Love the product, have been using it since it was first released to a small group of us! It has been insanely valuable during fundraising. Strongly recommend. It also stealthily works on AngelList as well!
Hi all, I'm a co-founder at Conspire. We're excited to give you all the first look at our Chrome plugin!
Based on analysis of billions of email interactions, our system understands who knows each other and how well. It shows your strongest connections to the people you look at on LinkedIn and AngelList (and more sites to come).
I think you'll be surprised at how connected you are. Would love your questions and feedback!
It's very interesting. I am wondering, how do people react when they realise they need to give a kind of "blanket" access to all their emails? Do you get a lot of questions? I have read your FAQ and I understand what you are doing (only using headers), but with the recent and very public hacks, are people concerned? It seems to me emails can be very, very personal (I might have discussions with my GP, a lawyer, etc.) and they can contain sensitive business info (deal terms, etc). It's different with FB, Twitter where we know it's "mostly" public stuff.
@cam_pj Yes, the permissions are a big ask to make from a privacy perspective. Email data is some of our most sensitive data online. We would love to request read-only header access, but unfortunately email access isn't that granular. So, we have to make sure that we are excellent stewards of every user's data.
At the end of the day, a user has to get enough value out of Conspire to counteract any real and perceived privacy risk. If they don't, they can delete their account and data at any time.
@cam_pj I think long term, most people will only be willing to give "blanket" access (even if headers only) to a very specific segment of people. If everyone knows who everyone emails, all the time --> then requests for introductions will become too frequent, and the current system (which partly works because it's not transparent, and hence stays an infrequent activity) will break down.
@drewmeyers That's an interesting way to think about it. What we've seen with "super-connector" types is that they already get many intro requests per day. Their contacts frequently ask for intros -- some to people the super-connector barely knows -- because we assume they know everybody in their field.
Conspire can actually reduce the number of intro requests because the super-connector will only get asked when he/she is the *right* person to ask.
@sydney_liu_sl Thanks! Would love your feedback.
Our goal with the plugin was to pop up relevant info as you go about your normal day. Whenever you're on LinkedIn (and Angel List and Gmail), we'll show you something userful/interesting.
This is super cool, and if it works well it's a huge step up from what I've been using, but that's mostly because those tools don't work as well as I had hoped. Questions:
- Is there a way to hook up more than one email account? I signed up with my personal email because there's way more history there, but I'm guessing you guys would do better analysis if you had my work emails to compute, too. Of course, my employer (or clients) might take issue with that.
- Are social integrations on your roadmap? I have a lot of contacts I've never exchanged emails with, or rarely, but if you were looking at our Facebook or Twitter interactions (including messages, but also public interactions), our degree of intimacy would be readily apparent. It seems like with just the one channel, there's a bias toward types of communication (and personalities) that occur in that channel.
@eliservescent To hook up multiple email accounts, log in with your existing account at conspire.com and then click 'add account' in the upper right. You are correct that it works better and better with more data.
Social integrations are definitely on our roadmap. What we've found is that we can get a very accurate picture of the typical user's professional network just from email. That said, any data source that helps our system understand the strength of relationships will improve the experience.
This is *very* thoughtful. Obviously LinkedIn connections are stronger than others. Conspire promises to surface the signal strength. I suspect LinkedIn would be very interested in this. However, isn't there a network problem here? Don't you need to know the email connection history for lots of people before this fulfills its promise? If my connection to Brad is through David, how is it possible to understand signal strength between David and Brad without David being a Conspire user? I understand that you'll know about my connection to David through my own email history (even if David isn't a user), but what about the next step?
Hey Ryan, great question. It's true we need some data beyond your own to give you insights about mutual connections and longer paths. But note we don't need data from each person in the path. If you and Brad are users and we see a connection to David in both of your communication patterns, we can stitch those connections together to form a path even if David isn't a user... Of course he is a user, so maybe not the perfect example ;)
Cascadeur