·By Linran YU
From a name on a list to a meeting on the calendar
A partnership starts as a name. The distance between that name and a meeting on the calendar is where the work happens, and almost none of it is charm.
A partnership starts as a name. Someone who buys for a chain of shops, a professor running the lab you want to work with, a rescue that already has the audience you are trying to reach. The distance between that name and a meeting is where the work happens, and almost none of it is charm.
It begins with the list, and the list should be wide. From outside you cannot tell which name will answer, and the ones that turn into something are rarely the ones you would have bet on. Anyone whose work touches yours is worth a message. Some of my best conversations started in industries I had never worked in.
Then there is the route in. Public contact addresses are read by nobody in particular. A named person, the assistant who books the calendar, a colleague who can pass it along, a trade show conversation picked up two weeks later: these get answered. Finding that route is the unglamorous half of the job, and the half that decides the outcome.
The message is short and about them: what you noticed about their business, what you are proposing, and one concrete ask, usually twenty minutes. Not a brochure. Not your whole history. People decide in the first two lines.
Then follow up, once, properly. Most yeses arrive on the second message, and the difference between persistent and irritating is whether it adds something new.
Here is what that looked like. As director of communications for 3 Body Labs, my job was to identify AI professors and PhD students working in one narrow corner of the field, and to open conversations about collaborating.
The USC AI lab answered. They invited us to meet them at their lab on campus and walked us through the space, the equipment and what they were working on.
Another name on the list was a PhD student at UC Berkeley, already researching exactly what the company wanted to build. I wrote to him and set up a meeting with our founder. Our work is open source, and that turned out to be the whole point. He offered to work for free, on three conditions: the code stays open, he gets to publish, and none of it comes before his own schedule.
He said plainly that he did not want to be paid. Nobody could have guessed that from the outside, and nobody would have found out without the meeting.
By the time you sit down, the right person is expecting you, knows what you are proposing, and has the time set aside. If the conversation needs two languages, I can be in the room for that too.