Why the most generous leaders in Silicon Valley consistently outperform everyone else, and why Open Future Forum was built to find them.
In 2013, organisational psychologist Adam Grant published Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. The central finding: in every profession, givers, those who contribute to others without immediate reciprocal benefit, consistently produce the highest long-term outcomes. They also, initially, sometimes fall behind. The difference between the most successful givers and the least successful ones is simple: the successful givers learn to operate in networks where giving is the norm, not the exception.
Murray Newlands had been living proof of this thesis before it was written. He built a career in Silicon Valley through two decades of introductions made without asking for anything, content published for the benefit of others, platforms shared freely, and time given to founders who had nothing to offer in return. He became one of the most connected people in the Bay Area not by networking strategically, but by being genuinely generous.
Adam Grant identifies three types of professional behaviour:
Grant's research shows that at the top of every field, the most successful leaders are givers. They build reputation, trust, and compounding networks that no transactional approach can replicate.
The AI era is moving too fast for any single leader to have all the answers. The executives who navigate it best are the ones who share their insights, build trust across networks, and compound their knowledge through genuine exchange. Forum Select is built for exactly those leaders.
In a fast-moving field like AI, the leaders who share what they're learning receive better information back than those who hoard it. Open exchange accelerates every member's thinking.
Every introduction Murray makes without being asked, every conversation held off the record, deposits trust into a network that no amount of money or status can purchase.
When you build a community around generous behaviour, it self-selects. Takers don't stay, there is nothing to extract from a room of givers. What remains is pure.
Murray Newlands arrived in Silicon Valley without the traditional credentials, no Stanford MBA, no prior VC pedigree, no family money. What he had was an instinct to give generously: to write articles for the benefit of readers, to make introductions without a fee, to speak at conferences for the good of the audience, to spend time with founders who could offer him nothing in return.
Two decades later, he has 1.4 million followers on Twitter/X, bylines in Forbes, Inc, Time and The Guardian, a partnership at IASV Seed Ventures, and the trust of hundreds of senior executives across Silicon Valley.
None of it came from networking strategically. All of it came from giving without keeping score.
Forum Select is built for exactly one type of leader: the generous one. If that is how you operate, come and find your room.