[jayruy]

Ridiculously techno-centric comment. You cannot replace trust with a shell script. IT has the profound ability to tell us, with amazing detail, the state of the world today. But business planning is done based on the future, and that requires trust.

Even if you are "building the future" in a startup: if you've taken funding or are drawing salary, you've convinced someone about a possible future state of the world, and that requires trust.

[derefr]

I was responding to the original statement that "a lot of business transactions are done in the real world based on connections, phone calls and socialising." My comment was basically that these transactions are frequently done with agents and proxies that provide no service on their own, beyond acting as gatekeepers that must be convinced with steak dinners, hired escorts, etc., to "trust" you. They are in a position to do this because they have earned the trust of the people you really want to reach, and now abuse that trust by only putting through those that offer payola.

These people should be avoided; the best thing to do is to find the real customer—the person who makes the decision, not to pass your idea on, but to accept or reject it—and gain their trust (which is frequently much simpler, since they're much closer to the product/service and know what's actually good for it.)

Frequently, this will make the middle-men angry, and they will strike back by trying to ruin your image in the eyes of their contact (who, you recall, trusts them.) This is why most people choose to stick with the steak-dinners-and-strippers route.