If I know you and can actually vouch for you, I’ll happily make any intro where I stand to gain nothing.
I somewhat frequently get a cold outreach asking me to recommend someone I’ve never met to something/someone I know and I can’t understand how that ever works.
Random example but I was working with an algae biofuel company during the cleantech boom and we were having analysis problems as the equipment we were using kept fouling due to the harsh desert conditions where our ponds were. I was at a birthday party and obliquely mentioned that issue to a friend who had asked how it was all going and before I knew it, he'd called his former coworker who'd founded a company that successfully launched similar equipment to Mars which was obviously not user-serviceable so was built to be extremely robust. There was no 'ask' from anyone involved and nobody got richer from the exchange, but it was just a random occasion to connect people who might find each other interesting that was completely common in my SV experience.
If you were knowledgeable enough to move to the Valley, if you had the wealth and connections to move to the Valley, then you already passed some of the checks needed to be someone who would be a sufficiently good bet to introduce.
It might already be the case that the Valley has changed to be more similar to the East.
East coast is more of an introduction, with the implied vouch. Setting up a business relationship.
My understanding is that homelessness in California is a business similar to dating apps (tinder etc).
If dating apps would actually find you a partner, they would all go out of business. So dating apps mainly keep you on the hook, fishing for subscriptions.
If you erradicate homelessness all these jobs woudlnt exist.
Do you think your tax money really goes to get people out of the streets?
California's ruling class is a landed gentry of boomers that all bought into the housing market before Prop 13 froze their tax rates in place. They will weaponize anything to stop any construction which they think might lower their property values. Hell, Beverly Hills used their school district in order to launch a frivolous lawsuit against the LA Metro D line expansion, because Beverly Hills is full of rich idiots who think public transit ruins property values[0].
So California can't get rid of homelessness - not because it means the homeless shelters[1] will be out of a job, but because homeless people are the natural consequence of making housing unaffordably expensive. The only actual solution to homelessness is the one thing California will never do on pain of death. The homeless shelters are there to create moral cover for NIMBYs making the city too expensive to live in. So the homeless shelters aren't ripping off the shitlibs; the shitlibs are paying them to sweep the problem under the rug, and they are dutifully doing so.
[0] Cars ruin property values, because cars require lots of very expensive infrastructure like highways and stroads, and nobody wants to live or shop next to a giant pollution generator. In contrast, access to public transit increases land value! But the California gentry all drive so they don't care about this.
[1] Please interpret "homeless shelters" to mean "any government agency involved with homelessness management". Technically speaking SF has a lot of unsheltered homeless because, well, living unsheltered is just not as hellishly awful as it is in other cities.
In SV, in the 90s/00s, no one wanted anything in return. Everyone was there to help. We all understood that the entrepreneur’s path is a nearly impossible one, and if you have somehow followed it to success, you want to try to guide others to that successful place.
After ~20 years I’ve left SV but I retain the mentality :) AMA
I stepped away nearly a decade ago so I don’t know how true that is for the tech “scene” today, but it was really great and inspiring for a very young transplant like me.