Remember Birthdays & Other Tips to Unlock ROI in Your Relationships

Nurturing professional relationships isn't a nice-to-have but a must-have . The strength of your relationships can be the difference between a missed opportunity and a transformative collaboration. Every meaningful interaction, remembered birthday, or thoughtful check-in not only deepens your personal connections but can unlock doors to unimagined opportunities and synergies, setting the foundation for a thriving professional journey.

Whether you're an introvert who cherishes meaningful connections or an extrovert thriving on team dynamics, developing your own authentic approach you feel comfortable using to proactively build and maintain your rolodex is really really important.

Following are three S-Tier habits / behaviors I've learned throughout my career for building strong, lasting, and valuable connections. I’ve tried to inject some personal stories where relevant…hopefully some of this is useful !

1. Celebrate Birthdays with Thoughtful Timing

Remembering birthdays can have a profound impact. **Hat tip to Auren Hoffman ?? for one of my favorite relationship pro moves in the story below…

In the fall of 2022, we were fortunate to hire one of the most talented product professionals I've worked with in my career, Rebecca Houser .

Rebecca joined us having done several impressive tours of duty at other high-growth startups, including LiveRamp . During her first or second month with Thoropass , she and I were talking about LiveRamp, and she told me about a very charming and memorable and heartwarming habit of her old boss, Auren Hoffman ?? .

As she tells it, Auren is known by those close to him for remembering birthdays and reaching out not on the day but on the day before. His thinking is that people likely get a bunch of emails on their birthday. But the day before their inboxes are probably pretty clear. Thus, he reasons, his email wishing happy birthday is a bit more likely to be read and appreciated if it is separate from all the others.

I actually called one of my closest CEO mentors (one of my angel investors and fellow founder/CEO from whom i’ve learned many things about investing long-term in my relationships) before i sat down to write this and told him what i wanted to say, including Auren's Day-Before Birthday tradition. He replied instantly:

"Ha. Yes. Auren sends me a note before my birthday every year. Lemme tell you: those get the job done for sure. Really, it might seem small, but that's a great gesture and always feels special."

2. Adopt a Personal CRM System

Have a method to keep track of the people you meet along the journey in life and in business. Everyone you meet, whether a teammate who joins your company, an investor you shake hands with at an event, or a musician who played a small gig at your favorite bar last weekend is a person you may want to talk to again down the road.?

Who knows where we will all be in a year or two or ten? A person you met at that conference the other day…well, you may want to buy or sell something from/to them in the future. Heck. You might invest in their company! Or the two of you might want to start a band together.?

Without structure to manage it, the potential of a new connection tends to get lost with time. Use Clay.earth or another personal CRM. Or use Apple’s iOS / macOS Contacts.app. Just something!

One thing i do is keep a “People I’d Hire Immediate if Timing Were Right” spreadsheet:

Another hack from my own playbook is super simple: just make a note of how you meet everyone you put in your phone.

e.g. here’s my cofounder, Sam Li 's, contact in my phone ??:?

By maintaining a lightweight yet structured system for personal CRM (handful of spreadsheets, systematic reminders, keeping birthdays, and making clear notes i can easily find later), I’ve been able to reconnect with these individuals at pivotal moments, leading to collaborations and opportunities that were mutually beneficial.?

3. Systematically Check-In with People

Reach out to former partners, customers, teammates, or employees on some kind of interval or cadence.?

Auren Hoffman ?? uses birthdays. I've heard from a few people that Mike Bloomberg has an advanced system for personal/professional checkins with some contacts on a yearly cadence and others every 2 or 3 years (I've heard this but this is not confirmed..if anyone knows more about Mike's system i’d love to learn more. I hear he is the best.)

Timing in life is everything. You’ll very rarely meet someone at the perfect moment to start a new company, build a new product, offer or accept a new job, etc. Those major life events take some prep and planning. And you want to be sure you stay close to folks who give you energy and you’d be happy to work with or partner with or otherwise be in the same orbit.?

Two examples from my career where keeping in touch periodically led to huge results long-term:

Story #1: Thoropass’s Employee #1:?

From 2010-2013 I worked on product at a fintech in NYC, OnDeck . An engineer on my squad, Ronald Zú?iga , and I became close friends over those years despite geographical distance. Ronald is from Costa Rica, so we worked together on Skype calls (pre Slack!) but never met f2f for many years.?

We tinkered and built a ton of hobby projects together and bonded over shared interests and hobbies (we're both fans of pretty much all adventure sports). When I was building my first startup (data science company called ?hat), I tried to hire Ronald a few times but the timing was off on his side or our side for one reason or another.

Fast-forward to 2019. Sam Li , Eva Pittas , and I had been working together on a new biz that would eventually become Thoropass. We'd been at it full time for ~3-4 months and starting to find our footing as business partners. We were making decent progress w/ early customers and thinking about raising capital from investors.

I called Ronald and told him to get on a plane to New York to meet Sam and Eva ASAP...we were starting a new company and I thought he needed to be on the bus with us from day zero.?

Ronald joined within a week, bringing with him our founding engineers Dominique Carvajal , Ivonne Castro , Juan Ignacio Alterio , and Otto Mauricio Zu?iga Arguedas . He established Thoropass's engineering hub in Costa Rica and built one of the finest product engineering organizations in startups.

Story #2: a Strategy Team with Muscle:?

I spent winter 2015 in the bay area as part of Y Combinator 's W15 batch w/ my prior startup. My cofounder, Greg Lamp , and I made headway with investors, circling about a million dollars on a target $1.5M seed round. Greg returned to NYC to start a hiring push, and I stayed in San Francisco to wrap-up the round.

During YC, Greg and I had been living down the Peninsula. But after Demo Day, I needed a new place and moved into a friend's ( Sam Hecht ) place in Hayes Valley.

Sam's apartment had a kind of "hacker boarding house" vibe. New faces were coming and going all the time, and it wasn’t uncommon to wake to find a new friend coding in the living room or talking to an investor in the kitchen.

One chance meeting was with a friend of Sam's, Manuel Jiménez De O?a .

Manuel was sharp, creative, intense—I liked him immediately.?

He'd held several impressive roles at great companies—when we first met he was running growth at healthy meal delivery startup, Sprig.

For several years we stayed in touch, catching up periodically and running into each other in SF from time-to-time. I think we both were excited and curious about working together on something at some point. But, again, timing is often a critical issue for team-ups.

Fast-forward to summer 2022, we had grown Thoropass to more than a hundred employees and thousands of customers. While still a startup, we were actively investing in "growing up" as a company.

We were looking to double down on our huge R&D investment in LATAM, revisiting our entire pricing/packaging, establishing new organizational capabilities like revops, analytics and data science, and expanding our audit and assurance product menu to create more subscribable security and privacy compliance products beyond SOC 2.

BOOM - I knew just the guy to help us with all of that stuff. I called Manuel Jiménez De O?a and introduced him to my cofounders. And a few weeks later he was sinking his teeth into a project for us and a few weeks after that we had a new head of strategy.

Rewards beyond measure

The journey of building and nurturing relationships is enriched by thoughtful gestures and systematic approaches. From sending birthday wishes the day before to maintaining a personal CRM and regularly checking in with contacts, these strategies have played a crucial role in my personal and professional growth. Relationships open unexpected doors, big time. Value them and invest in them. It'll be worth it many times over

—

Streamline SOC 2, ISO 2700*, HITRUST, PCI, & more: thoropass.com

Thanks for reading !! If you found this post useful, you might also enjoy these:

• Why “WHY YOU SHOULD NOT JOIN Y COMBINATOR” indicates small-minded thinking
• Lessons from ‘Failure’ in Startups
• Compliance Maze: Choose Quality Over Convenience

I’m on X.com/austinogilvie and LinkedIn.com/in/austinogilvie

Book a 1:1 w/ me: intro.co/austinogilvie to talk startups, investing, moral philosophy, or extreme sports