What Goes Around Comes Around
In 2011, Adam Rifkin had more LinkedIn connections to the 640 powerful people on Fortune’s lists
than any human being on the planet. He beat out luminaries like Michael Dell, the billionaire founder
of the Dell computer company, and Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn.* I was stunned that a shy, Star
Trek–loving, anagram-obsessing software geek managed to build a network that includes the founders
of Facebook, Netscape, Napster, Twitter, Flickr, and Half.com.
Adam Rifkin built his network by operating as a bona fide giver. “My network developed little by
little, in fact a little every day through small gestures and acts of kindness, over the course of many
years,” Rifkin explains, “with a desire to make better the lives of the people I’m connected to.” Since
1994, Rifkin has served as a leader and watchdog in a wide range of online communities, working
diligently to strengthen relationships and help people resolve online conflicts. As the cofounder of
Renkoo, a start-up with Joyce Park, Rifkin created applications that were used more than 500 million
times by more than 36 million people on Facebook and Myspace. Despite their popularity, Rifkin
wasn’t satisfied. “If you’re going to get tens of millions of people using your software, you really
should do something meaningful, something that changes the world,” he says. “Frankly, I would like to
see more people helping other people.” He decided to shut down Renkoo and become a full-time
giver, offering extensive guidance to start-ups and working to connect engineers and entrepreneurs
with businesspeople in larger companies.
To this end, in 2005, Rifkin and Joyce Park founded 106 Miles, a professional network with the
social mission of educating entrepreneurial engineers through dialogue. This network has brought
together more than five thousand entrepreneurs who meet twice every month to help one another learn
and succeed. “I get roped into giving free advice to other entrepreneurs, which is usually worth less
than they pay for it,” he muses, but “helping others is my favorite thing to do.”
This approach has led to great things—not just for Rifkin, but also for those he’s shepherded
along the way. In 2001, Rifkin was a big fan of Blogger, an early blog publishing service. Blogger
had run out of funding, so Rifkin offered a contract to Blogger’s founder to do some work for his own
first start-up, KnowNow. “We decided to hire him because we wanted to see Blogger survive,”
Rifkin says. “We gave him a contract to build something for our company so we could use it as a
demo and he could keep Blogger going.” The money from the contract helped the founder keep
Blogger afloat, and he went on to cofound a company called Twitter. “There were several other
people who also contracted with Evan Williams so he could keep his company going,” Rifkin
reflects. “You never know where somebody’s going to end up. It’s not just about building your
reputation; it really is about being there for other people.”
In the search for Fortune’s best networker, when Rifkin popped up as the winner, the reporter on
the story, Jessica Shambora, laughed out loud. “Not surprisingly, I had already met him! Someone had
referred me to him for a story I was researching on virtual goods and social networks.” Shambora,
who now works at Facebook, says that Rifkin is “the consummate networker, and he didn’t get that
way by being some sort of climber, or calculated. People go to Adam because they know his heart is
in the right place.” When he first moved up to Silicon Valley, Rifkin felt that giving was a natural way
to come out of his shell. “As a very shy, sheltered computer guy, the concept of the network was my
north star,” he says. “When you have nothing, what’s the first thing you try to do? You try to make a