as a list you can edit.
Then it works while you do not. It watches who joined, who moved, who started exporting, who is hiring in Nairobi, and compares that against your goals every hour, rather than when you next open something.
What reaches you is short. Two or three names a week, each with a sentence saying why this one and why now. You answer yes or no. Yes becomes an introduction or a seat at a dinner. Saying no costs you nothing and teaches it something.
It works for you alone, not for us and not for the other side.
It cannot pass on what you told it
This is the part that matters, and the reason you can tell it the awkward thing. Your Superconnector never sends your details, your terms or your position to another member. It sends a question to that member’s Superconnector.
Two agents meet in private. Each holds what its own member needs and can offer. They compare the two without either one disclosing it, and come out with one sentence: there is an overlap worth a human’s time, or there is not. Neither member sees the other’s position, and neither agent keeps it.
Salary is the clean example of the mechanism. Neither side will say a number first, so the two agents take both numbers into a sealed room and come out saying only that the ranges overlap.
What one Superconnector asks another for is consideration, never acceptance. It can ask that a case be weighed. It cannot buy a meeting, and no member is obliged to take one. So a stranger with a budget cannot arrive in your inbox: the budget buys an agent’s attention, and your agent still says no on your behalf.
Alvin Roth calls this safe disclosure, and it is the condition business introductions have always failed. It is one of three, and they are below.
The sealed room. Two agents, two sealed positions, one sentence out.
Why introductions are a market, and a broken one
There are two kinds of market. Commodity markets clear on price: gold, oil, orange juice, where a buyer takes the cheapest seller and nobody asks who anybody is. Matching markets clear on price and on who will have whom. Jobs are one. University places, housing and marriage are others. So are business relationships, which is the one we are in.
The second kind clears badly, and it fails in a way nobody measures. A partnership that does not form is not lost to a competitor. It does not happen at all, so it appears in no accounts, and the two companies never learn what they missed.
The scale of the loss is not knowable, which is why we do not put a number on it. What is knowable is the shape: most companies could name five relationships that would change their year, and cannot name the people.
Two traders, one crowd, and each holding what the other came for.
Roth’s three conditions
Alvin Roth shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics with Lloyd Shapley for 40 years of work on how matching markets clear, and on how to repair them when they do not. He redesigned the American medical residency match and the New York school system. Three conditions have to hold at once, and the professional networks have the third without the first two: billions of participants, almost nobody saying what they need, and a volume of posts past what anybody reads.
Safety. It has to be safe to say what you actually want, including the part that is awkward to write down. A market where everybody edits themselves matches people on what they were willing to publish. Your Superconnector works for you alone and never passes on what you told it, which is the section above.
Decongestion. Something has to weigh more options than a person can. Ten thousand companies is 50m possible pairs. The agents hold thousands of those comparisons an hour and what reaches you is two or three names a week.
Thickness. Enough participants in the same place at the same time. We have least of this and it is the one code cannot buy. It is why membership is open to any company in an open economy, why peer learning and the summits exist, and why the network is worth more to you in a year than today.
Two of the three are engineering problems. The third is a reason to join early.
What it is not
It is not a chatbot you have to remember to open. Most weeks you read four sentences from it and answer one.
It is not a directory with a search box. A search finds what you already knew to look for, and the valuable match is usually in an industry you would not have searched.
It is not a person. It says so when asked, it says plainly when it does not know something, and it does not claim to have met anybody.
One each, per job
Each person at a member company gets their own, in that job. Your colleagues have theirs, and none of them can read your goals. Change employer and you get a new one, because the old one belonged to the old job.
You name it, and it signs its messages with that name. Members end up talking about theirs by name, which is the point of giving it one.
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