I was looking for VCs. They were already in my phone.

A few months ago I needed to raise money. Not in the abstract, "someday we'll fundraise" way. In the "the runway math has stopped being comfortable and I should probably start talking to people" way.

My first honest thought was: I don't know any VCs.

I sat with that for a bit and felt a little sick about it. You spend years building a thing, you go to the dinners, you shake the hands, and then the one moment you actually need the network you've supposedly been building, your brain returns a flat "nope." I genuinely believed I didn't know anyone who invested in anything.

So I did the thing you do when you're anxious and avoiding the real work. I opened my phone and started scrolling. Contacts first, then WhatsApp, then back to contacts. Thumb moving on autopilot. Names sliding past that meant nothing to me anymore — a first name and a number, no company, no context, no memory of where we'd met or why I'd saved them.

And then, somewhere around the third pass, I started actually reading the names instead of skimming them.

I was wrong. I knew a lot of them.

There was the guy I met at a conference two years ago who ran a small fund. There was someone from a dinner in — I want to say it was a birthday thing? — who'd said, very casually, over dessert, "let me know if you ever raise, I like getting in early." There was a former colleague who'd mentioned once, almost as an aside, that he does "a bit of angel stuff on the side."

None of that was written down anywhere. It lived entirely in my head, and my head had quietly deleted it. The people were right there in my phone the whole time. What was gone was the context — the who-does-what, the who-said-what, the throwaway line at a dinner that was actually an open door.

That's the part that got me. It wasn't that my network was too small. My network was enormous and I'd been walking around convinced it was empty, because the tool I kept it in is basically a phonebook from 1990. Names and numbers. It remembers nothing for you. It has never once, in the entire history of contacts apps, told me anything I didn't already type into it myself.

The evening I did it by hand

So I spent an evening fixing it manually. This is the unglamorous part.

I made a note on my laptop and I went through the whole list. Every name, one at a time. Trying to remember. Where did I meet this person? What do they do now? Did they ever say anything that sounded like interest? I cross-referenced WhatsApp threads — which are their own special kind of chaos, scattered across a hundred conversations, half of them named "Rahul (conf)" because that's all I knew at the time. I tagged people. I grouped them. I wrote little notes to myself: "said he angel invests — climate mostly," "wanted to help, follow up," "warm, met twice."

It took hours. My eyes hurt. But at the end of it I had something real: an actual list of people who invest, and a shorter, better list of people who had, at some point, told me to my face that they'd want in. People I could now actually email. People I could pitch.

And I felt two things at once, really strongly.

The first was relief. The second was a low, specific kind of frustration — because none of that should have taken an evening. The information had always been there. I'd lived those conversations. The failure wasn't mine and it wasn't the people's. It was that everything I used to hold onto them was designed to store a phone number and nothing else. All the value — the context, the "he said he'd help" — had to be rebuilt by hand, from memory, at 1am, because no tool had bothered to keep it.

The thing I couldn't stop thinking about

Here's the insight I keep coming back to, and I don't think it's just me.

Your network is already huge. You are not short on people. You've met thousands of them. The reason it doesn't feel huge is that the moment you look away, the context evaporates, and a contact with no context is functionally a stranger. The value was never in collecting people. Anybody can collect people; that's what business cards and LinkedIn connections are. The value is in remembering the stuff around the person. What they do. What they said. Why they might matter to you six months from now when the question you're asking has completely changed.

We've all just quietly accepted that this is our job to remember. That it's normal to forget who told you they'd invest. It's not normal. It's a tooling failure we've been apologizing for on the tool's behalf for thirty years.

So that's what I'm building. It's called Dhaga — it means "thread." The idea is simple and it comes straight out of that evening: you capture people and little notes as you go — after the dinner, after the call, whenever — and instead of dumping them into a dead list, it quietly turns them into a private map of who you know and what you know about them. And then, when you need it, you just ask. In plain English. "Who do I know who invests in climate?" "Who did I meet who offered to help?"

One question. Not an afternoon of scrolling.

I'm building it because I needed it and it didn't exist, which is the only reason I trust myself to build anything. I still think about that night — the specific stupidity of sitting there convinced I knew no one, while a folder full of people who'd literally offered to help sat glowing in my hand.

If you've ever had that feeling — the certainty that your network is useless, right up until the moment you actually look — then you already understand the whole thing, and I'd love for you to come along.

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