Give and Take: WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

karmic moments can often be traced to the fact that matchers are on a mission to make them happen.
Just as matchers will sacrifice their own interests to punish takers who act selfishly toward others,
they’ll go out of their way to reward givers who act generously toward others. When Adam Rifkin
helped people in his network, the matchers felt it was only fair to plot his well-being. True to form,
he used his newfound access at LinkedIn to plot the well-being of other people in his network,
referring engineers for jobs at LinkedIn.
On a Wednesday evening in May, I got to see the panda in his natural habitat. At a bar for a 106
Miles meeting in Redwood City, Rifkin walked in with a huge grin, wearing a San Francisco Giants
jersey. He was immediately swarmed by a group of tech entrepreneurs—some smooth, others
endearingly awkward. As dozens of entrepreneurs piled into the bar, Rifkin was able to tell me each
of their stories, which was no small feat for someone who receives more than eight hundred e-mails
in a typical day.
His secret was deceptively simple: he asked thoughtful questions and listened with remarkable
patience. Early in the evening, Rifkin asked one budding entrepreneur how his company was doing.
The entrepreneur talked for fourteen minutes without interruption. Although the monologue might have
exhausted even the most curious of tech geeks, Rifkin never lost interest. “Where do you need help?”
he asked, and the entrepreneur mentioned a need for a programmer specializing in an obscure
computer language. Rifkin started scrolling through his mental Rolodex and recommended candidates
to contact. Later in the evening, one of those candidates arrived in person, and Rifkin made the
introduction. As the crowd grew, Rifkin still took the time to have a personal conversation with
everyone there. When new members approached him, he typically spent fifteen or twenty minutes
getting to know them, asking what motivated them and how he could help them. Many of those people
were complete strangers, but just as he had helped Graham Spencer eighteen years earlier without
thinking twice, he took it upon himself to find them jobs, connect them to potential cofounders, and
offer advice for solving problems in their companies. Each time he gave, he created a new
connection. But is it really possible to keep up with all of these contacts?