Remember You network is your net worth

How valuable is your network? The Paypal Mafia is an extreme example of the phrase “your network is your net worth”.

When eBay bought Paypal in 2002, the founders of Paypal had an average age of 30. With the opportunity to go out and start again, they decided to stay in touch and share their strategies, experiences and connections as they launched their next businesses.

The result?

Elon Musk launched Space X and Tesla (Now worth $30 billion+)
Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn (Now worth $25 billion+)
Peter Thiel launched Palantir (Now worth $20 billion+)
Steve Chen and Chad Hurley founded Youtube (Sold to Google for $1.65 billion)
David Sacks launched Yammer (Sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion)
Russel Simmons and Max Levchin launched Yelp (Now worth $1.6 billion+)
Dave McClure founded 500 Startups (Invested in 1,300+ companies)
Premal Shah became president of Kiva (Crowdfunded 1 million+ microloans)

The founders sold Paypal for $1.5 billion 13 years ago, but as a result of sharing their journeys after that, they now have a combined net worth of over $20 billion.

Between them, they have created 7 billion dollar companies and invested in many more, generating over $100 billion in market value.

Supporting each other was the intention from the beginning. As Peter Thiel recalls, “When we started PayPal, I remember one of the early conversations I had with Max was that I wanted to build a company where everybody would be really great friends and, no matter what happened with the company, the friendships would survive.”

Your success will be determined not by how much you want to be successful, but by how many of the right people you connect around you who want you to be successful.

Your network is your net worth.

What can you do today to improve your network?
What can you do to add more value to the one you’re in?
How can you grow network value everywhere you go?

Today we live in a networked world. So thinking about growing network value is more important than ever. As Reid Hoffman says, “In the Networked Age, we’re all like the little kid from The Sixth Sense. If you’re not seeing networks when you enter a room, you might want to check your pulse.”

3 Steps to $30 millions, Yahoo bought 17 year old Nick D’Aloisio’s iPhone app

This week Yahoo bought 17 year old Nick D’Aloisio’s iPhone app, Summly, for $30 million. When Yahoo was founded in 1994, Nick wasn’t even born yet.

What’s he doing with $30 million? As Nick says, "I can't even buy a car because I don't have a licence yet." So he’s going to buy a new bag. Why? “Mine is broken; it’s old and the strap’s not working.”

3 STEPS TO $30 MILLION

Nick’s app has delivered over 90 million news summaries in the four short months since he launched it on his 17th birthday in November. But Nick isn’t even old enough to be a Director of his company, so his mum is the Director while he sits in as Company Secretary.

What has gotten Nick to success so quickly in 15 months when so many of us are still struggling after 15 years? Here’s 3 steps his journey has in common with most super-success stories:

PROBLEM + PASSION = $300K SOLUTION

Nick’s Summly App was the solution to a real world problem that no one else was solving well. As Nick relates, “I was 15 years old and I was revising for some kind of history exam. The problem was I was trying to find information that was useful to me.”

Searching Google on his phone didn’t give him enough detail to know what was or wasn’t a useful link. So he put his own iPhone app together. The app quickly rose up the download ranks and Apple featured it in their store.

Then came a fateful email: “About a month later, the private fund of the Hong Kong billionaire Li-Kashing cold emailed me and expressed an interest to invest, but they didn’t realize I was 15...It turned out that they actually liked my age because it demonstrated I was net-native, so I’d only grown up with the Internet. They flew to London about a month later and invested $300,000. That kick-started this whole journey.”

$300K FUNDING + EXPERTISE = $1.3M REPUTATION

Nick used the money to bring in world experts to help relaunch the app. At 16 years old, he teamed up with the leaders in Natural Language Processing, Stanford Research Institute (Who create Apple’s SIRI - named after the company’s initials, SRI).

In between high school classes in London, Nick worked with SRI in the US by phone and text messages to build the new app. SRI’s solid reputation and Nick’s focus on approaching well known celebrities to help him attracted high profile investors Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono who invested $1.3 million. Nick made the most of his investors, with Stephen Fry starring in the launch video for Summly.

$1.3M REPUTATION + SINGLE-MINDED FOCUS = $30M STORY

With world class partners and world class investors, Nick gave up full-time school at the end of 2011, with his parent’s blessing: ““I talked about it with them and my headmaster and we decided it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it would be silly not to run with it. Now, looking back, I can say it was a massive gamble. But it was a good gamble.”

From a standing start to $30 million, Nick has taken the age old 1-2-3 formula of solving a problem in a smart way, then using the resources he attracts to bring in the best talent, and leveraging that to attract the most influential partners.

What made him think he could just go and knock on the door of the best companies and most well known people in the world? As he says "I was naive. I didn't know I couldn't."

Nick is now reflecting on this week’s news: “Numbing is probably the best word to describe it. It’s a shock to be honest. The only thing I can take from this is that I’m genuinely kind of proud that I’ve been getting a lot of tweets where young people are commenting and saying, “This is really inspirational, I want to go and start my own thing.”

How many of these 3 steps in the 1-2-3 formula have you taken in your business? What can you do to upgrade your product, your talent or your partners?

Or maybe it’s time to be a kid again, be naive again, when you didn't know you couldn't. And start something entirely new.

The Billion Dollar Tweet

Here’s a tweet Travis Kalanick sent in January 2010. The reply from Ryan Graves happened 3 minutes later. That tweet was worth over a billion dollars.

January 2010 was the month Travis was doing a test run with 3 cars in New York for a mobile app that he and his friend, Garrett Camp, had just created.

They had decided it was time to start a company around the app and, needing to find a GeneralManager to run it, Travis took to Craigslist and Twitter looking for the right person.

Ryan’s reply to Travis came as he was looking for something new. He had some experience at GE, and had worked for Foursquare for a while for free after the company turned him down for a job. He was ready for a new opportunity - and took a chance with this tweet.

Travis replied back, they met, they hit it off, and Ryan joined Travis and Garrett on March 1st as their first hire.

With their new company started, the three of them then invited all their friends to demo the product and they officially launched in San Francisco just 3 months later on May 31st.

That was five years ago.

This week, the team that started with that tweet has built their company, Uber, into a company that is currently valued at over $60 billion (they just announced another funding round of $2 billion this week http://bit.ly/ubers-next-2-billion).

Today, Travis and Ryan are worth over $6 billion, and that tweet from Ryan (who today is Uber’s Head of Global Operations) began a journey which has made him a billionaire today as well.

How are you using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube today?

As a wall of content? As a broadcasting tool?

Or, like Travis and Ryan, as a way to find the resources, connections and opportunities you need when you need them?

Depending on how you use it, social media can make you feel apart from everyone, or one step to anyone.

It can overwhelm you, or empower you.

It can be a time waster, or a time saver.

“Never confuse motion with action.”
~ Benjamin Franklin

What do you need or who can you help today? It may just be a tweet away.

Of course, there is no promise that one connection or one tweet will result in you making a billion dollars or impacting a billion lives.

But there is no promise it won’t either.