Publishing research and insights online increased the speaker's chances of meeting influential people like Marc Andreessen and Gary Tan. He cites examples: an AI researcher's bottleneck post that caught top investors' attention, and his own conference meetings that grew from his online presence. Consistent public sharing and event attendance amplified these networking effects.
Honestly, you might think it's too late to create content today, but it's not because we talk about, like Gary Vee likes to talk about, it's no longer social media, it's interest media. So if you post something that's really good, people are going to follow you and they're going to want to meet with you. So I'll give you an example here. Neil, remember how I just showed you those stocks, the one that jumped like 8,000% in a year? That's from a guy. I just saw his post on X and he just started posting. He does a lot of research on all the AI bottleneck stuff and he literally has a website called aibottlenecks.app or something. Yeah. He just started posting and he has some of the best investors in the world following him now because he publishes interesting stuff. To him, it wasn't that interesting before, but he lives his life all the time. But when he started making it public, he started, you know, people like to say increasing your surface area of luck. And so even if you might not be doing really interesting research right now, even if you're an intern right now or you're in college right now, share your experience of learning whatever it is that you're working on, build in public, and then people are naturally going to want to associate themselves with you. So for example, my best friend Marc Andreessen or my best friend Gary Tan, for example, from YC or Andreessen Horowitz, that's because I've created content. Neil, the way I got acquainted with Neil was because he used to have a blog called Quick Sprout, and I really enjoyed his content around how he spent X amount of dollars on clothes or how he spent on this and that and how it generated Y ROI. But being more serious here, he wrote a lot of stuff around SEO. And then one time I thought he was making something up, so I emailed him. Yeah. And then that's how our relationship started. And it started on Skype, right? But here's the other thing, as you create more and more content, you're producing things, you're kind of building in public. Maybe as an example, Neil, like let's say you're speaking at a conference in Mexico, or I'm speaking at a conference in Germany. One time I spoke at a conference in Germany and one guy hit me up and he's like, hey, I've been a fan of your work for a very long time, let's meet up. We met up, we had great German food, right? And it was a— that was cool, right? You never know what happens with these things. So the content piece is great. I think putting events together is great too, going to events, hanging out with people too.
