Welcome back to Field Notebook!

Here are some of the thoughts, essays, and hot takes that have surfaced across the Redbud team this month. In Edition #7 of Field Notebook, we discuss the six degrees of separation and the impact of visa talent. 🥓

Redbud VC invests $250k-$500k in early-stage tech founders. We deliver insights and learnings we shared over the last month to our over 15,000 readers.

In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram ran a crazy experiment. Researchers handed people a letter and asked them to get it to someone they had never met. There was one rule: they could only pass the letter to someone they knew personally. Over and over again, the letters found their way to complete strangers through surprisingly short chains of introductions.

The world turned out to be much smaller than anyone expected. People in your network know people you do not. The people you know, even the people you're close with, have networks you have no idea about.

Most people who hear that story, think "interesting" and move on. Founders shouldn't.

Think about the person who could change the trajectory of your company. Maybe it's an investor. Maybe it's the engineer who builds your first product. Maybe it's your first enterprise customer. Whoever you're imagining, there's a good chance they're not six introductions away.

They're probably two or three. The only problem is you can't see the path.

You know someone from college. She used to work at a company where one of her teammates is now building startups in New York. That teammate plays pickleball every Saturday with the founder you've been trying to reach for six months.

The connection already existed. You just didn't know it.

That's what makes networks so interesting, and where most people get this wrong. The true value of your network isn't measured by how many people you know now. It's measured by how many relationships you can discover.

For years, that discovery process has been mostly accidental. Someone makes an introduction at a conference. A friend mentions a former coworker over coffee. You realize two people know each other after a scroll on LinkedIn.

It can work, but it's incredibly inefficient.

Not every path is equal, either. Milgram's letters traveled through whoever came to mind first, geography, alma mater, an old job. Roots is different. A shared hometown carries a kind of trust a conference badge never will. Someone who grew up two towns over from you, or built a company in the same city you did, will take your call in a way a stranger on LinkedIn won't.

That's the part most networking tools miss. They treat every connection as equal weight. But the paths that run through the towns and schools and communities that raised you, tend to be shorter and stronger than the ones that don't.

Every founder belongs to communities that have been quietly creating connections for years. Schools. Employers. Hometowns. Accelerators. Sports teams. Military service. Friends of friends.

Those communities contain thousands of invisible paths, but most founders never find them. We built Roots so you can.

Search engines made information searchable. GPS made the physical world searchable. AI is making knowledge searchable. Roots is making networks searchable, both the ones you've discovered and the ones you haven't. And because Roots starts with place, it surfaces the paths most likely to actually hold weight when you need them to.

Six degrees of separation was an interesting observation. We believe it can become a practical tool.

Sign up for Roots here.

Photo from: 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. | Iceinstitute.org

Hemkesh Agrawal landed in America after a 35-hour, three-layover flight. He had two bags, $1,000, and no network. He took a bus two hours from the airport through what he expected to be skyscrapers and instead was nothing but cornfields. He knew no one.

Now, he’s our Head of Engineering at Redbud VC and helping build Roots (social platform for builders).

Hemkesh represents exactly the kind of builder America keeps almost losing and sometimes does.

Before he arrived in the US, Hemkesh was already building. At 16, he watched a blind person struggling to use their phone. He built a glove with touch points mapped to digits so visually impaired users could dial by pressing their fingers. He got a patent on it. Then he went to pitch competitions and got great user feedback: one tester told him the glove prevented them from reading braille, so he redesigned it with open fingertips. Not bad from a tenth grader in India.

The instinct to find a problem, build something, and iterate based on real users isn't something people teach in school. It's a disposition. America's ability to attract people with that disposition is one of the most underrated inputs to our innovation economy.

When Hemkesh joined us, it was the product of an intentional career built around one constraint: he was on a visa. Every decision he made, from which startup to join after graduation to which hackathons to judge, was partly shaped by building a credible case to stay. He ended up qualifying for an O-1A (the "extraordinary ability" visa) across five categories: media coverage, critical role as a VC-backed CTO, judging experience, his patent, and salary benchmarks. He submitted a 400-page application. Premium processing. Then spent three weeks stuck in his apartment with no job, no driver's license, waiting to find out if he had to leave the country.

Luckily, he didn't. But plenty of people with his profile do, which is part of why Redbud backed Migrate Mate. Immigration shouldn't come down to a costly attorney or weeks sourcing the right role.

Hemkesh knew from day one he had to build his profile. That meant being intentional about the work he took, the communities he joined, and the events he went to. The visa pressure made him more deliberate. That's one reason immigrant founders tend to build with urgency that's hard to manufacture.

Technical depth isn't evenly distributed, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone. Hemkesh grew up in a system where programming was required curriculum from fifth grade. By the time he sat in a Michigan State engineering class, he had nearly a decade of structured technical training behind him. That's an advantage, and it's the product of another country making different choices about what’s important.

When we close doors to people like that, we don't make our own talent pool stronger. We just make our companies weaker.

We're building a platform at Redbud called Roots that's designed, in part, around this problem. When Hemkesh landed in Michigan, the hardest part for him was having no network. And yes, you have to earn your right to win, but access to network effects is arguably a right that should be open-sourced rather than earned. It’s the most impactful lever for accelerating a high achiever's success. Roots is leveling the playing field, so entrepreneurship is not pay-to-play or a birthright.

Hemkesh found his way in without it. But he'll tell you himself: the people who connected him to other people were the unlock. Every critical role he landed, every hackathon he judged, and every letter of recommendation he collected, everything traced back to someone who opened a door.

That's what we're building at Roots.