Name Dropping in Silicon Valley

By Larry Chiang

I get this town. I’m am an alpha figure in this economic ecosystem because of 650 little little things. 20-30 ya know about because you heard from a friend of a friend. The other 640 I blogged but you don’t know because you haven’t read em.

One of the little things is a douchie thing to the uninitiated: Name dropping.

Think of Silicon Valley as one big rolodex, messy shuffle, six deck shoe, Vegas scale messy. If you are direct-hearing a name getting “dropped”: think of it as game-on

For example, lets say you hear me say the legendary Stanford educator: Tom Kosnik.

Bamm!

Ask and notate for that email intro. Want John Raisian from Hoover Institute… ASK!!

Want Bob Bowlsby from Stanford Athletics?… ASK Landry Fields via twitter!!

Want Cameron Teitelman from StartX… ASK!!

Want Tina Seelig from STVP… ASK!!

Silicon Valley is the only town where you can stop into Keplers to pee and walk out with five email addresses and two dinner invites, 3 party leads.

Accelerated networking.

In other towns, people protect their list of contacts. Me?! I’ll send the text of a legendary VC’s text message machine to an undergrad cs major with the confidence to call me.

On Quora, I was accused of name dropping. This is a collateral casualty

– Do not be impressed at who I know or what presidents cell phone I have memorized 312-804-xxxx. Leverage who I know.

– This town has super fast risers and fallers. A tad of persistence gets you pretty far, pretty quickly.

– Sprinkle in some hustle by pre-reading. Good news kids: no one does networking foreplay. One-click-banging doesn’t work in the supermodel world and it doesn’t work in networking with names that get dropped. Solution = make it multi stepped.

Name drop my name and brag that you toggle and control me via your text message machine. It’s also known as my iPhone 9.

How?!

Start by posting a picture of you with my mentors book on social media. For example:

https://twitter.com/jessedesigns/status/192741305120595969

https://twitter.com/thepbxguy/status/192709243470741504

Then notify me. You know how to reach me.

CEO of Duck9 Stanford University EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence)

Duck9 = Deep Underground Credit Knowledge 9 125 University Avenue/ 100 Palo Alto CA 94301 http://www.duck9.com/ass 650-566-9600 650-566-9696 (direct) 650-283-8008 (cell)

**************** Editor of the BusinessWeek Channel “What They Don’t Teach at Business School” http://whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.com/blog CNN Video Channel: http://ireport.cnn.com/people/larrychiang

Read my last 10 tweets at http://www.Twitter.com/LarryChiang

Author, NY Times Bestseller http://whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.com/blog/?s=Ny+times+bestseller

“What They Will NEVER Teach You at Stanford Business School” comes out 11-11-12

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