The intro that took two years to set up

A guy I used to work with messaged me in March. He'd just been laid off. Director level, fifteen years in, the kind of background that's supposed to open doors on its own. He wanted to know who I knew at three companies he was targeting, and whether I'd put in a word.

Here's the awkward part. I barely knew him.

We overlapped on one project at Panso, a few years back. He was good at it. But we hadn't spoken since, not once. So when he asked me to vouch for him to people I actually trust, I had to be straight with him. I could make the intro. But it would be a cold intro with my name stapled to it, and that's worth almost nothing. The person on the other end reads "Manav says you should talk to this guy" and hears "Manav met this guy once, years ago." They're not wrong to.

That's the part nobody tells you about networking. The withdrawal only works if you made the deposit. And most people try to withdraw on day one of a job search, from accounts they never funded.

I get why. When you're employed and busy, staying in touch with someone you don't currently need feels like a low priority. It is, in the moment. The cost shows up later, all at once, on the worst possible week.

Let me tell you about the other side of this.

Around the same time, a former colleague from my Subziwalla years reached out. Completely different energy. She wasn't asking for anything. She'd seen something I posted, had a sharp disagreement with part of it, and told me why. We went back and forth in the DMs for twenty minutes. It was a good argument. I learned something.

That was the third or fourth time in two years she'd done something like that. A comment here, a "this made me think of you" article there, a quick note when something I built shipped. Tiny deposits. None of them transactional.

So when she eventually mentions she's exploring a move, and asks if I know anyone in a particular space, I don't hesitate. I'll spend real social capital on her, because she's real to me. The relationship has a balance in it. I can make the warm intro and mean it, and the person I send her to can feel that I mean it. That's the only kind of intro that actually moves anything.

Here's what I want you to take from the contrast.

A referral is not a favor you ask for. It's a balance you draw down. The size of the favor someone will do for you is capped by how much of a relationship is actually there. You can't fake the balance at the moment of withdrawal. People can smell an account that was opened yesterday.

Which makes the work counterintuitive. The best time to build your network is when you don't need it. The worst time, the time almost everyone actually does it, is the week after a layoff, when every message you send has "I need something" radiating off it, even when you don't say the words.

So what does a deposit look like, practically? It's smaller than you think.

It's reading what someone posts and replying with something real, not "great post." It's remembering what someone was working on and asking how it went, six weeks later, with no agenda. It's sending the article that genuinely made you think of them. It's congratulating the promotion before you need anything from the promoted person. It's being useful to people who, on paper, can do nothing for you right now.

None of this is a tactic. The second it becomes a tactic, it reads as one, and it stops working. People can tell the difference between "I'm investing in this relationship" and "I'm farming this relationship for a future ask." The first one builds a balance. The second one quietly drains it.

I'll be honest about my own scorecard. I'm decent at this with some people and genuinely bad at it with others. The guy who messaged me in March? I could have been the person funding that account for the last three years. I wasn't. That's on me as much as it's on him. The lesson cuts both ways.

If you're reading this and you're not currently searching, you're in the rare and valuable spot of being able to make deposits with no withdrawal in sight. Use it. Pick five people whose work you respect, who you've lost touch with, and do one small, genuine thing for each of them this month. Not a pitch. Not a "let's catch up" that's really a setup. Just contact that costs you something and asks for nothing.

If you're reading this and you are searching, the move is different but not hopeless. Stop trying to withdraw from empty accounts. Make the smallest possible deposit first. Engage with something the person actually cares about before you get anywhere near the ask. It won't feel fast. It isn't. But a small real deposit beats a large fake withdrawal every time.

The mistake is thinking the network is a thing you have. It's a thing you've been funding, or not, for years. The balance is already what it is by the time you need it.