Expanding Dunbar's Number

In 1992, Robin Dunbar proposed that the human brain can maintain roughly 150 stable relationships — real, reciprocal, I-know-what's-going-on-in-your-life relationships. Five people you'd call at 3am. Fifteen close friends. Fifty you'd invite to dinner. And 150 you'd recognize, trust, and actually keep up with. Beyond that, relationships decay — not from malice, but from the quiet accumulation of missed texts and forgotten follow-ups.

For most of history, 150 was enough. I don't think it is anymore.

Cold Power Is Dying

The early internet gave us something intoxicating: the ability to reach anyone, anywhere, without introduction. LinkedIn made every professional addressable. Cold email became a growth strategy. Access was the advantage.

Then we drowned in it. Inboxes overflowed. LinkedIn became a spam channel. Every "quick question" was a pitch. Every "congrats on the new role" was a warm-up to an ask.

And now AI is about to make it infinitely worse. By the end of this year, every channel we thought was safe — iMessage, phone calls, email — will be flooded with AI-generated messages that are indistinguishable from real ones. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't declining. It's collapsing.

So people are retreating to trust. Hiring managers ask "who do you know?" VCs rely on warm intros. Deals close because someone vouched. The numbers back this up — 70–85% of jobs are filled through personal connections, up to 88% of closed VC deals come from warm introductions, and referral-based hires convert at 40%+ while cold outreach response rates have cratered below 2%.

The Problem No One Talks About

Here's what I keep coming back to: relationships follow the second law of thermodynamics. Left alone, they tend toward entropy.

Think about your own life. The college roommate you swore you'd stay close with. The founder you met at a conference who was working on something fascinating. The mentor who changed your trajectory. Without sustained energy, these connections cool. Not because anyone stopped caring — but because life gets in the way.

The research is clear on this. Granovetter showed that weak ties — acquaintances at the edges of your network — are disproportionately valuable. They bridge you to novel information and opportunities your inner circle can't provide. But weak ties decay first. They require the most context to maintain and the least emotional urgency to sustain. They dissolve quietly, and with them, the opportunities they carried.

I've watched this happen in my own network dozens of times. Someone I should've followed up with. A connection that could've turned into something meaningful. Gone — not because I didn't care, but because I simply forgot.

Why I Don't Think AI Outreach Is the Answer

The seductive pitch right now is: let AI handle your relationships. Personalize at scale. Send a thousand messages that feel like one.

I think this is fundamentally wrong — and the reason is biological, not technological.

We're social primates with 200,000 years of evolution optimizing for detecting sincerity. A "thinking of you" from someone who actually knows you will always outperform a perfect message from someone who doesn't. Each layer of closeness in Dunbar's model requires roughly 50 hours of shared time. AI can compose the words. It cannot invest the time.

If you wouldn't let a robot speak for you at dinner, why would you let one speak for you in someone's inbox?

Fully AI-generated outreach treats people like rows in a spreadsheet. I think that's inhumane, and I think the market is starting to agree.

AI will make cold outreach infinitely cheap. That's precisely why it will become infinitely worthless.

What I Think the Real Opportunity Is

Dunbar's Number isn't a limit on desire — it's a limit on capacity. We forget. We lose context. We don't know who to reach out to, when, or why. The overhead of tracking 150 relationships across a dozen platforms exceeds what any human brain can handle.

But what if it didn't have to?

The opportunity isn't automating relationships. It's making you aware of them. Surfacing the right person at the right moment — the college friend who just joined the company you're selling to, the investor you haven't spoken to in six months who'd be perfect for your next round. I think of these as cues — moments of opportunity that exist in your network but decay invisibly without action.

The action should always be yours. The words should always be yours. The relationship should always be yours. The tool should extend your memory, not replace your voice. A calendar doesn't attend meetings for you — it makes sure you show up. The right relationship tool doesn't maintain relationships for you — it makes sure you don't lose them.

Who This Matters For

If you're a VC who meets 200 people a quarter and loses 190 to entropy. An operator whose career was built on relationships but manages them in their head. A recruiter juggling 50 conversations a day who can't remember who to follow up with. A founder whose strongest investor came from a coffee chat two years ago.

If your success compounds through people, this problem matters to you.

What I'm Building

Your network is a living system. Left alone, it decays. Nurtured intentionally, it compounds.

The internet spent two decades making connections easy. It's time to make them durable. Dunbar gave us the limit — I want to expand it.

That's why I'm building Cued.