[iamelgringo]

Location matters. Even if you're boot strapping. I'm boot strapping Hackers & Founders.

In the past three months, I've met a CEO of a 300 person gaming company, M&A execs from Fortune 500's, Engineer[0] from Google Finance, the head of the Singularity Institute, artists that make 2 story flaming sculptures, an architect that works on computational architecture, a man who built a battery that charges in 10 minutes that is currently in use by Special Forces in Afghanistan, a former Yahoo VP, a VP from AT&T, the CTO of America and the man who wrote the Jobs bill... a person on the US Council of Foreign Relations, a man who helped the Arab spring flower in Egypt...

That's not to brag. I've simply been extremely deliberate about networking over the past 5 years.

In Silicon Valley, even after being here for 6 months. You probably don't realize it, but you're only 2 or 3 degrees of separation from everyone else who's really, really impressive in town.

To that density, add a culture that places an extremely high value on helping others out, and you have something amazing.

[a5seo]

Are there any practical (mathematical?) techniques to measure "openness" of a startup community's network?

You may be 2-3 degrees from John Doerr, but the question is, could you actually get a meeting with him?

Just my intuition, having lived in the Valley (8 years) and Austin (10 years) is that the Bay Area gets a B- for openness, compared to Austin which gets an A-.

[iamelgringo]

You may be 2-3 degrees from John Doerr, but the question is, could you actually get a meeting with him?

That depends.

Adam Rifkin, the founder of the 106 Miles meetup and pretty kick ass nice guy and serial entrepreneur, was funded 12 years ago by Kliener Perkins. So, if you got to Adam's meetup, and bump into him, you're now 1 degree of separation away from John Doerr.

So, if you take Adam out to coffee, and talk to him about getting an introduction to John, Adam can certainly provide an into to John, but he's far more likely to talk to you, get a feel for what you're doing, and then provide introductions to 10 other investors and amazing people that could probably provide as much or more value than John Doer.

Good question.

There's also a very strong culture in Silicon Valley of "quality introductions".

The perceived value of a person's personal network in Silicon Valley is directly proportional to the quality of introductions that person can make to others. (Read: matching person to investor)

[iamelgringo]

Also, I've also thought of Silicon Valley investor, operator and notables networks as a type of graph problem. And, I've often thought of working towards a specific introduction as a type of graph traversal problem.

What node foo in this graph do I need to connect to? What nodes bar[] surround foo? What is the strength of each edge connecting bar[node] to foo?

Getting from node baz to node foo is recursive:

Get_to_Node_Foo( node baz ): Look at all the edges and nodes surrounding baz. Are you next to foo? Ask for intro. Else, move to the node that seems closest to foo. get_to_node_Foo( that_new_node ).