This is a short excerpt of Build, a book on several extraordinary entrepreneurs and technologists building the future, and what they’ve learned doing so.
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Sometimes, for a given problem, there are only a handful of people who have exactly the right advice. In a networked world where information can be spread effortlessly, the problem isn’t access to information: it is the filter to what solves your problem, and what doesn’t that really matters.
Dan Martell of Clarity.FM aims to be that filter. His platform allows you to instantly access the individual you need who has lived through your problems before you. Imagine a real-time Jeopardy call-your-friend function, if your friends were million-dollar entrepreneurs, and billion-dollar investors.
Welcome to the future of advice.
It looks a lot like a curated index of experts that are ready to answer your questions for a nominal fee, on-demand—and that’s because that’s what it has to be. Nowadays, to collect opinions is almost trivial. Posting a link anywhere is an open invitation for many on the web to openly question your sanity, and plenty more.
What most people need now is not information—there is too much of that around. What they need is qualified advice: communication that has more barriers than Yahoo Answers, in other words. People will spend immense amounts of time and effort to find those qualified answers, because quality matters more than quantity.
This can be seen in the success of Quora—which has managed to gather a community of very intelligent and connected contributors, who more often than not, know exactly what it is like to work with Elon Musk or Sergey Brin—because they are working with them right now.
The future of advice-giving to Dan isn’t about making it easier for advisor and advisee to connect with one another: it’s about creating a level of friction so that both sides know exactly what they’re getting into, and both sides know exactly how much they’d be willing to give up to meet one another.
The future of advice-giving isn’t about making it easier for advisor and advisee to connect with one another: it’s about creating a level of friction so that both sides know exactly what they’re getting into, and both sides know exactly how much they’d be willing to give up to meet one another.