#sunnybates

“Networks know no borders,” she says. “That’s their power.”

Sunny presents during the Auckland Tripartite Summit in New Zealand

“We go inside companies and we see how information flows and try to help them grow a network mind set, Bates says.That means teaching them to look outside.”

Come join us for some haha moments this coming Monday. We'll be discussing comedy and identity, how to talk about the "hard stuff" by making people laugh. All very valuable lessons, it'll be joke after joke after joke! With Negin Farsad and Baratunde Thurston!

Besides being an insanely fast talker, Sunny has a talent for spotting great ideas she loves and standing behind them. Here's an interview with Yancey about the history of Kickstarter; with a nice mention of Sunny and her propensity for taking the underdogs under her wing.

Q: What were some turning points, in those early days before the site launched, that you thought, ‘You know what, we’re going to stick with this’?”

……

So, a big moment there was we met a woman named Sunny Bates, and Sunny is an uber-connector, she’s the fastest talker you will ever meet. She lives here in the city and is a lovely, lovely woman. Sunny shares a dog walker with a friend of Perry’s from college; and so we met Sunny through that and we became, you know, the two downtown boys that she got to help out. She really liked us immediately and we were just blown away by her, she’s just a force. We didn’t know anybody, and so we told her our idea and we were these two earnest guys with a piece of paper; and she was like “I’ll take you around, I’ll introduce you”. And so we were able to talk to people that we would definitely would not have otherwise.

Q: Who are some of the people who you got to talk to and engage as a result of your connection with Sunny?”

A really important one would be Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr and Hunch. Through Catarina we were introduced to Andy Baio. Andy was an early advisor of ours and our CTO for a little while...

You might come to regret not asking for what you need. That is the lesson from Sunny's interview in the just-released book "Maximize Your Potential" by 99u. 

Friends of a friend might be the people who could change your life or give you the opportunity you need, so don't be shy at a party and keep to what you know, expand your circle--even if it takes a drink or two to give you the courage to do so.

The interview (and the rest of the book) is full of useful anecdotes and tips, it was just released this week by 99u, part of Behance. 

We were wondering what the future looked like, and found just the guys to ask.