Your extended network is everyone your team and your close relationships could reach through their connections: not just the people you know directly, but the people those people know, including who your investors and advisors can reach for you. It is far larger than any one person's contact list, and it is where most warm paths are hiding.
Your first-degree connections are a small, familiar set, and they are not only your team's. Your close relationships, like investors, advisors, and customers, each bring their own reach on your behalf. The moment you include who all of them know, the reachable network grows many times over, which is exactly where the warm intro opportunities you cannot see on your own live. These are your second-degree connections.
No one can track the extended network by memory, which is why it stays a network gap. Pathfinding surfaces the routes through it, working backwards from a target to a connector. See how Via finds warm paths.
Via turns your team's extended network, including the reach of your investors, advisors, and customers, into something searchable. Instead of each person seeing only their own contacts, Via looks across the combined network, including second-degree ties, to find who can reach any target.