It's who trusts you
One of the biggest mindset shifts founders struggle with has nothing to do with product or capital.
It’s networking.
In corporate roles, networking is focused, narrow, and mostly invisible:
You stay in your lane.
You build relationships inside your function or industry.
You’re intentional, but quiet.
And that approach makes sense when your career path is clearly defined and advancement happens behind closed doors.
Startups don’t work that way.
As a founder, your success depends on many more groups than you’re used to engaging with:
Investors
Partners
Advisors
Potential customers
Future hires
Sometimes an audience, if you’re B2C
That breadth can feel overwhelming.
It can also feel unfair when you see founders who seem to “already know everyone.”
They raise faster, they get early customers more easily, they unlock opportunities that feel inaccessible...
It’s tempting to write that off as privilege or luck.
A more useful frame is to treat relationships as an asset class.
Every startup has constraints:
Capital. Talent. Time. Distribution. Technology.
Relationships are just another one:
If you’re building deeply technical, novel software, progress gets much easier when you have trusted relationships inside that engineering community.
If your future target customer gets 50 sales emails in their inbox every day, it's much easier working with them if you've worked together for years.
If your company requires more capital than most, it helps to already be in relationship with people who write checks.
If you’re building in real estate and you’ve never had a drink with a GC, things are going to be very hard for you.
And make no mistake: This isn't a game of going to a million networking events and rubbing elbows with the right people.
Don't think about it as "It's who you know".
Think about it more like, "Who trusts you".
Because it isn't who you know.
Trust is what makes things move better and faster,
And can reduce friction around your hardest problems.
What often trips founders up is how they build these relationships.
You don’t get there by pitching your startup to everyone you meet.
You don’t get there by parachuting into communities you haven’t earned your way into.
You don’t get there by asking for favors early.
You get there the slowly.
By being an honest person.
By showing up consistently.
By talking about more than work.
By being useful without keeping score.
By being mindful of other peoples' priorities.
By staying in touch long before and after there’s no obvious upside.
Trust compounds quietly, over years.
A helpful question to ask as you build your company:
Which relationships could make my hardest problems easier over the next 5 years?
THAT answer should shape where you invest your time.
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