I have made a few thousand introductions in thirty years. I don't remember most of them. The ones I remember are the ones I regret.
Which tells you something about the economics. When I put two people together and it goes badly, they lose an hour. I lose something harder to replace, which is their willingness to pick up the phone the next time my name appears on it. Nobody says this out loud. You find out six months later, when a call that used to take a day to return takes three weeks.
I learned this at Skype, and I learned it alone. In 2004 the company sent me to open Brazil and the rest of Latin America. No office, no team, a product the carriers regarded as theft and the regulator had not yet found a category for. I had a laptop and a list of people from my years at Nextel and Openwave who would still answer a call from me. That list was the whole business. Every time I asked one of them for a meeting I was spending it down, and I knew there would be no refill if the meeting wasted their morning.
So I prepared more than the situation seemed to warrant. Before I asked a carrier or a portal for a meeting I wanted to know what their year looked like, who in the building would carry the blame if the thing went wrong, and what I could honestly promise Skype would do for them, which in 2005 was less than they hoped. When SkypeIn launched here in early 2006 with a local carrier, and three other operators put their names to the announcement, I think each of those names represented about six months of conversations nobody saw.
At Atomico the job changed and the lesson did not. For twelve years my job was not finding companies to invest in, whatever the business card said. My job was helping the companies we had already backed arrive somewhere, usually here. The Swedish gifting app needed Brazilian retailers. The Argentine restaurant platform needed São Paulo. A fitness marketplace from São Paulo needed Europe, which made a nice change of direction. Strip the slides away and the brief was always the same question: who should these people meet, in what order, and how do we make sure the first meeting starts somewhere other than zero.
After enough of these you start to see that a good introduction has a structure, and most of it is invisible to the two people being introduced.
The first part is a reason that works from both sides. "It would be useful for A to meet B" is not a reason. "B has been trying to solve this for two quarters and A solved it in Chile" is a reason. If I cannot say in one sentence what B gets out of it, in B's terms, this quarter, I don't make the call. A lot of requests die at this point and I tell the person asking exactly why. "Good for you, not yet for them" is a complete answer. People who hear it a few times start to trust the introductions I do make.
The second part is asking each side separately, with enough information to say no. This is slower than copying two people on one email, and the slowness is the point. Someone who has agreed to a meeting arrives prepared and curious. Someone who was volunteered arrives polite and absent. In Brazil, where almost no one will tell you to your face that they are not interested, a volunteered meeting can run for months before anyone admits it ended in the first ten minutes.
The third part is briefing both sides, which is the one people skip. The founder gets told about the person across the table: what they built, what they are tired of hearing, what they have said yes to before. The other side gets told about the founder, in enough detail that the meeting does not open with a pitch. Half an hour of context beforehand buys back the first half hour of the meeting. Done properly, the two of them start by talking about the problem instead of about themselves.
The fourth is timing, and in Brazil timing is a subject in its own right. The country is big and the market is big; two neighbourhoods of São Paulo add up to the Chilean market. It also has seasons that outsiders don't see. There is a budget cycle, an election every two years at one level or another, a week in February when nothing gets signed, a regulatory decision everyone is waiting on for the second half. An introduction made a month early is a favour the other person cannot use. The same introduction a month later looks like luck.
Then there is a fifth thing I did not understand until I had been at Atomico for some years, and which I now think matters as much as the other four together. I was never bringing the operators and the investors one company. I was bringing them a stream. A Swedish gifting app one month, an Argentine restaurant platform the next, a Finnish games studio, a São Paulo fitness marketplace. The variety kept people curious in a way no single company could. They took the next meeting because the last four had been interesting and they did not want to miss the fifth.
For some companies this was decisive. A business with no obvious glamour, a retailer in a dull category or a piece of back-office software, walked into the room carrying the appeal of the group it came with. It got the attention reserved for the seductive names on the same list, and quite often it was the one that turned into a deal, because its numbers were better and the glamour had only opened the door. Variety kept people curious, curiosity kept the meetings coming, and the meetings gave a quieter company a hearing it could not have won on its own. This is one reason Ocidente works across investors, founders, creators and institutions rather than picking one. The breadth keeps the people we call interested in picking up.
Nobody counts what happens after the meeting as part of the introduction, and I think that is a mistake. A week later I don't ask how it went. I ask what each of them said about the other to someone else. That is the real signal. If it is good, I place the next piece. If it is bad I have learned something about one of them that will save me a worse mistake later, and I owe both of them a quiet word. In my experience relationships do not wear out from use. They wear out from being left alone after use.
People describe what I do as having a network, and I have stopped correcting them. But the list of names is the least valuable thing I own. Anyone with a conference badge can build one. What took thirty years is knowing which two names belong in the same room, which do not, and when. I did not arrive at "fewer introductions, better made" as a philosophy. I arrived at it by paying for the alternative, more than once.