Want to get your pitch deck in front of the right VC? Trying to find the right “in” to help you land your dream job? Or just trying to figure out which of your thousands of e-mail contacts are actually helpful?
A startup called Conspire thinks it has a way to help you figure that out.
The Boulder, CO-based company is developing software it says can map users’ personal networks to help them find with whom they have the strongest relationships and how to keep those relationship strong. Better yet, Conspire says it can help connect the dots between all its users’ networks to help find the right person to turn a cold introduction into a warm one.
“This will get your foot in the door in the best way possible,” Conspire co-founder and CEO Alex Devkar said.
How? By analyzing who talks with each other and figuring out the indicators of meaningful relationships, like how often people connect, how fast they reply to each other, and how long they’ve been corresponding.
“The way we understand the strength of relationships is looking at communication patterns,” Devkar said.
Users give Conspire limited access to their e-mail accounts, and it culls information from e-mail headers and analyzes information like recipients and dates. It uses that information to determine how often people communicate, how fast they respond to each other, and how long they’ve interacted.
Conspire shows you your connections by asking you to search for a person or a company, and returns with a list. Click on a name, and it tells you which Conspire user is the most direct connection between you and your target. It rates the quality of the intermediary relationships from “acquainted” to “knows very well” and lets you ask for an introduction by clicking on a link. Users can expand the list to see many different paths.
Conspire also will send you regular e-mails telling you who you’re losing touch with, in case you need to reconnect. For now, it’s all free, but Devkar said the company plans to add premium features over time.
Right now, Conspire users can only connect their e-mail accounts, in particular Gmail, but other providers will be added soon, Devkar said. Conspire plans to eventually add other data sources like Twitter and Facebook and possibly text and voice messages, he added.
“Add that up across users, and we get a global network of people and know the strengths of relationships between each one,” Devkar said.
Conspire wants to become “the de facto professional relationship graph for the world,” Devkar said. “We’ve got a lot of growing to do before we can say that, but that’s the big vision of where we’re going.” He wouldn’t say how many people use Conspire, but the company says more than 26.7 million people are reachable through its network.
Conspire is about two years old, went through Techstars, and recently closed a $2.5 million financing round
