Connect the Dots collects $15M Series A to help companies graph connections –

Drew Sechrist, who was employee 36 at Salesforce in 1999, was on Marc Benioff’s early sales team, pushing the company when nobody knew who they were or what hosted software was, for that matter. He called Benioff the “number one alpha networker.” He could go to him at any time in those early days and get an intro, helping to grease the skids for his pitch, giving him a much better shot at a sale than going in cold. But technology was getting to the point with machine learning and some other advanced techniques [that] we could extract value from that data and then build a graph of relationships to see who actually knows who,” Sechrist explained. Today, Connect the Dots has a social graph in beta by request, or, if you know someone using it, you can also get on, using the Clubhouse approach to user-base building. He admits that it’s challenging to be racially diverse, especially with a large part of the workforce in Serbia, but it is something he’s working on as the company doubles its head count in the coming year.