The Operating System
14 Talent Play

Build a Network by Being Genuinely Helpful

Treat your network as your highest-leverage long-term asset, and build it by helping people generously and early, especially before they've made it.

An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can.

In How To Be Successful, Altman frames your network as a compounding asset and gives a concrete way to grow it: help people as much as you can, early and without an immediate ask. Introductions, advice, and small favors accrue into the relationships that later unlock deals and hires. He’s blunt about the payoff, too: “the size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish.”

His YC years were the machine. Thousands of founders passed through Y Combinator on his watch; a great many he later backed, recruited, or was recruited by. The helping and the harvesting were the same activity, run over a decade.

Doesn’t transfer at the same rate. Altman’s generosity flowed through the single best deal-flow funnel in tech. “Help people and build a network” is true, but it undersells how much of his network was a structural gift of the seat he held. The same favors, done without that platform, compound far more slowly.