How to network in a ‘non-icky way’

CAROLINE DELL: You have about 1500 names to faces that your brain can remember, your barista, the president of the United States, other celebrities, like there’s just all these people floating around. And anyone beyond that roughly 1500, you don’t remember them. And that’s just the reality of the human brain. But that is where we think technology can augment your memory. It doesn’t need to take out the human thing. You can still go and be your super connector self and make an introduction between that student and that startup executive. But the search and the recall and the memory is something that we can use AI to help augment our human brain.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: This is Caroline Dell, co-founder and CEO of a new AI startup called Goodword. They’re developing a networking co-pilot. Think of it as your own personal superconnector. It not only knows every single person in your network, but it also helps you build stronger relationships with them.

DELL: I think being human means being in relationship with other humans. Harvard did a study that followed people for 85 years to see what was the number one predictor of longevity. And, you know, we think about things like don’t smoke or have a healthy lifestyle.

But the number one thing was the quality of your relationships.

EL KALIOUBY: There’s a lot of talk about how AI will make the world less personal, but on this episode, we explore how AI can actually bring people together.

Caroline and I get into why professional relationships are more important than ever, how AI can help you build stronger connections, and pro tips on networking.

I’m Rana el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI – a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

[THEME MUSIC]

Caroline, I am so excited to have you on the show. We first met at the Masters of Scale Summit last year. How was that experience for you?

DELL: Oh, it was fantastic. And a great example of the power of connections, right? I was standing, waiting for the shuttle bus with one of my existing investors, Leslie, from Graham and Walker. And you walked by in a fabulous white suit. And Leslie said, Rana and Caroline, have you met? And we went, we have not met. And here we are a few months later, so great content, of course. But as we know, it’s all about the people and it brought us together.

EL KALIOUBY: It did bring us together and I have to share that I got talking to Caroline and I just got enamored by what you’re building at Good Word. And I ended up investing just before the holidays. So I’m very excited to be an investor and part of your journey.

DELL: We are so happy to have you part of the cap table. I loved your work around Emotion AI. It’s really interesting. When we first came up with the idea for Good Word, we had this sort of nugget of like, it’s sort of like EQ meets AI, and we were playing with this idea of it’s not just the technology, it’s the emotional human part of relationships that matters. So when we met and we heard your backstory and your belief that we need to humanize technology before it dehumanizes us, it felt very much in line with what we’re building at Good Word.

Copy LinkHow building Chief revealed the hidden power of professional relationships

EL KALIOUBY: You spent a number of years building Chief, which is this network for women professionals to get together. I am curious, what did you take away from that experience that kind of influenced what you’re building at Good Word?

DELL: Yeah, that’s a great question.

So Chief is a network for executive level women, and I joined as the head of strategy and operations in very early days when there were only 200 members in a single clubhouse in Tribeca and was with that business through our growth and scale to 20,000 members across the US. It was really incredibly magical when you brought people together and saw how career transforming those connections could be.

One of my favorite stories was a member who got her dream job and she said, I never even would have applied. You know, not only that, I wouldn’t have gotten it, I wouldn’t have even applied if someone in my coaching group at Chief hadn’t said, hey, I know the hiring manager. I’ll put in a good word for you.

And she applied and she got it. And so those stories were frequent, right? The magic of relationships. But there was also the tragedy in that those moments are hard to scale, right? And there was this feeling of, I’m part of this great community. How do I find the perfect person at the perfect moment?

And I think that experience is what really lit the spark for Good Word. The idea that, look, you know that corny saying your network is your net worth. It’s true, but nobody actually knows how to maintain and activate their network in the moments that matter.

Copy LinkWhy your network matters more than ever at work

EL KALIOUBY: All right, so I love this line. Your network is your net worth. And I wanna unpack that and specifically, what problem is Good Word trying to solve?

DELL: Yeah, it’s funny, I don’t know whether I love it or whether I should cringe, ’cause it is true and it’s cheesy but true. And maybe that’s what makes it memorable, but Good Word is solving this broad feeling that we all have of, we’re living in a time where we’re more connected than ever before, right?

We have more contacts, we have more LinkedIn connections, we have more people in our phone book, our digital phone book. Yet we’re feeling a growing gap in that human to human connection. There’s a lot of people talking about the loneliness epidemic and how relationships are the number one predictor of longevity.

What’s interesting is when people talk about that, they often think about friends and family, and friends and family are incredibly important. But as professionals, we actually spend most of our waking hours at work. And so what would the world look like if we were more connected, in community, in stronger relationships with our professionals who maybe went on to be friends and, you know, you work together again, or they refer someone or they do put in a good word, they make that introduction. And so that’s what we’re really building, is technology that at its core strengthens human relationships.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. And of course, people who know me will know that this is absolutely within my kind of investment thesis and things I really care about. It’s this idea that we can use AI not to take away from human relationships, but to actually augment and amplify these human connections. So I would say I’m a super connector.

I love connecting people. It literally gives me this feeling of just fulfillment and joy. But it is a mess. So, as you said, I actually have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn, which at some point I reached out to LinkedIn and I was like, I wanna have more connections. And they were like, this is the maximum.

Yeah, this is the maximum number. And then I have my WhatsApp groups and my text messages and my calendars. It’s a real mess. I love hopping on calls with people, especially young people who are, you know, fresh graduates and they’re like, I am looking for a job opportunity at an AI startup in the healthcare space.

I know a lot of these people, but it’s so hard to tap into my brain, like, to actually summon the right introductions. So how is Good Word tackling this problem? Is this the problem Good Word is tackling?

DELL: Yes, it is one of the main problems. And actually what you’re describing, it’s not just you, although you have a really big network built over many decades of work in this field. It’s human psychology. And so if you’ve ever heard of Dunbar’s theory, Robin Dunbar is a psychologist out of Oxford who researched and coined the term Dunbar’s theory, which is that you only have about 150 friends. But what’s interesting is that your relationships actually exist in rings, and so it’s 150 people. You know, the common, oh, we had a wedding, it’s 150 people. But you have people who are broader out, you have about 500 acquaintances.

You have about 1500 names to faces that your brain can remember, your barista, the president of the United States, other celebrities, like there’s just all these people floating around. And then there are inner rings like your 15 champions or your five best friends. And so we actually don’t experience other humans as first degree, second degree, third degree.

We experience them as much smaller concentric circles of relationships closer or less close. The challenge that you’re speaking to is anyone beyond that roughly 1500, you don’t remember them. It’s impossible to recall them. So when you’re doing that contextual search in your brain of like, okay, who do I know at an AI healthcare startup who might be hiring for a junior level?

I’m sure you know lots of people, but can you perfectly recall them in that moment? No. And that’s just the reality of the human brain. But that is where we think technology can augment your memory. It doesn’t need to take out the human thing. You can still go and be your super connector self and make an introduction between that student and that startup executive.

But the search and the recall and the memory is something that we can use machines and AI to help augment our human brain.

Copy LinkHow AI can extend the limits of human memory

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. The other piece of this too is there is no social network today or social platform today that encapsulates that degree of closeness. Right? Like I have 30,000 first degree connections on LinkedIn, but I’m connected to you, which is very different than being connected to Gabby, who’s my co-founder at Blue Tulip, and I’ve worked with her for a decade, versus somebody I met once, right? Or maybe even didn’t meet at all and just kind of accepted their request. LinkedIn doesn’t know, right.

DELL: They don’t know. And that is something that we are building with Good Word. So we are integrating with other platforms and tools that you use today. Email, calendar, AI note takers, Excel, and you can actually import all of that data to bring it all into a single source of truth, right? And so we become your living, breathing memory, and then we organize the relationships. You have meetings with Gabby on your calendar every single day. That’s a signal.

Versus, you know, we talked a couple times one week when we were getting to know each other, or you haven’t talked to someone in six months. Maybe that’s a moment for Good Word to say, hey Rana, you haven’t talked to this person in six months, but you used to talk to them every week. Do you want to maintain that relationship?

So that’s where Good Word can help surface the right people, prompt action at the right time, and kind of fill that gap between huge volumes of people who have so many opportunities to collaborate and connect and do work together, but remembering who those people are as they change careers, as you change careers, it’s hard to perfectly come together unless you have that kind of machine learning and matching helping you surface those people.

EL KALIOUBY: In a minute, how AI can help supercharge your networking game and what Anne Hathaway has in common with an AI co-pilot. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkWhat a relationship copilot actually looks like in practice

Welcome back to Pioneers of AI. You can also watch this episode by heading over to our YouTube channel.

Yeah. I’m a founding connector on Good Word, which means I have early access to the product and I’ve been using it and giving feedback on it as well.

I take copious notes in my meetings and so I’ve been dumping that into Good Word. It will say, here are the six people perhaps you wanna reconnect with this week. And some of them are spot on, some of them are not.

Some of them are really people that have kind of dropped off my radar. But I would love for you to share with us, kind of bring it to life. So say I’ve just been onboarded, what does this experience look like and what are some of the use cases or workflows that Good Word is implementing?

DELL: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ll take one step back and say, when we designed Good Word, we wanted to build something different than the existing set of tools out there. So instead of it being about automation, right? Auto replies, mass outreach, lots of people, lots of volume, scraping publicly available data.

We believe that that’s not what makes a relationship. Maybe that’s a sales pipeline or a recruiting pipeline, and that’s great. But our approach is that we don’t need to automate relationships. We wanna give people the context and the intelligence to show up in their relationships that they already have and want to strengthen or maintain or reconnect if they’ve forgotten about them.

So when you join Good Word, you come into the product. We have a mobile app or desktop, so we have both. One of the features that our early founding connectors are really loving is this feature called recommendations.

And what we are doing is we are taking everything we know about you. You tell us a little bit in onboarding about your goals, who you are, and everything we know about your network. And then we are using the AI to say, okay, who could be helpful for Rana in this moment? And it’s suggestive. It’s almost like the way a dating app would say, you could swipe through.

There are some people that you’re like, nah, I don’t need to catch up with them right now. And the matching actually gets better over time as you use it. But we’ve had a lot of users be like, oh my God, of course, that person who I haven’t thought about in years.

And then they catch up and they’re like, oh, I didn’t know that they’re also now a fractional consultant for startups. And so those are the magical moments.

Copy LinkUsing AI to capture real world moments and follow through

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, I love that. So part of the challenge, but also opportunity, is a lot of our interactions are in the real world, right? Like you and I met at a conference, we were by the bus stop. And in an ideal world, I would have something that would capture that piece of information right there and then, ’cause I’m not going to pull up my laptop and type in my AI note taker and take notes. And the picture that comes to mind, I’ve shared this before, I love the scene from the Devil Wears Prada when Anne Hathaway whispers into Meryl Streep’s — into Miranda’s — ears, and she’s like, oh, he’s the ambassador and this is his new wife.

How do you think about real world interactions? Can Good Word help there?

DELL: Good memory.

EL KALIOUBY: Well, I’ve watched this movie like 15 times, so no judgment, please. Yeah, how do you think about real world interactions? Can Good Word help there?

DELL: We can, and that’s actually in part why we launched with both a mobile app and a desktop. And that’s different from what others are doing. Frankly, I didn’t realize how hard it is to develop on mobile. It is still early building AI products in a mobile application, but we do have one for iOS and Android will be launching in the first half of this year, probably pretty shortly.

And the idea is as a professional, we are so busy, we’re not gonna come back to our desktops, open up our laptop, pull up our spreadsheet, enter them in, type the notes. This is how we met, this is the context you need — just brain dump, truly just brain dump in that moment.

So with Good Word, you can open the app, hit a plus button, and you can type or just verbally brain dump. I met Rana at Masters of Scale. We were standing by the bus stop. Leslie introduced us. It looks like we’re really aligned in our vision of the world and where we’re going with emotional intelligence and relational intelligence. I should probably follow up with her when I get back to New York. And that’s it, done. And then Good Word will, because it’s integrated with your calendar, say, hey, looks like you’re back in New York. It’s time to remind you. I’m gonna suggest that you reach back out to Rana and here’s why.

EL KALIOUBY: So that is the vision of giving you an extra brain, an extra memory, but also one that’s proactive and so it doesn’t have to wait for something to happen to remind me to follow up. It’s almost like a relationship chief of staff, right? It’s got the Anne Hathaway kind of like whispering in your ear, like you really should follow up with Rana. Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow GP at a fund, and she’s pregnant and due in April. I would love to make a note in Good Word, and hopefully Good Word reminds me mid-April.

DELL: You in.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, exactly. To reach out and just check in and see if the baby’s here. It’s these little authentic moments of connection that I think really build trust and a longevity of a relationship.

DELL: Authenticity is probably the word we hear the most from people who join the wait list to our users. They’re like, I want it to be real. I don’t wanna outsource my relationships to the robot. I’m a human and I wanna build a human relationship with the other person. It is, like you said, it’s kids’ names and pets and your latest vacation and your daughter’s going to college.

And these are the things that we relate on as people. But where do you store that? Theoretically you could set a calendar reminder for April, but I’m sure there’s lots of things on your calendar.

And so with Good Word, yes. If you put that note in, we will resurface it to you as an action for you to take at the right time because of the time sensitivity of that moment.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. The other use case, I think, for professionals who tend to be traveling a lot and meeting lots of people, is I’ll be in New York, say, next week. And I want something where I’ll say, I’m in New York for two days, who should I meet with? Is that something you guys are working on?

DELL: Absolutely. That’s a really common one because again, it’s really very interesting. We have more digital connections than ever before, yet coming out of the pandemic, we’re like, it’d be nice to see you in person again. Like, I’d really love to see you when I’m in town, and that is a great trigger.

Copy LinkDesigning relationship intelligence with privacy at the core

EL KALIOUBY: How do you think about privacy in designing the underlying architecture? And what I mean by that is there is a lot of information about each of us that’s in the public domain, but a lot of these conversations can be private information that maybe a person does not wanna share publicly. But it’s important information in the context of the relationship. So how do you think about privacy?

DELL: Privacy is one of the most important things we think about when designing Good Word. And I actually think that that’s where a lot of the power of your network is. It’s in those private pieces of information. The pregnancy example is a great one, right? If she’s due in April, her employer probably knows she’s due in April, but if it were six months earlier, she might not have shared that yet.

And so that was a private piece of information. Similarly, if you’re changing jobs soon, maybe you haven’t announced it.

So our view is, yes, of course we can pull in all the publicly available information, and what we do is we create one global profile per person. So there’s one Rana in Good Word, and everything that’s public, we will or can share with any Good Word user who’s connected to Rana.

But if I take a note in my Good Word and I say, Rana is investing in my company, or we’re chatting about her becoming an investor, that’s probably not something I want on the internet before we’re ready to announce. And so what we do is we built a security layer so that we know that is classified as private information.

So for me, I see a different profile of Rana. And then somebody else. And that again, is what we think makes it a relationship instead of just a connection. But privacy is at the core of that.

Copy LinkWhy access to the right network still shapes opportunity

EL KALIOUBY: So Caroline, earlier in my career, I thought the path to success was just to work harder and harder and harder. And I really did not prioritize time to go to meetups or events or conferences. I was just heads down doing my research, building my company.

And then at some point I realized that yeah, who you know is in a way more important than what you know. But it’s been hard to break into these already existing networks of, say, tech investors who are usually, you know, they all were part of the same company and then they spun out and now they co-invest together.

It’s definitely a problem for women founders who are not part of these tech bro networks. Is this something you’ve experienced and how could Good Word be part of the solution?

DELL: Yeah, absolutely. I think that experience is really common, especially for women where we work really hard and then we think that someone will see us and we’ll just get the promotion, we’ll get the gold star. And unfortunately, I have also learned the hard way that often the promotion doesn’t just come from hard work, it comes from sponsorship.

And so who in the company is advocating on your behalf? Who have you built relationships with? Understanding that there are factors that work beyond just getting the job done. And so I think that’s something many of us learn the hard way, right?

And we do live in a world of haves and have nots. It’s something we’ve been talking about in the startup ecosystem with some founders raising enormously large rounds at AI hype bubble type valuations.

EL KALIOUBY: Often without products.

DELL: Often without products. And the folks, being a female founder, I have a lot of female founder friends who are not having that experience.

About 80% of my cap table are women, which is really, really cool, but also speaks to the need for more diverse check writers, to invest in more diverse founders, to build more diverse companies. And I was fortunate to have a network of incredibly successful women coming out of building Chief and meeting so many female executives.

But the stakes are higher than ever, right? It’s not just what you know, it’s who you know. And it is back to our earlier conversation. Will they go to bat for you? Will they put in a good word, will they write you a check? Do you know people who have the ability to write checks?

EL KALIOUBY: Like I remember when I first heard about the friends and family round, I was like, I don’t have any friends or family who could write me a check, really? But I think part of it is that we are part of a network. And if you’re able to have that mindset, that might be helpful.

DELL: And that’s why I would say one of my biggest pieces of advice to founders is like, make other founder friends, because maybe they’re not your family, but they’re someone’s family. Right. And if you’ve got a great founder friend, that’s happened to me before where I’m like, who are great angel investors on your cap table? Are you willing to make an introduction? And they’re like, of course. And these are people who consistently angel invest. And then I get a chance to speak with them and maybe they’ll angel invest in my company or maybe I’ll refer them to another founder. And so you are part of a network. It’s just so hard because we can’t see it and feel it. It’s intangible. I think where Good Word can help is identifying the people in your network who might be part of a network that you’re not part of. So I hope it unlocks doors by saying, there’s someone out there that is willing and ready and able to help you, and we can help you find and identify who that person is.

EL KALIOUBY: We’re going to take a break.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkWhy this is the breakthrough moment for relationship intelligence

EL KALIOUBY: When we come back, Caroline shares five pro tips for building a stronger network. Why is this moment so magical? Like, why weren’t we able to do this five years ago or 10 years ago? I think AI provides a tipping point for this opportunity. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

DELL: So about a year ago, over and over people would say, yeah, I totally see the need for this. Investors, people I talk to all day every day, but why hasn’t it been done before?

There’s specifically this graveyard of personal CRMs. What did we learn? Why couldn’t we do it in the past? Why can we do it now? And there are two things, like you said. The first is really AI unlocks a technical ability for us to do it. Human relationships are exchanged in language and large language models are great at taking in lots and lots of language. And so it’s sort of the same currency, if you will. So we can actually capture all that language, process it, store it, summarize it, and kind of start to make sense of the reams of data that previously was mostly stored in spreadsheets.

The second thing I believe is really the moment we’re living in and what it means to be human in the AI era. And that is the feeling we all have coming out of a global pandemic, living in a world where we are more connected than ever before, but also feeling lonelier than ever before.

And this feeling of I as a professional will outsource lots of tasks to the AI. I want it to make me more efficient. I want it to summarize my notes. I want it to give me time back. But what I don’t want it to do is disintermediate every relationship that I have.

And so I think it’s this cultural moment, this landscape that we’re living in, this paradoxical question of how do I keep what is fundamentally human? And that is interacting with other humans, being in community with other humans.

Copy LinkFive better ways to build a network without being transactional

EL KALIOUBY: I kind of wanna take a step back because I would love your top five tips for how people should both cultivate and activate their networks. How to network in a non-icky way.

DELL: An authentic way. Yes. So a number of things. The first is, it is actually a mindset. And so go in with, you are a human, not a networker, right? Nobody wants it to feel like a transaction. So skip the generic, let’s grab coffee, can I pick your brain? Be a person, be curious, be specific, be real. Share something vulnerable, right? So the first is like, be a human and remember that the person you’re trying to reach or talking to is also a human. The second is give, try to give before you get.

EL KALIOUBY: That would’ve been my top one. Generosity, right?

DELL: Generosity, the most connected people I know actually lead with generosity, and that can be like an intro, share an article, celebrate a win. And the key here, I think, is you don’t have to get anything in return. At least not in that moment. It’s a mindset of relationships are built on trust, and trust is built by showing up.

And if you pay into the system, trust that it will return one day, but it doesn’t have to be today.

The third, and this is related, is stay connected before you need something.

EL KALIOUBY: We’ve all done it and it’s a little awkward and it feels like it’s kind of too late. It’s like, hey, haven’t been in touch, can you help? And look, people are fundamentally good and they will try to help, but the magic really happens when you nurture relationships consistently. Like you said, it’s maintaining or cultivating. So when that moment does come, you’re not starting from awkward. You’re starting from that place of connectedness.

I love that one. That is awesome.

DELL: The fourth one is quality over quantity.

And so you do not need 10,000 LinkedIn connections. You do not need hundreds of thousands of followers if you’re building an audience. If you’re an influencer, sure, that’s totally different. But what you really need are a hundred people who would go to bat for you. The people who would put in a good word, who would serve as a referral, and be a little bit intentional about who those hundred people are.

And that’s a quality thing that is really important in having a strong network. And the last one is give yourself permission to be intentional. That’s actually something that surprised me building Good Word, is that people feel guilty. They’ve let relationships fade. It’s like, oh, I left my job a year ago and I meant to stay in touch, but I looked up and it’s a year later. We know we wanna stay in touch. We have good intentions. Life gets in the way. Don’t beat yourself up, just start thinking about your systems, right? We’ve all learned that your habits are powerful.

Fall to the level of your systems. Networking is also a place where systems and habits are powerful, and being intentional about that and how technology can help you will make you a super connector, even if that’s not something you do naturally.

Copy LinkWhat it takes to lead a startup at exactly the right moment

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, I love that. So I wanna switch a little bit to your role as a founder and CEO. What is keeping you up at night?

DELL: It’s funny. I was a startup operator for almost a decade before becoming a founder. And I think maybe there always needs to be a little bit of ignorance, right? Ignorance is bliss. And even as an operator, even as someone who was a chief of staff and a third employee and a fifth employee, I was like, I could do this. I was the chief of staff, I was the right hand. I could figure it out. And I remember asking the co-founder and then CEO of Chief, Carolyn Childers, hey, how different is this really? And she said, oh, it’s really different. And I got in the seat and I said, she was right. It’s really different.

And I think the thing that I found resonates with lots of people is, look, at the end of the day, you’re responsible for the entire business, including your employees, including their—

EL KALIOUBY: —absolutely.

DELL: —the people and their families. Right? We have team members who have young children, and that responsibility is on your shoulders.

You’re also fiscally responsible for your investors’ capital, some of which is friends and family capital from people I love. And I’m fortunate that they took the bet on me early before we had a product, before we knew exactly what we were doing.

We just knew that networking mattered and relationships matter and deserve to be brought into the AI era. So I think what’s keeping me up at night now, we launched Good Word just about two months ago. We’ve got a couple hundred founding connectors. We’re getting feedback every day.

I just have this feeling of like, the moment is here, you know, for so long you just kind of feel like you’re pushing a boulder uphill. You’re creating all your momentum yourself. And there’s this feeling of that tipping moment where the users try to pull it out of you. They’re like, can I have this? Can I have that? Can I have this? And we’re like, absolutely. That is a great idea. How fast can we build it? And so that’s kind of the moment of like, we don’t wanna miss the wave. The opportunity is now.

EL KALIOUBY: That’s awesome. Thank you Caroline. This was great.

DELL: Yeah. Thank you Rana. It’s been wonderful chatting, as always, and really excited to partner with you to bring Good Word to everyone and continue to bring products to market that are all about humans in the AI era.

As an entrepreneur and investor, my professional and personal relationships sometimes blur. I think that’s true for a lot of people. Which is why I think it’s so important to cultivate our larger network.

EL KALIOUBY: Caroline spoke about a core paradox in the AI era. As we interact with more agents and co-pilots on a daily basis, our human relationships will become increasingly important.

But here’s the thing: cultivating your network is hard — especially when that network extends to thousands of people online. Personally, my relationship data is a mess, and is spread across so many platforms. Relationship Intelligence helps solve this problem.

It’s a new category of AI that I am really excited about and keeping tabs on.