Connect The Dots

Here is a fact that is both completely obvious and, until fairly recently, almost impossible to act on: the fastest way to sell something to a stranger is to stop them being a stranger. You find the person who already knows them, you get an introduction, and suddenly a cold call becomes a warm conversation. Drew Sechrist spent roughly a decade at Salesforce - he was somewhere around employee number 36 and, at one point, its top-ranked global sales manager - watching this happen thousands of times. Warm intros closed bigger and faster. Cold outreach mostly closed nothing.

The trouble with that insight is that it doesn't scale. A great salesperson has a great rolodex, but the rolodex belongs to the salesperson, it lives in their head and their inbox, and it walks out the door the day they quit. Multiply that across a whole company and you get a strange situation: an organization collectively knows an enormous number of useful people, and no single employee can see more than a sliver of it. The relationships exist. They're just invisible.

Connect The Dots, founded in San Francisco in 2019, is essentially a machine for making them visible. Sechrist started it with a handful of fellow Salesforce alumni - designer Ian Swinson, engineer Luka Trikic, and product lead Noah Lehmann-Haupt - and the core move is almost cheeky in its simplicity. Email, it turns out, is one of the richest datasets in existence. Every back-and-forth you've ever had is a small proof that you know someone. So the company applies AI to email metadata, layers in LinkedIn data, and reconstructs a picture of who you know, how well, and - crucially - who all of your colleagues know too.

The scoring is where the design philosophy shows. A relationship only counts when the email goes both ways. A newsletter blast doesn't make you close to anyone; a genuine exchange does. The more you've traded messages, and the more recently, the higher the relationship scores. It's a small rule with a big implication: the system is trying to measure something like trust, and it's decided that trust looks like reciprocity, not reach. You can follow ten thousand people on LinkedIn and still have a very thin graph in Connect The Dots.

What you get out the other end is a searchable graph of every real relationship across your company, plus your board, investors, advisors and customer champions. A salesperson who wants to reach a specific buyer can see, instantly, which of their colleagues has the warmest path - and then request the introduction. Recruiters can find the person internally who can vouch for a passive candidate. Business development gets a direct line to the right executive instead of a guess. The pitch to a go-to-market leader is basically: you are sitting on a better lead list than anything you could buy, and it's in your own employees' inboxes.

The business model is a neat piece of engineering in its own right. The individual product is free - the idea being that any professional should be able to carry their relationships with them across an entire career. The money comes when a company pools all of its people's relationships into one shared graph. That's a genuine network effect: each new colleague who joins makes more warm paths appear for everyone else. Free at the edge, valuable in aggregate. It is the kind of structure investors like, which may explain why Norwest Venture Partners led a $15 million Series A in December 2021, alongside Cloud Apps Capital Partners and Velvet Sea Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to about $20 million.

There's also a slightly unusual ethical flourish. Connect The Dots published something it calls a Relationship Data Bill of Rights - a public statement about how it treats the relationship data it collects. In an industry that has historically treated your contacts as inventory to be scraped, packaged and sold, writing down what you won't do is a real position, and a marketing one too. Whether you find it reassuring or clever probably depends on your general disposition toward San Francisco software companies, but it is at least a stance, and stances are rarer than they should be.

The competitive field is not empty. Affinity, Introhive, 4Degrees, Clay and others are all mapping relationships from various angles, and the broader universe of cold-outreach tools - the ZoomInfos and Apollos of the world - are selling the exact opposite thesis: more data, more contacts, more sending. Connect The Dots is making a narrower and, in a way, more contrarian bet. Not that you need more people to email, but that the right person to email is almost always one warm introduction away, and that the hard part was never sending the message - it was earning the trust to have it read.