In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram ran a crazy experiment. Researchers handed people a letter and asked them to get it to someone they had never met. There was one rule: they could only pass the letter to someone they knew personally. Over and over again, the letters found their way to complete strangers through surprisingly short chains of introductions.
The world turned out to be much smaller than anyone expected. People in your network know people you do not. The people you know, even the people you're close with, have networks you have no idea about.
Most people who hear that story, think "interesting" and move on. Founders shouldn't.
Think about the person who could change the trajectory of your company. Maybe it's an investor. Maybe it's the engineer who builds your first product. Maybe it's your first enterprise customer. Whoever you're imagining, there's a good chance they're not six introductions away.
They're probably two or three. The only problem is you can't see the path.
You know someone from college. She used to work at a company where one of her teammates is now building startups in New York. That teammate plays pickleball every Saturday with the founder you've been trying to reach for six months.
The connection already existed. You just didn't know it.
That's what makes networks so interesting, and where most people get this wrong. The true value of your network isn't measured by how many people you know now. It's measured by how many relationships you can discover.
For years, that discovery process has been mostly accidental. Someone makes an introduction at a conference. A friend mentions a former coworker over coffee. You realize two people know each other after a scroll on LinkedIn.
It can work, but it's incredibly inefficient.
Not every path is equal, either. Milgram's letters traveled through whoever came to mind first, geography, alma mater, an old job. Roots is different. A shared hometown carries a kind of trust a conference badge never will. Someone who grew up two towns over from you, or built a company in the same city you did, will take your call in a way a stranger on LinkedIn won't.
That's the part most networking tools miss. They treat every connection as equal weight. But the paths that run through the towns and schools and communities that raised you, tend to be shorter and stronger than the ones that don't.
Every founder belongs to communities that have been quietly creating connections for years. Schools. Employers. Hometowns. Accelerators. Sports teams. Military service. Friends of friends.
Those communities contain thousands of invisible paths, but most founders never find them. We built Roots so you can.
Search engines made information searchable. GPS made the physical world searchable. AI is making knowledge searchable. Roots is making networks searchable, both the ones you've discovered and the ones you haven't. And because Roots starts with place, it surfaces the paths most likely to actually hold weight when you need them to.
Six degrees of separation was an interesting observation. We believe it can become a practical tool.
Photo from: 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. | Iceinstitute.org
