A warm path is the clearest route between you and someone you want to reach, running through a person who has a real relationship with both of you. Instead of contacting the buyer cold, you reach them through a connector who can vouch for you, so the first touch carries trust from the start.
A warm path is a short chain of real relationships. At one end is your target buyer. At the other end is you, or a teammate. In between sits a connector: a former colleague, an investor, a customer, or an advisor who genuinely knows the buyer and is willing to make the introduction.
The path only counts if every link is real. A shared employer with overlapping tenure, a working history, an investor who sits on both boards: these carry weight. A one-time conference handshake or an old social-network accept does not. The strength of a warm path comes from the strength of its weakest link, which is why a credible connector matters more than raw proximity.
The two are related but distinct. A warm path is the route that exists in your network, whether or not anyone has acted on it. A warm introduction is what happens when someone walks that path and actually makes the connection. The path is the opportunity; the intro is the action.
Most teams have far more warm paths than they realize, because the paths run through second-degree relationships nobody has time to surface. Finding those paths is the job of pathfinding.
Via finds the warm paths that already exist in your team’s extended network. You name a target buyer, and Via works backwards to surface who in your orbit can get you in, ranked by how strong the path is and why.