The BISS Fellowship  /  The Thoughtful Networker

A Fellowship field guide

How to be a thoughtful networker.

Early in your career, a network is not something you have. It is something you build, one short, specific message at a time. Here is how to do it well, and without the ick, stage by stage, with the exact messages annotated line by line.

One thing before you start: industries and cultures do things differently. This guide leans on experience in tech and in the English-speaking professional world, where a stranger messaging you for twenty minutes of advice is normal and welcome. In some industries and some countries it is less so. The principles (be short, be specific, be genuine, expect nothing) travel almost everywhere. The surface details may not. Read it as a strong default, not a rulebook. Its companion, The Art of the Intro, covers what to do when someone offers to introduce you.

The thoughtful networker Stage 1 of 8

Stage 1

Find the people worth writing to.

You: NoahA list of strangers

Here is the thing nobody tells you: in the right environment, expanding your network is genuinely easy. In tech, and in plenty of industries like it, most people will give a stranger twenty minutes. They remember being twenty-two. They like talking about their work. Very little is standing between you and a conversation except the message you have not sent.

What it takes is being specific about who. Not “people in tech.” People doing the particular job you are curious about, at the kind of company you are curious about, in a place that is plausible for you.

LinkedIn is the easiest door, and usually the only one you need. Search the role, filter by company or city, and look for the people two or three steps ahead of you rather than twenty. If LinkedIn will not let you message them, their work email is often a guessable pattern, or sitting on a company page. Either channel is fine.

Two or three steps ahead of you. An associate PM who graduated three years ago has more useful, more specific advice for you than a VP, and far more time.
Anything you genuinely share. Your university, your city, your school, a former employer, a field of study. It is a reason for them to open the message, and it is true.
Not just the famous ones. The best conversation you will have this month is almost certainly with someone you have never heard of.
Stage 1 of 8

Stage 2 · the one that matters

Write a very short message.

You: NoahPriya, a stranger

The whole message does two jobs. First, in a couple of seconds of reading, it says who you are in the way that makes you relevant to this particular person. Then, after a line break, it makes one small, specific ask.

Relevance is the part people get wrong. If you are writing to someone in tech, do not tell them about your school play. Tell them what you do now. If you are about to graduate, tell them what and where. Not your life story. Two sentences, and they should be the two sentences that matter to them.

Tap the highlighted phrases for the coaching notes.

That is the entire message. Roughly eighty words. If yours is twice as long, the fix is almost never better writing; it is cutting the paragraph about yourself.

Stage 2 of 8

Stage 3 · the one rule

Never, ever turn it into a sell.

The same messagegone wrong

You are asking a person for their time, and a lot of people will give it. What you are asking for is their advice on a specific topic. The moment the message becomes an argument for hiring you, or a pitch for your startup, or a request for a referral, the trade changes and most people quietly opt out.

This is not squeamishness about self-promotion. It is that you get one first message, and a pitch spends it on the thing you want least: a polite no. Here is the same outreach, written the way it usually goes wrong.

No CV attached to a first message.
No asking for a job, a referral, or an internal forward.
No “trust me”, and no selling. You have nothing to sell yet, and that is fine.
A short introduction, and one specific question you would like their view on. That is the whole trade.

One line above is a style, not a mistake. “Dear Ms. Raman” is simply the wrong register for a product manager in tech — it is not what sinks that email. What sinks it is the life story, the adjectives and the job ask, and those would sink it in any industry and any country. Do not read this card as “titles are bad”.

Where titles are expected, dropping one is the error instead, and that is most of academia. If the person you are writing to runs a research lab, the whole shape of the email changes too, so we wrote that one down separately: Writing to a Lab.

Stage 3 of 8

Stage 4

Send a lot of them, and accept the silence.

You: NoahForty people, over a few weeks

A certain percentage of people will not answer you. That is not rejection, and it is almost never about you: it is an inbox. So cast a wide net. Messaging a lot of people is a healthy thing to do, and a good one, as long as each message is genuinely written for the person receiving it.

And then the part that surprises everyone: far more people say yes than you expect. People who owe you nothing will get on a call and hand you their perspective, because someone once did it for them.

40 messages over a few weeks

Illustrative, not a promise. The shape is the point: most squares stay blank, and the ones that do not are worth all of it.

27 never answered 6 replied warmly, no call 7 real conversations

Two practical notes. Keep a simple list so you are not messaging the same person twice or losing track of who replied. And if someone does not answer, one short follow-up a week or two later is completely normal; a third is not.

Stage 4 of 8

Stage 5

Show up on time, with your questions written down.

You: NoahPriya

Someone has given you twenty minutes out of a working day on the strength of one message. The way you repay that is simple: be on time, be prepared, and want the conversation for its own sake.

Noah & Priya · 20 minTue 12 Mar, 16:00–16:20 CET · Google Meet · invite sent by you

What a good twenty minutes looks like

  • Be there first.Join a minute or two early, camera on, somewhere quiet. You asked for this slot; do not be the reason it starts at four past.
  • Bring written questions.Three or four, prepared in advance, open enough to follow up on. Written questions are the difference between a conversation and an awkward silence at minute six.
  • Arrive with no expectations.You came for their perspective. Not a referral, not a job, not an introduction. Wanting nothing else is what makes you good company, and paradoxically it is what makes people offer things.
  • Ask who else you should talk to.Near the end: “Is there anyone else you think I should be speaking to?” It is a light question, easy to decline, and it is how one conversation becomes five.
  • Do not harden it into an ask.Unless they invite it, do not convert the call into a request for a referral or a job. If they offer, take it gladly. If they do not, leave it.
  • Send two lines of thanks afterwards.Same day. Say what was actually useful. It takes a minute, and it is the thing most people never do.

If they do offer an introduction, there is a craft to handling it well, and we wrote that one down too: The Art of the Intro.

Stage 5 of 8

Stage 6 · where a network actually forms

Send an update every few months.

You: NoahThe handful worth keeping

After the calls, pick the people who were genuinely relevant to you, and start sending them updates. Not every week. Every few months. Where you are now, what you are working on, what is on your mind.

Expect no response. Most will not reply, and that is the correct baseline. A certain percentage will, because they like your approach or they simply vibe with you, and those are the relationships that a year from now turn into a door opening. That is a by-product. It is not the reason you send it.

Not a newsletter, not a mail-merge, not the same paragraph to eighty people.
Never an update with a hidden ask stapled to the bottom.
Every three to six months, to the people it is genuinely relevant to. Ten people you actually update beats two hundred connections.
Stage 6 of 8

Stage 7

Live in the digital vicinity of your field.

You: NoahEveryone doing the work you want to do

The last piece is quieter and it runs continuously. Be in the digital vicinity of people who are interested in the things you are interested in. Follow them, read what they post, and respond when you actually have something to say. Over months, this is what marks you out as someone who is up and coming and genuinely excited about the work.

This is networking. Not the conference badge, not the connection count. Being nearby, visibly paying attention, for long enough that people start recognising your name.

Priya Raman
Senior Product Manager at Nordkap · 2d

We killed a feature this week that took four months to build. Wrote up what we should have noticed in week two, because the signals were all there.

Comment like a colleague. Add a question, a counter-example, or something you learned. Say nothing rather than say “Insightful!”
Post occasionally yourself. What you are building, what you got wrong, what you just read. You do not need an audience; you need to be findable and clearly interested.
Amplify other people’s wins. When someone in your network does something good, say so publicly. It costs nothing and it is remembered.
Do not perform. Daily engagement-bait posts are visible from space, and they do the opposite of what you want.
Stage 7 of 8

Stage 8 · the thing to keep hold of

None of this is performative.

YouA career, over years

It is worth being clear with yourself about what you are doing here, because it is what makes the difference between networking that works and networking that makes everyone uncomfortable.

The goal of the call is the answers. You genuinely want to know how product and engineering split the work, or what a first year in that job is really like, or whether the master’s is worth it. You are asking because you need to know. That is not a pretext for getting in front of someone: it is the entire point, and it is also why people enjoy the conversation.

The goal of the practice is the practice. Doing this thoughtfully, regularly, over years, is the skill. Some percentage of the people you meet will like how you operate, and one of them will eventually open a door. You cannot predict which, and aiming at it directly is exactly what stops it happening.

And when you do have a real achievement, share it. A network you have quietly tended for two years will amplify it much further than you can alone. But that is a happy consequence of the thing, not the thing.

If you remember five lines

  • Short beats polished.Eighty words, two paragraphs, one ask.
  • Specific beats broad.Specific person, specific topic, specific length of call.
  • Advice, never a sell.The moment it becomes a pitch, you have spent the relationship.
  • Wide net, no hard feelings.Silence is an inbox, not a verdict.
  • Then keep showing up.An update every few months, and a real presence where your field talks.
Stage 8 of 8

The whole habit, at a glance

Eight stages, one principle: be genuinely easy to say yes to.

Your move

You do not have to start with strangers.

The BISS community is full of people who already have a reason to help you, and who remember exactly what this stage felt like. Tell us who you are trying to reach, and we will do our best to put you in front of them.

Tell us what you need Read: The Art of the Intro