(don’t love title)
Everyone in Silicon Valley talks about helping people with no expectation of receiving anything in return
that’s not quite true though
people will only offer to make you intros if they think you’re above a certain level of impressiveness. because those intros don’t cost social capital, they build it - it creates goodwill in the person who was introduced, and it creates goodwill for the person they were introduced to.
the question isn’t, why are people in Silicon Valley so nice?
it’s, why is goodwill priced higher here than elsewhere?
I’d guess you could distill a lot of that into the ease of equity sharing. Someone with goodwill can convert that to a small angel check if the company looks especially promising - so goodwill is worth the price of an option, which is positive.
In that sense, Silicon Valley is like a semi-liquid options market on people and companies, at a scale where personal relationships matter.
one way to increase value of goodwill is aggressive gate-keeping to keep quality of people high (eg Stanford, YC)