[ghaff]

I did a few calls with an expert network firm once upon a time when I was an analyst. My limited experience was that they were really looking for inside information rather than broader insights and a lot of product companies actually forbid engaging with them.

Super-well paid is a matter of perspective. As I recall it was about $500 for an hour call but it's not like I personally got all that and was pretty normal as a consulting rate.

[neom]

Mine as after DigitalOcean went public, I was long gone from it, they mostly wanted to talk about where cloud is going (would managed hosting/ftp hosts go away, what do you think will happen to the front end, blah bah blah) - They paid me hourly well over an order of magnitude more than what you were paid, heh. :)