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Walking the Yellow Brick Social Graph

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When you launch a startup and find $6 million in funding in three days, people will notice. When you raise $60 million from top Wall Street names like Kenneth G Langone, Henry R. Kravis and Andrew Tisch, heads start turning. When your startup creates a detailed map of  profiles and relationships of over 2 million of the rich and powerful in the business world, people will beat a path to your door.

Neal Goldman’s startup, Relationship Science LLC (RelSci), which emerged out of beta recently after several years of development, hopes that is exactly what will happen. Why would one be interested? What if their software could show you the yellow brick social graph path to the highest echelon of potential partners, sponsors, angels, private equity, or donors for your business or cause?

If LinkedIn had a super-premium list of executives and leaders that people could search through, then you’d have the data goldmine that is Relationship Science.  This is rarefied air that you will not likely find in most social networks, but know that this is not a social network in the sense of LinkedIn or Facebook . Rather RelSci is a relationship database and graph that maps all the business, and social relationships of an estimated 2.2 millionbusiness leaders across North America, Europe and some in Asia Pacific.

I had a conversation with Josh Mait, CMO of Relationship Science, recently to understand the capabilities of the system and more so what value and issues people might discover with such a system. Their CEO, Mr. Goldman had sold his previous company CapitalIQ, a financial database service to McGraw-Hill in 2004 for $200 million.  This new effort takes a different tack, focused on a data science and big data analytics of public sources of information about corporate officers, major stockholders, board members, venture capitalists and investors of every kind, as well as leaders in non-profits and similar organizations.

This takes effort, not just in software data crunching, but scaled human effort to go through entire libraries of information, news and other identifying public information to draw the facts of each relationship. For example, it shows work and employment history, education, business deals and relationships, family networks, and even their creative works, awards, political and non-profit donations (see Figure 2). There is similar information on companies or organizations as well.

You could navigate and search through these relationships by these categories and see profiles of each individual or organization. If you allow the system access to your contacts on your own machine—it is not uploaded to the database for others to see, just for the system to perform analyses for you—then you can do path searches.

The path searches are color coded (see Figure 3) to signify the degree of strength of relationship between individuals. The more you have in common with the next person in the path, the more the color moves from orange (weak) towards red (strong). Each link will show the information that connects the individuals together, whether it is a common employer, board membership, or other factors. The next link between the 2nd and 3rd degree in turn is similarly graded based on what they have in common.

Before you jump ahead to find the yellow brick path to Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or Ratan Tata, there is a catch: you can find out a lot of information about them, but not their direct contact information. Rather, it will use your contact information and make comparisons to draw a path to the targets, if such paths should exist.

No path can guarantee success, of course. You cannot traverse a social graph of real relationships like one would walk up a road. The wizard doesn’t always grant an audience.

I pointed out that perhaps your own contacts may not realize that such a path exists. After all, a businessperson on this level may have hundreds or thousands—of if you’re a social media superstar, hundreds of thousands—of contacts and an exponential number of paths outwards. How would someone react to hearing that they are a point in the path?

Mr. Mait’s response was that people at this level usually have good relationship management skills and know how to approach people. In any case, the information is public of course, mashed up against your own contacts. I’d say it depends on how well you know your contacts and how well they know the next person.

I see several great uses for this tool. First of all, this is obviously a terrific business development tool, regardless of industry. This goes beyond the data you might find, say on Hoover’s. It is useful precisely in the rank of top level executive business development and sales people where it is the most difficult to build relationships, whether you want to reach a person or learn about a company.

Second, it is similarly handy for non-profits or other funding supported organizations to find new sponsors and those interested in the same field. One could explore a person’s interests, donation history, and memberships to develop an understanding of those who might be interested.

Third, it is useful for HR teams and headhunter firms looking at potential executive hires or new board members. They can use it to trace history and relationships of candidates across the business world.

Finally, it may also be useful for watchdog organizations, whether looking for political donations, board memberships, or employment of business leaders on their radar. The ability to save and repeat searches allows regular monitoring capabilities of their activity.

Relationship Science is a still young organization so it is quite likely we will find new uses for this kind of information. When it comes to information concentrations of the rich and powerful there is always interest—just see the perennial success of the various Forbes lists. With the degree of financial backing, their valuable consolidated information base, and their software algorithms, Relationship Science is definitely one to watch.

A relationship database on the other hand gives you much more than rank order, it provides a new way to explore the streets and pathways. As with navigating any big city, you need to really understand your destination and the path that will get you there. And as any traveler will tell you, knowing the route is not the same as the journey itself, but it certainly helps to have a map.