The People You Work With Shape Everything

I’ve been thinking about this lot lately as I watch former colleagues launch new companies, get promoted to executive out with opportunities. After twenty years in tech, I’m starting to see the real pattern: the people you work with early in your career become the foundation for everything that comes after.

This isn’t about networking in the traditional sense. I’m talking about something more fundamental - great people compound over time.

The Microsoft Effect

When I was at Microsoft, I didn’t fully appreciate what I was getting beyond the immediate job. Sure, the technology exposure was incredible and the scale taught me things I couldn’t learn anywhere else. But the real value was working alongside people who were just exceptionally good at what they did.

These weren’t just smart people - tech is full of smart people. These were people who knew how to ship products, how to think strategically about markets, how to manage complex technical debt while still innovating. They had this combination of technical depth and business acumen that you don’t find everywhere.

What I didn’t realize then was that I was building relationships with people who would go on to become CTOs, VPs of Engineering, startup founders, and product leaders across the industry. When you work closely with someone on hard problems, you learn how they think. You see how they handle pressure, how they communicate with stakeholders, how they make decisions when the stakes are high.

The Startup Amplifier

Moving into startups after Microsoft showed me how these relationships actually work in practice. Suddenly I wasn’t just another employee - I was someone who had worked with people that potential investors, partners, and customers already knew and respected. That credibility transfer is real.

But more importantly, I could bring specific people into new opportunities. When you know someone’s capabilities firsthand, when you’ve seen them solve similar problems before, you can move fast. No lengthy interview processes trying to figure out if someone can actually do the job. You already know.

I’ve seen this pattern repeat across every company I’ve worked with. The best hires almost always come through people who’ve worked together before. Not because of favoritism, but because there’s already trust and proven collaboration. You know how to communicate with each other, you understand each other’s strengths, and you can hit the ground running.

The Compound Effect

Here’s what gets interesting over time: these relationships start compounding in ways you can’t predict.

A product manager I worked with at a media technology company later became a VP at a major streaming platform. When that platform needed enterprise SaaS solutions, guess who got the introduction? A developer from an early startup became a technical architect at a Fortune 500 company. When they were evaluating new platforms, our previous collaboration gave us credibility we couldn’t have bought.

This isn’t just about getting meetings - though that matters. It’s about having people who understand your capabilities and can speak specifically about your work. When someone says “Joe built the infrastructure that handled our scale during the World Cup,” that carries weight in a way that a LinkedIn recommendation never could.

What Actually Matters

The key thing I’ve learned is that you can’t manufacture these relationships. They come from doing real work together on problems that matter. You build trust by being reliable when things get difficult, by having good judgment when the path isn’t clear, by contributing meaningfully to shared success.

I’ve worked with people who were clearly trying to “network” - always angling for the next opportunity, name-dropping, positioningically. It never works the same way. The relationships that actually compound are built on mutual respect for each other’s work, not mutual benefit calculations.

The best collabor is focused on solving the problem in front of them, not on what it might lead to later. But when you consistently work that way with great people, the opportunities follow naturally.

Making It Practical

If you’re early in your career, this means being thoughtful about where you work and who you work with. A slightly lower salary at a company with exceptional people is often a better long-term investment than a higher salary working with mediocre teams.

Pay attention to the people around you who are genuinely good at their jobs. Not the loudest voices or self-promoters, but the people who consistently deliver, who think clearly about complex problems, who make everyone around them more effective. Those are the relationships worth investing in.

And invest in them by being someone worth working with yourself. Be the person who shows up prepared, who follows through on commitments, who contributes to shared success. The network effect only works if you’re adding value to it.

The Long View

Twenty years in I can see how this plays out. The people I worked with in those early Microsoft days are now distributed across the industry in positions of real influence. We’ve hired each other, recommended each other, partnered with each other’s companies, and generally made each other more successful over time.

It wasn’t planned, but it was predictable. When you work with great people on meaningful problems, those relationships become a foundation for everything that comes after. Not because anyone owes anyone anything, but because proven collaboration is rare and valuable.

The companies change, the technologies evolve, the markets shift. But the people you’ve done great work with - those relationships compound over decades. That’s where the real career leverage comes from.