Find The Next David Karp And Make Him Your BFF

This article from Harvard Business Review — “Six ways to befriend future tech billionaires” — is not about what I thought it was going to be about. I read that headline and couldn’t click fast enough — yes, please, tell me how to be friends with people who will become very rich and then take me to the riviera. French. Italian. Any riviera.

It is not that. It’s advice for older business people on how to get in early with bright young things who will become their bosses one day. The tips are kind of great actually. Hang out where they hang out, like, in online chatrooms. Mentor them, but make sure you don’t tell them how to do anything, they hate that. Ask questions. Give them money. Worship the ground they walk on. All great tips.

As for the aforementioned problem, of how we befriend the future rich of America: Ideas? I think it probably involves being super creative and driven and hanging out with other super creative and driven people and then, CHANCES ARE, someone (you????) will make it.

I lived in L.A. after college with a group of boys who were all Trying To Make It In Entertainment. My contribution was interning at a production company and scoffing at screenplays that were getting produced, insisting that I could do better than that, and then never doing better than that. Anyway we had a pact that if any of us Made It we’d get a house in the Hollywood Hills big enough for everyone to squat in. Later, paying off everyone’s debt was added to the mix (we were planning on major, major success). No one has made it. We all still have debt and no houses in the Hollywood Hills. Yet.

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