When Matt Sim arrived in San Francisco, he had very little to his name and no margin for wasted effort. Every decision carried weight, including how he spent his time trying to build a place for himself in the technology world. Like many newcomers, he started with the obvious move, the large networking events and conferences that promise access and connection. What he found there changed how he thinks about relationships and opportunity.
The big events, in his experience, produced little result. Hundreds of introductions, stacks of contacts, and a great deal of activity rarely translated into anything real. The interactions were shallow by design, brief exchanges in crowded rooms where everyone was looking past the person in front of them for someone more useful. Sim came to see this kind of networking as a numbers game that mistakes visibility for value, and he found it produced very little of the latter.
What worked instead was the opposite approach. Smaller, higher signal rooms, curated dinners and tight knit builder communities, consistently produced more genuine opportunities than any conference did. In those settings, conversations had room to go deep. People could be understood rather than merely met. Sim found that a handful of real relationships, built with people who actually knew his work, did more for him than a thousand surface level connections ever could.
The principle he drew from this is simple to state and hard to practice. Depth beats breadth. Trust, in his framing, is not built through visibility or a single impressive introduction. It is built through repeated, verifiable action over time, by showing up, doing what you said you would, and letting people see the pattern. That kind of trust cannot be manufactured at scale or collected like business cards. It accumulates slowly, in smaller circles, through proof rather than presentation.
This runs against a common instinct in professional life, the urge to be everywhere and know everyone. Sim argues that the urge is usually counterproductive. Spreading attention across hundreds of weak connections leaves none of them strong enough to matter. Concentrating it on a few relationships, by contrast, allows real trust and genuine mutual understanding to form. The math feels backward to people who equate a large network with a strong one, but in his experience the smaller, deeper network is far more powerful.
There is a quieter point underneath this about how trust actually works. People decide whether to rely on someone based on evidence, and evidence takes time and proximity to gather. In a brief encounter at a conference, there is no opportunity to demonstrate reliability. In an ongoing relationship within a small community, there is. Every kept commitment and every delivered result adds to the record, and that record is what
eventually opens doors. Sim treats this as a reason to favor environments where he can be observed over time rather than judged on a first impression.
The lesson connects to a thread that runs through much of how Sim operates, a preference for substance over surface. Just as he learned to value honest results over appearances in other parts of his life, he came to value genuine relationships over the appearance of a vast network. Both reflect the same underlying belief, that what is real and proven matters more than what is visible and broadcast.
There is also a reputational effect that Sim finds easy to underestimate. In small, tight communities, word travels. A person who consistently delivers becomes known for it, and that reputation spreads within the circle without any self-promotion. The same is true in reverse, which is part of what keeps standards high in those rooms. Sim sees this as another reason depth pays off. A reputation built through real action within a trusted community works on a person’s behalf, opening doors through others’ vouching rather than anything they have to claim about themselves. That kind of earned, transferable trust is almost impossible to build in the churn of large, anonymous events.
For founders and builders, his advice is to resist the pull of breadth. The conference circuit and the endless pursuit of contacts can feel productive while delivering little. Investing instead in a smaller number of deeper relationships, and letting trust build through consistent action, tends to produce the opportunities that actually move things forward. In a culture that often rewards visibility, Sim makes the case that depth, quietly and over time, is the better bet.
