I enjoyed FT columnist Pilita Clarks recent article on "The dos and don’ts of the email introduction" as she was hitting on one of the most valuable aspects of business. When I used to work at Techstars, the world's largest startup accelerator with 4,000 portfolio companies valued at $116B market cap, we believed intros were so important that we taught all new portfolio founders how to write "forwardable emails" for 30 minutes on the first day of every accelerator program.

Our portfolio Founders were typically seasoned execs (like the former CIO at HBO) yet very few if any had ever been taught how to write or request introductions. During each program, we could make up to 175 introductions per startup to help them fundraise and acquire customers faster. One of my colleagues would refer to introductions as the "currency of investing".

Another big frustration with intros is feedback. Especially for Connectors who make these intros as they rarely hear back from either party on how the intro went. This is often frustrating as the Connectors would love to hear if they are building or burning Bridges. They sometimes only learn months or years later that intro X led to an investment, sale, hire etc... We therefore strongly encourage all intro participants to close the loop with Connectors as a) it is polite and b) it often leads to more introductions.

Introductions are so important that I often think of them as the "hidden hand" of so much business and career success, yet these introductions are often forgotten as they are mostly invisible and therefore forgotten. We were so excited by the potential of changing this, that we started  Bridge, to help streamline the whole introduction process as a way to a) help Connectors and b) eventually replace LinkedIn with a better, more useful network.

With over 1B connections and hundreds of millions of dollars of value shared via Bridge, we're pretty confident that introductions might be the key to creating the next LinkedIn :) Especially as AI and automation drown our inboxes with so much noisy outreach.