Second-Degree Referrals Into AI Labs
The labs you want are too new for a first-degree connection, so the honest move is to borrow one. This walks through finding the person who knows the person, and asking in a way that costs them 30 seconds.
Find My Warm Path →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick a tech target:
Why first-degree fails at a young lab and second-degree works
Fast-growing labs hire faster than your network catches up. OpenAI and Anthropic were tiny a few years ago, so the odds that an alum or a former coworker is already inside are low, and that is exactly why people give up and submit a cold application.
The fix is to stop looking for someone AT the lab and start looking for someone who KNOWS someone at the lab. Your former manager who now advises startups, your grad-school labmate who went into ML research, your old teammate who joined a company the lab partners with: any of them may be one hop from an engineer or recruiter you would never reach directly.
How to build and work a second-degree path
The path has three people in it: you, the mutual contact you genuinely share something with, and the employee you want to reach. Your whole job is to make the middle person comfortable passing you along.
- Map the connectors, not the targets. List people you have a real tie to (classmates, ex-coworkers, people from a past internship) who sit close to AI research or infra, then check who among them already knows someone at the lab.
- Ask the connector, not the employee. Message the person you actually know first. Ask if they would be comfortable introducing you to their contact, and make it easy to say no so a yes is real.
- Hand over a forwardable blurb. Give the connector two lines they can paste: who you are, the specific role or team you want, and why you are a fit. Never make them write your pitch for you.
- Lead with the shared thing. In every message, open with what you and that person share (the class, the project, the old team), not with the fact that you want a job. The shared thing is why they will help at all.
Finding the connector without reading every profile by hand
The slow part is figuring out which of your old classmates or coworkers actually sit one hop from the lab. Checking profiles one by one burns a weekend and you still miss people.
FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking step for you: it looks at the real people tied to your schools and past employers, surfaces who is closest to a target like OpenAI or Anthropic, and drafts the intro so your first move is sending a warm note, not scrolling. It is free, and it turns a cold target into a short list of people worth asking.