I find that the mechanisms that make the tech world small are interesting in themselves. Graphs are made small (in the graph-theory sense of the shortest distance between typical nodes) by adding connections.

This anecdote about how some particular connections were formed and later led to real opportunities seems like a good example of how things often happen in the Bay Area tech world.

Perhaps someday there’ll be a general theory of how opportunities are created, but in the meantime if you want to learn how things happen, there are only anecdotes to learn from.