his interview, and had glowing references. But the candidate could have been faking: “talking to
someone for an hour only gives you a glimpse, the tip of the iceberg,” Lee thought, “and the references
were self-selected.” A taker could easily find some superiors to sing his praises.
So Lee searched through his LinkedIn and Facebook networks and identified a mutual connection,
who shared some disconcerting information about the candidate. “He seemed to be a taker, and it
carried a lot of weight. If he’s been ruthless in one company, do I want to work with him?” Lee feels
that online social networks have revolutionized Groupon’s hiring process. “Nowadays, I don’t need
to call in to a company to find out about someone’s reputation. Everyone is incredibly connected.
Once they make it past the technical rounds, I check their LinkedIn or Facebook. Sometimes we have
mutual friends, or went to the same school, or the people on my team will have a link to them,” Lee
explains. “You can understand someone’s reputation at a peer level pretty quickly.” When your
relationships and reputations are visible to the world, it’s harder to achieve sustainable success as a
taker.
In Silicon Valley, a quiet man who looks like a panda bear is taking transparent networks to the
next level. His name is Adam Forrest Rifkin, and he has been called the giant panda of programming.
He describes himself as a shy, introverted computer nerd who has two favorite languages: JavaScript,
the computer programming language, and Klingon, the language spoken by the aliens on Star Trek.*
Rifkin is an “anagramaniac”: he has spent countless hours rearranging the letters in his name to find
the one that captures him best, generating candidates such as Offer Radiant Smirk and Feminist
Radar Fork. Rifkin has two master’s degrees in computer science, owns a patent, and has developed
supercomputer applications for NASA and Internet systems for Microsoft. As the new millennium
approached, Rifkin cofounded KnowNow, a software start-up with Rohit Khare, helping companies
manage information more efficiently and profitably. KnowNow achieved a decade of success after
bringing in more than $50 million in venture funding. By 2009, while still in his thirties, Rifkin
announced his retirement.
I came across Rifkin while scrolling through the LinkedIn connections of David Hornik, the
venture capitalist whom you met in the previous chapter. When I clicked on Rifkin’s profile, I saw
that he was coming out of retirement to launch a start-up called PandaWhale, with the goal of creating
a public, permanent record of the information that people exchange. Since Rifkin is clearly a staunch
advocate of transparency in networks, I was curious to see what his own network looks like. So I did
what’s only natural in a connected world: I went to Google and typed “Adam Rifkin.” As I scrolled
through the search results, the sixteenth link caught my eye. It said that Adam Rifkin was Fortune’s
best networker.
michael s
(Michael S)
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