Mapping My LinkedIn Journey: 23 Years of Professional Connections
Posted: June 17, 2026 Filed under: Personal Leave a commentI’ve been on LinkedIn since 2003. Twenty-three years. I have never once stopped to look at what I’d actually accumulated there. That’s not humility. It’s just how it goes. You’re busy working, you connect with people after meetings and conferences, and the number ticks up. You don’t really think about it as a thing you’re building. It’s just there, in the background, doing its quiet archival work.
Until last week, when I finally pulled my connections export and ran some numbers. Seven thousand, seven hundred and one connections. Going back over two decades. I wasn’t expecting much more than a big list. What I got was a kind of accidental autobiography. If you drew it as a map, here’s what you’d see. AWS would be the continent. A huge block, 716 connections across six years in that organisation. Microsoft would be the largest country sitting right next to it, 353 connections from 23 years across Australia and the US. Telstra would be a mid-sized nation on the edge, 193 connections from four years bridging corporate telco and the startup world. And then everything else fills in the rest of the territory: Google, Atlassian, CBA, the founders, the freelancers, the conference people, the people I met at events I’ve half-forgotten.
Three careers. One map. Twenty-three years of showing up.
The seniority numbers caught me off guard. Thirty-six percent of my network is C-suite, Founder, or VP. Nearly 2,800 people at that level. Sixty-five percent are Director level or above. I didn’t consciously build a senior network. I didn’t sit down at any point and think “I should connect more with executives.” I just stayed in tech long enough that the people I met early became senior. That’s the compounding effect of a long career. You collect people, and people grow.
The 814 founders deserve a mention on their own. That’s muru-D, startup weekends, API economy people, the Australian tech ecosystem I spent years championing. Those connections represent a different kind of relationship than the corporate ones. They’re people who were building something and, at some point, I was in the same room.
The peak years are telling. In 2017, I added 1,028 connections. In 2015, it was 981. In 2016, 776. Those were when I was back in Melbourne, working at Telstra. The network grew because of the role – API Evangelism, Austrade Landing Zones, iAwards, Mentor for CSIRO On Innovation, ON Prime, ON Accelerate, so many hackathons, and countless other events. The posts tell the story new year, new house, new job, 12 Months In , 546 Days, 730 Days & 23 trips to Sydney!, 1,000 Days, 1337 d4y5 47 73l57r4
The most common title word in my network is Director. 1,110 people carry that word in their title. Then Manager, Founder, Senior, Head. It reads like a snapshot of the industry I’ve been working in: enterprise and mid-market tech, the layer of organisations that actually buys and builds things.
Then 2020 hit, and the numbers tell that story too. 357 connections in 2020. 248 in 2021. 85 in 2022. 62 in 2023. 117 in 2024. Ten in 2025. Melbourne went into lockdown in March 2020 and didn’t fully come out the other side until October 2021, after 262 cumulative days of restrictions, the most of any city in the world. No conferences. No industry events. No casual coffees with someone you’d just met. The connections slowed because the circumstances that create connections simply stopped. The network didn’t disappear. It just went quiet.
I don’t regret the quiet years. A network isn’t a score to maximise. Sometimes you step back, look around, and figure out what comes next. The data captured that pause honestly. It didn’t dress it up.
April 2026: 19 new connections. SmallBizAI is running, I’m back in the world, and the counter is moving again.
Looking back over all of it, would I do anything differently? Not really. I had a LinkedIn profile URL on my business card from early on, so everyone who got my card got my details. Each period of the data represents where I was and what I was doing: the experiences I had, the people I met, the projects I was part of. The data isn’t separate from the career. It is the career.
If I’m being honest about one thing I’d change: I’d have added more people from the 1980s, the 1990s, even those early 2000s. The time before LinkedIn existed. I have a stack of business cards sitting in a box in the garage somewhere, and I remember buying a business card scanner years ago with grand plans to digitise them all into the rolodex. I never got around to it. I doubt I ever will. There are a lot of boxes in that garage.
There’s one data point I keep coming back to. The most common title word across 7,701 connections is Director. 1,110 people. Not CEO, not Founder, not Engineer. Director. That word sitting at the top of the list says something about where I operated for most of my career: the layer of organisations where decisions actually get made. Not always in the boardroom, not always on the tools. In the middle. Where strategy meets delivery. I spent twenty-plus years in that zone, and the network reflects it.
The word “Founder” is second-most interesting to me. 814 of them. That comes from years working the startup ecosystem in Australia: muru-D, startup weekends, accelerators, the whole API economy push at Telstra. A lot of those founders were early. Some of them became significant. Most were just people with an idea and the nerve to try.
Seven thousand, seven hundred and one people. Forty years in tech. Three employers who each shaped a chunk of the map. One career that somehow kept moving forward.
And yes, I still have about 300 unanswered connection requests sitting in my inbox. I’ll get to them.
frankarr 