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The team calls them MIQs, for most important questions. They create a hierarchy of what they most need answered about an investment or a new idea, then track down the people who might know. Often those people are already in the network, so a conversation leads to another conversation, and the priorities get reshuffled as the answers come in.
The network comes from years of work. Fifteen years of teaching a class at Columbia built trust with a group of investors and operators, which lets those conversations happen naturally. Mark Leonard, who is almost impossible to interview, has come through the classroom three times. A close friend who owns a software business in roofing has given another view, because ten years of helping with his leadership shows things a public equity investor can't glean.
Why does ranking questions focus research?
Vilfredo Pareto observed in 1896 that about eighty percent of the land in Italy was owned by roughly twenty percent of the people. Management consultant Joseph Juran later generalized the pattern as the vital few and the trivial many. Juran popularized the idea in quality management from the 1940s onward.
Why do acquaintances carry new information?
Sociologist Mark Granovetter surveyed people who had recently changed jobs and published the results in 1973 in a paper called The Strength of Weak Ties. Most had found their job through acquaintances, not close friends. Acquaintances move in different circles, so they carry information that a person's close friends already share.
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