Turning scattered networks into a searchable graph

Employees join Factory with years of relationships behind them, recorded in inboxes, calendars, and LinkedIn accounts that no system reads across. “We’re very heavy Slack users,” Ashley explains. “So people would constantly post in channels: does anyone know this person, or do we have any connections to this company?” 

In her first few weeks, Ashley used Factory to build People Graph, an internal system that uses the Harmonic API to map who at Factory knows whom across the ecosystem. “The value for us is gaining access and visibility to all of our employees’ rich networks,” she says.

When an employee syncs their accounts, which stay private to Factory and encrypted at rest, Harmonic's Network Mapping records three things for each connection: the teammate who knows the person, the channel they connected on, and when they last met or wrote. Harmonic enriches each connection with its data on more than 35 million companies and 195 million people. These direct relationships form the graph's first degree.

Harmonic's Investor Searches extend the graph further. Ashley pulls the full portfolios of Factory's investors and angels. Those portfolio companies become second-degree connections, and their founders add a third degree, each reachable through an investor introduction that lands better than any cold email. When someone at Factory needs to reach a person outside their own network, the graph shows the warmest path: the teammate who knows the investor, the company that investor backed, and the founder at the end of the chain.

Anyone at Factory can query People Graph in plain language, through a Slack bot or a dedicated web app. In Slack, they tag the bot in the channel where the question comes up and get an answer right away, instead of waiting for a teammate to pick up the thread. For deeper digging, the web app shows everyone Factory is connected to, who holds each relationship, and how recently they were in touch.

“Now no one has to wait on anyone else, or endure a terrible LinkedIn search experience, or slog through their own memories to figure out who they’re connected to,” she explains. “We have a real-time view into the warmth of our connections.” Harmonic is the layer underneath: “It’s the infrastructure for our relationship intelligence system.”

‍

Filling a room in a city full of developer events

Factory regularly hosts events for engineers, researchers, and developers. One recent evening brought together deployment engineers to talk about their budding field. They covered what it's like to deploy technology inside engineering organizations, lessons from real deployments, and how to work with the sales leaders they partner with.

In a city this busy, a strong guest list starts long. "In the Bay Area, with the number of developer events happening, the drop-off rate is high," Ashley says. "If you want a hundred people to come, you have to invite three hundred plus. Sourcing that many people by hand just isn't realistic at scale."

With Harmonic, Ashley can search for a role under all its titles, such as "forward deployed engineer," "solutions architect," and "solutions engineer," along with companies known for strong teams in that function. She filters everything by location and seniority, and the results become the foundation of the guest list. Every match comes from Factory's network, and People Graph shows which teammate knows each person, so each invitation can come from someone the recipient already knows.

‍

Finding expertise that no job title captures

Factory cares deeply about its partnerships, many of them with startups building at the frontier alongside it. Choosing partners well means knowing every company in a space, and a CRM only knows about companies the team has already met. "It's a bit like an investor prospecting startups in an area they're interested in," Ashley explains. "Harmonic is terrific for prospecting the landscape of an area we're looking to have partnerships in."

Scout, Harmonic's research agent, takes the first pass. It reasons across Harmonic's company and people data, Factory's own account and network data, and the web, so Ashley can describe the companies she wants in natural language. "I use Scout for market research: show me every company of this type, in San Francisco, at this headcount," she says. "It's semantic matching on what a company does, which is hard to pin down with filters alone." A Scout run can also seed a saved search, which keeps picking up new matches as they appear.

Finding partners is the first step. Then Ashley looks at the team. "The quality of the engineering team is what I care about, because of the nature of our business," she says. "We're a very technical company looking at very technical companies, and the proxy for quality is often where an engineer worked before." Harmonic's work histories make that proxy easy to check at scale.

‍

Harmonic as operating infrastructure

Ashley has deployed Harmonic twice: once at a venture firm, and now at a software company. “Harmonic was initially a tool for investors. That’s what it was built to do,” she explains. “The set of startup and people data is stronger than Crunchbase, PitchBook, all these other sources… but I don’t think non-investor companies are fully aware of the benefits for them yet.”

At Factory, Harmonic's data doesn't sit in a separate tool. Ashley used Droids to build it into the places people already work, like Slack, so questions are answered where and when they are asked.

Any company that hires engineers, runs events, courts partners, or sells into the tech ecosystem works with the same raw material Factory does. Most still ask in Slack whether anyone knows someone. Ashley thinks companies outside venture haven’t yet seen “the Harmonics of the world” as an operational resource. The data has been there all along, but the habit of using it hasn’t caught on. “I used it first as an investor, so I brought it over,” Ashley says. “The platform makes just as much sense for all our use cases here.”