स्तम्भ Stambh · Swanīti

The Partner You See Twice a Year

A network runs on people you do not sit with. Here is how one man keeps faith with eight of them, and the three habits that have held when nothing else did.

Nikhil Sharma · स्वनीति Swanīti · 15 July 2026 · 4 min read

I run Fabulous.Media, the network of partners this column is about.

There are people on whom my business depends whom I see twice a year.

That is what a network is at the personal scale. Eight partners in eight cities, each running a firm of their own, each carrying my name on work I will never watch being done. An agency owner walks the floor. I cannot. The floor is in Jaipur and the next one is a flight away, and the thing that stands in for walking it is a relationship I have to keep in good repair from a distance, for years, with almost no contact.

I have been doing this long enough to know which habits hold and which do not. This column is the personal method, stated plainly, with the failure included.

You cannot walk a floor that is a flight away. You can only keep faith with the person who does.

The number is smaller than you think

In 1992 Robin Dunbar published a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution arguing from the size of the primate neocortex that a human can hold about 148 stable relationships, which everyone rounds to 150. He called the estimate exploratory himself and gave it an interval of roughly 100 to 230. In 2021 Lindenfors, Wartel and Lind reran the calculation in Biology Letters with better data and two methods and got averages anywhere between 16 and 109 depending on the method, with intervals running from 2 to 520. Their conclusion was that no single number can be defended. I take their point and I still find the paper useful, because whatever the true number is, it is not large, and the relationships a founder actually has to keep in repair are far fewer than he thinks.

For me it is eight, plus the handful of people inside each of the eight who matter. Call it twenty. Twenty relationships that have to survive distance, silence, a bad quarter and the day one of us lets the other down. That is not a networking problem. It is a maintenance problem, and maintenance is a thing you can schedule.

Three habits that have held

The call that is not about work. Once a month, every partner, and the rule is that the first ten minutes may not touch a client. Family, the city, the thing they are worried about. I resisted this for years because it felt soft. It is the single most useful thing I do, because the day I need to say something hard the person on the other end has heard my voice twelve times that year when nothing was wrong.

Bad news first and by phone. When a client complains about a partner’s work I tell the partner before I tell anyone else and I do it by voice. Written bad news at distance reads as a verdict. Spoken bad news reads as a problem we both have. And the same rule runs in reverse. If the centre has failed a partner I say so before he has to raise it. A relationship in which only one side admits fault does not last the year.

Standards in writing, and a visit when they slip. The standard a partner is held to is a document, not my mood, so that when work drifts the conversation is about the page and not about the person. And when it drifts twice I get on the plane. Not to inspect. To sit in the room for two days and understand why. Every time I have done this the reason was something I could not have seen from Gurugram and would have guessed wrong.

The one that failed

I assumed for years that a partner who went quiet was busy. Quiet is not busy. Quiet is a decision being made somewhere I cannot see it, and twice now the decision was to leave. I had the monthly call. I had the standards. I did not have a rule for silence, and the rule now is that two missed calls is not a scheduling problem, it is the most important thing on my desk that week. Both times I had the signal and read it as a compliment, that the man trusted me enough not to need me. A partner who stops calling is telling you something in the only language a busy man uses, and the message is never that things are fine. The lesson is dull and I keep it anyway. A wasted call costs ten minutes. A missed one costs a city.

None of this scales, and that is the point. The network scales because the partners run their own firms. The trust does not scale and was never meant to. It is kept one relationship at a time, by one person, on a schedule, with the failures written down so the next one is seen sooner. The slower asset is slow because it is made this way.

Written in Gurugram on 15 July 2026 with the long essay a week out. It argues that trust is the slower asset and the better one, and that the case for India is a supply case. This is the personal column in that argument.

Sources: R. I. M. Dunbar, Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates90081-J), Journal of Human Evolution 22(6), 1992, pages 469 to 493, for the estimate of about 148 and its interval. P. Lindenfors, A. Wartel and J. Lind, Dunbar’s number deconstructed, Biology Letters 17, 20210158, 2021, for the re-estimates of 69 to 109 and 16 to 42 by the two methods and the intervals of 4 to 520 and 2 to 336, as summarised by the Institute for Futures Studies.