Free B00AFPTSI0 EBOK by Adam M. Grant Ph.D.

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.

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