There’s a new social media tool making big waves on the internet, but unless you’re a Wall Street banker, you may not have heard of it. Relationship Science, or RelSci, is a well-funded site that collects as much data as possible about influential business people around the world, and aims to connect them through mutual friends or business associates. Users will be able to connect with potential clients in a method that goes beyond cold calling or relentless networking. The site instead can streamline your research about a lead and suggest ways to get introduced. This priceless service will only set you back a mere $3,000 a year.
While that seems like a steep price in the age of free sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, the fee will be trivial to anyone looking to make multi-million dollar business deals. RelSci wants to have less users, in fact, as many top professionals see those sites as too crowded and thus less useful. RelSci is for serious business; founder Neal Goldman has already proven himself a valuable entrepreneur to Wall Street, and has been able to collect over $60 million in venture capital, including billionaire and finance all-star Henry Kravis. Goldman has a staff of nearly 800 people working to build out the site into a quality data center that will include information about any well-connected businessperson, their relationships, any organizations they have connections to, and even information about their families. RelSci will not require or rely on anyone to sign up for the service or need any user generated content to provide the information to subscribers. Instead, engineers crawl the web and produce any relevant results onto profiles.
In 1999, Goldman founded Capital IQ, a database service that is in use by Wall Street banks widely. CapitalIQ was sold for $200 million five years later, launching Goldman into fame and fortune in the finance community. He created RelSci as a way to streamline relationship building, an aspect of business he says is the most important part of making money. The founder also has some pretty strong opinions about how users should go about building those relationships, as he insisted that RelSci does not provide phone numbers or email addresses in the profiles. Goldman believes that cold calling is ineffective and would only waste the subscriber’s time. Instead, RelSci encourages deal makers to reach deep within their networks, find connections, and ask for introductions. This method is based on the vision that the site will change the way people do business and manage who they know.
Don’t forget to check out our full profile on KKR co-founder and co-CEO Henry Kravis!