Give and Take: WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

(Michael S) #1

Waking the Sleeping Giants


In 1993, a college student named Graham Spencer teamed up with five friends to build an Internet
start-up. Spencer was a shy, introverted computer engineer with a receding hairline, huge glasses, and
an obsession with comic books. Looking back, he says Superman taught him justice and virtue, the X-
Men kindled concern for oppressed groups, and Spider-Man gave him hope: “even superheroes could
have a rough time in school.”
Spencer and his friends cofounded Excite, an early Web portal and search engine that quickly
became one of the most popular sites on the Internet. In 1998, Excite was purchased for $6.7 billion,
and Spencer was flying high as its largest shareholder and chief technology officer. In 1999, shortly
after selling Excite, Spencer received an e-mail out of the blue from Adam Rifkin, who was asking
for advice on a start-up. They had never met, but Spencer volunteered to sit down with Rifkin
anyway. After they met, Spencer connected Rifkin with a venture capitalist who ended up funding his
start-up. How did Rifkin get access to Spencer? And why did Spencer go out of his way to help
Rifkin?
Early in 1994, five years before seeking Spencer’s help, Rifkin became enamored with an
emerging band. He wanted to help the band gain popularity, so he put his computer prowess into
action and created a fan website, hosted on the Caltech server. “It was an authentic expression of
being a fan of music. I loved the music.” The page took off: hundreds of thousands of people found it
as the band skyrocketed from anonymity into stardom.
The band was called Green Day.
Rifkin’s fan site was so popular in the burgeoning days of the commercial Internet that in 1995,
Green Day’s managers contacted him to ask if they could take it over and make it the band’s official
page. “I said, ‘Great, it’s all yours’,” Rifkin recalls. “I just gave it to them.” The previous summer, in
1994, millions of people had visited Rifkin’s site. One of the visitors, a serious punk rock fan, felt
that Green Day was really pop music. He had e-mailed Rifkin to educate him about “real” punk rock.
The fan was none other than Graham Spencer. Spencer suggested that when people searched for
punk rock on the Internet, they should find more than Green Day. When Rifkin read the e-mail, he
imagined Spencer as a stereotypical punk rock fan with a green Mohawk. Rifkin had no idea that
Spencer would ever be able to help him—it would only come out much later that Spencer had just
started Excite. A taker or matcher might have ignored the e-mail from Spencer. But as a giver,
Rifkin’s natural inclination was to help Spencer spread the word about punk rock and help struggling
bands build up a fan base. So Rifkin set up a separate page on the Green Day fan site with links to the
punk rock bands that Spencer suggested.
There’s an elegance to Adam Rifkin’s experience with Graham Spencer, a satisfying sense of
good deeds rewarded. But if we take a closer look, we find an example of just what makes giver
networks so powerful, and it has as much to do with the five years that passed after Rifkin’s
generosity as with the generosity itself. Rifkin’s experiences foreshadow how givers have the
advantage of accessing the full breadth of their networks.
One of Rifkin’s maxims is “I believe in the strength of weak ties.” It’s in homage to a classic study
by the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Strong ties are our close friends and colleagues, the
people we really trust. Weak ties are our acquaintances, the people we know casually. Testing the

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