Opportunity Flow

A Theory Of Moments That Can Change Your Trajectory

What is it?

Opportunity flow is to you and me what deal flow is to a VC firm. It is the sum of things like conversations about research breakthroughs a grad student friend had, the inside access to a job opportunity, and an old coworker pitching you to join her startup as a cofounder. (Although I’ll mostly be discussing in the context of paid work, it could be used avocationally or in personal relationships.)

Opportunity flow is the sum of moments that could alter the trajectory of your life. And like any sort of deal flow, depending on your investment hypothesis, you could consistently get opportunities to incrementally alter that trajectory or infrequently get the option to radically change. Most people land somewhere in between, but closer to the former.

Why is it an important concept?

If you can generate 1% more lifetime income or utility, then both you and the world will be richer and happier. While the concept of opportunity flow by itself likely won’t generate that, thinking in more structured ways about your future will.

Opportunity flow is an additional tool rather than a replacement for your other planning tools, as it will be high variance across both the population and at the individual level. However, even a small increase in opportunity identification and execution would increase global wealth and utility—which I believe is the most important moral consideration.

How to get started

Understand your risk profile.

Decide how much risk you are willing to take on. Are you simply looking for a new job or are you looking to invest a high percentage of your liquid net worth in a high risk venture? Most people will be in the middle. Decide if you will make many small bets or one big one.

Set aside your risk capital.

You will invest both time and money in generating opportunity flow. Initially, this will probably be writing down your ideas and previous work, reaching out to people who will mostly ignore you, going on awkward coffee meetings, and flying to events and meetings.  

The amount of time and money is clearly individual, but I would suggest setting aside more than feels comfortable. Once you have identified an opportunity you want to execute on, the time and money needed will be uncomfortable, so it’s best to start feeling that way now.

Be aware of all your skills. Not just your best or most obvious ones.

It’s easy to define your skillset as the graduate degree you have, or the function or industry you work in. However, in any high risk venture you will likely have to do a lot more than that anyway, so it’s best not to box yourself in from the jump. If you are a physicist, you can clearly do the statistics involved in forecasting. If you are a marketing person, but are willing to make sales calls, congratulations—you are now your venture’s salesperson.

Connect with people who have complementary skills—not people who are like you.

Many people looking to generate opportunity flow go to industry or functional events. This is fine as far as it goes if you’re looking to learn from whomever they could convince to speak. But if you’re looking for opportunity, don’t go to a place where there are a thousand people who proclaim to have the same expertise as you.

Go to where your skills are scarce. This could mean a researcher seeking out business types or someone from the developing world offering access to their market to a group of folks from the developed world. You will be rare and interesting, and opportunities will flow to you.

Come at problems from an angle.

If there is a problem that you understand, then seek out people who have no expertise in it, but have expertise in an adjacency. Look for people who deeply understand the first principles of the problem but likely have never considered your higher order problem. If you have an engineering problem, find a physicist. If you have a marketing problem, find a biologist. The flipside also works, if you have a psychology problem, find an art director from an ad agency.

If the people already working on your problem could have solved it, they already would have. And if they are going to solve it, then they likely won’t invite you into the room filled with people like you.

Privilege talent and passion, rather than a specific way of solving a problem (or even a specific problem).

This is a VC firm truism that probably doesn’t work for them. But I think it works for an individual’s opportunity flow. For VC firms, the number of people who have the talent and passion to dramatically alter the world is vanishingly small and their ability to identify them is…questionable. However, the number of people with the talent and passion to dramatically alter their own worlds is…well it isn’t vanishingly small. Fuck—it isn’t even small. Your ability to identify them is also likely much better.

If you find an opportunity with someone who is wildly smart with the passion to will their vision into existence, then I suggest you join them regardless of the problem they’re trying to solve.