Cooperation, whether it takes place among the hunter-gatherer tribes of Africa or the meme-spreading users of the Internet, works pretty much the same way: It depends on social connections, the existing and the newly forged, between individuals. If you map out social networks, they're going to look pretty much the same no matter what you're mapping: an explosion of overlapping hubs and spokes, with nodes emerging as pulse points of influence and virality.
The same is true for the networks that form the root system of the tech startup ecosystem: venture capital firms. Using data from 279 firms, the network analysis company Activate Networks mapped the connections that form between and among VCs -- based on the overlap of those firms' nearly 14,000 investments. As CEO Larry Miller explains: "If Firm 1 invests in Company A, and Firm 2 invests in Company A, then that's a connection."
