Graphight

Graphight’s mobile app keeps you productive everywhere you go

John Slade — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:21:32 +0000

Here at Graphight World Headquarters in southern California, we know a little about traffic. And while we have some of the nation’s worst commutes, we know we’re not alone in wishing that time spent in the car, train, or airport could be used for something more productive than listening to talk radio, or worse, a traffic report telling you how long your commute is going to be.

So we built the Graphight app – mobile edition! It’s deceptively simple, but highly useful. It provides you with a Call Sheet of the people with whom you should interact to build your professional network while you’re on the go. And it lets you dial or email right from the call sheet so you don’t need to thumb your way through your address book.

Sometimes the busy-ness of the day makes it hard for me to find time to spend working on growing my network and maintaining those professional relationships that matter most to me, but aren’t urgent right now. Well, time spent commuting is a perfect opportunity to do that, and Graphight’s mobile app makes it easy to do so. I don’t need to browse through my address book or my memory to remember who I ought to be contacting – Graphight does it for me – so I can reach out to the people that most need contact right now. Like that, I’ve turned my commute time into productive working time. It almost feels like I added hours into the day.

I’m sure we’ve all been stuck at the airport in a long flight delay far more times than we’d care to remember. Well, instead of whipping out the copy of USA Today you got from under your hotel room door that morning and flipping to the crossword puzzle, you can pull out your Graphight Call Sheet and make the delay productive by making strategic calls and sending the right emails. It’ll give you a much better sense of accomplishment than figuring out that 16-Across (the four-letter word for Polynesian feast) is “luau.”

If you’ve already signed up for the Graphight beta and haven’t yet downloaded the mobile app, download it below. It’s available today for Android and BlackBerry phones, and coming soon for iPhone. If you haven’t yet signed up for Graphight, you can participate in our beta here. And, of course, if you have questions, feedback, feature requests, or mad moments, let us know!

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Thanks, and good luck making your time on the go far more productive.

-John

Download Graphight’s mobile app here

Just view this page in your smartphone, click the Android or Blackberry button and you’re done!

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3 relationship lessons for engineers (like me) + other know-it-alls

Andy Wilson — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:49:50 +0000

Twenty years ago, I thought I knew it all. You remember feeling that way, right? It seems like only yesterday … I was sitting in my organizational behavior class at Harvard Business School when the prof asked,

“What’s more important: Who you know or what you know?”

I wasn’t much of a basketball player, but this one was an easy layup because, of course, I knew everything. After all, I’d studied engineering at Dartmouth and helped profs write cool papers about bio engineering. Now I was getting an MBA. So obviously my answer was what you know!

Boy, was I wrong. Today, I’d give a wildly different answer thanks to these three critical career lessons.

1. I got tired of being the inside guy.

I spent the first part of my career consulting. I did lots of cool analysis, created spiffy charts and built complex models. Yet I discovered that unless I got in front of the right person – someone with the authority to act on all the cool solutions I’d created – all that work was merely a mental exercise. If I didn’t know that “right person,” my work would lead nowhere.

2. Corporate politics count.

After business school, I spent a decade working primarily for large companies. I had high value ideas that the C-suite may have embraced. Unfortunately, I hadn’t built sufficient rapport or trust with those executives to even present my ideas.

3. I spent 10 years observing start-ups.

Small companies and start-ups are awesome and exciting. Many great new ideas and technologies originate there. However, early businesses typically have no awareness or credibility. The best way to get noticed is to build relationships with people who do have that credibility and strong relationships with others who can help. That means startup executives have to engage a wide range of prominent people — advisors, board members, VCs, major partners, lighthouse customers.

Now I know it’s relationships, not just knowledge, that count.

Yes, ideas are valuable and important, but more often than not, relationships carry the day. For example, we all see companies winning deals, people getting jobs and start-ups securing financing not because they have the best products, qualifications or clever idea. Instead, they succeed because they have access, credibility and trust with key decision makers. Certainly inferior products rarely win, but “good enough” products can win if the right relationships are in place.

So here I am extolling the virtues of investing in relationships. This “evangelism” certainly isn’t in my DNA — I started off believing the opposite (I was “immersed in the empirical” as my old business partner Matt Ridenour used to say). I now see how high-quality, relevant relationships drive critical outcomes.

Relationships matter. A lot. But they take time and continual effort to build, nurture and grow. Yet time is truly a luxury these days, so it’s difficult to devote that time even when we know it’s important.

Do you agree? And how do you balance building relationships for the future with the tasks you have to tackle right now?

Image credit: stuartpilbrow

On Product Betas (and On Graphight’s Beta)

John Slade — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:12:50 +0000

Hi, I’m John. I am a founder of Graphight, and I run product management here. Well, we’re a startup, so technically, I am product management here, but you get the point.

Because of that, I wanted to post some brief thoughts about Product Betas, and about Graphight’s beta. But, it’ll be easier to understand those thoughts if I share some of how I think about building Internet software products.

In my experience, building Internet software products requires bi-focal vision. I’m not talking about the glasses all product managers seem to need, no doubt from countless hours staring into computer screens. I am talking about the need to have two deeply different foci in one’s mind at the same time – Perfection and Pragmatism. Perfection is required because the product manager needs to have the vision of what the ultimate state of her/his product will be eventually. Pragmatism is required because we all know that the perfect product never will exist and you have to “ship” some product. Keeping these seemingly contradictory (but, in actuality, complementary) foci in one’s mind at the same time is not easy, even though it becomes second nature to product managers after a while.

When you take the tension between Perfection and Pragmatism and the humbling reality that real users will always know what they need far better than you could ever hope to know, many of us product types decide to “ship” our product and call it a beta. We say to ourselves: “I know this product doesn’t have nearly as many features as it needs to have, but my vision is so warped from months of this bi-focal stuff that I need some real users to re-set my field of vision.”

So, Graphight is here, in beta release. That means that there are several things we know are missing from the product, not the least of which are:

Easier integration with current relationship data sources and plugins for other platforms like Yahoo mail, LinkedIn, etc.
More consistent application navigation and action buttons that allow users the ability to navigate more quickly and perform more actions in bulk
A mobile app for the iPhone (you can imagine how much it kills me not to be able to use my own product on my own SmartPhone)

To those of you curious and/or (who are) brave souls who choose to be among the first people to try (or use) our beta product, please accept our deep thanks. We treasure the feedback you provide on what you hate, what you don’t understand, and even what you like. Even before we get your feedback, we’re already working hard on adding new capabilities and making easier versions of the existing ones too. We pledge to push out improvements and new features as fast as we can. And, we promise that we’ll stop calling Graphight a beta product as soon as our personal pride will allow.

Welcome to Graphight Public Beta

Andy Wilson — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:24:35 +0000

If you’re anything like me, you know that cultivating business relationships is one of the most important things you can do to build your business and your career. Effective relationship management can form a basis of personal success and differentiation.

Unfortunately, these days effective networking has become an overwhelming task: between our inboxes, calendars, LinkedIn connections, voicemails, and Tweets, keeping track of everyone is becoming a full-time job in and of itself. Increasingly, valuable contacts get lost in the “noise” and promising opportunities are missed.

In my years as a Venture Capitalist, Entrepreneur, and CEO to various companies, I’ve amassed over 3,000 contacts in Outlook (plus LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). Like many successful business professionals, I typically spend 20% of my week building relationships that I believe will be relevant and valuable in future business endeavors. I know that I “should” be keeping up with several hundred of the most important (my A-list), but I inevitably lose track of some of them in the clutter. And I often wonder which networking activities, and with whom, will give me the most bang-for-the-buck?

I’ve tried just about every so-called “solution” on the market: from professional CRM systems to Excel spreadsheets, and none of them were able to help me with this growing problem. I need a system that crosses my various networks, keep tracks of my most valuable contacts and systematically monitors how I am spending my time networking and guides me to the highest value activities. Unfortunately, there was no product available that would readily address my needs.

That is why I decided to assemble a team and build our solution called Graphight. Today after 9 months of development and private testing we are excited to debut the public beta version of our initial product.

We are eager to get feedback from users on the capabilities we’ve developed so far. As this is a true “beta” version of the product, you may discover some “undocumented features” and perhaps find the performance a bit lethargic at times; however, I am confident that you will get a glimpse into the magic of relationship management. Meanwhile, we are actively developing several new features for the product, so stay tuned for even better professional relationship management from Graphight going forward.

Finally, a tool built for networking professionals by networking professionals. If you believe that your business network is a driver of your success then you definitely want to give the beta product a test drive. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to reach ou t to us: we’re looking forward to getting your feedback and suggestions.

Welcome

admin — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:54:55 +0000

Welcome to the Graphight blog and thanks for your interest in connecting with us!

The Graphight blog is the venue for sharing

useful information about Graphight
ideas on how to be most effective at building your professional relationships
links to interesting articles and postings about relationship building for business benefit

Latest status on Graphight

We recently invited people to test out a beta version of our product. So far, we’re getting very positive feedback from the initial users and also some good suggestions to make the product even better. We are looking to add more people each week to test out the beta version of Graphight, so if you are interested, please register here.

Check back to our blog soon for more updates about Graphight.

The Graphight Team