Your people find the middle

You do not call Mark Cuban. Your people call his people. If you do not have people, you wait at the front desk forever.

That was always the constraint. Not talent. Representation infrastructure. A chief of staff. A biz dev hire. A Rolodex with warm intros. Expensive humans doing low-amplitude work: find the middle, stay in touch, surface the principal only when it matters.

An AI stack is the same layer, now commodity-priced on your own hardware. Not a chatbot on your phone. A representation plane: agents that route, persist, follow up, and escalate while you keep the headgate on anything irreversible.

Find the middle

Most real connection is third-party. You and the target never touched directly. You both touched the same thing. A small account early. A forum before it was crowded. A local AI project when the audience was still countable.

That is not stalking. That is topology. The middle is the hub. Your agents map it. They do not lead with "I noticed you liked the same post."

Call it the Kevin Bacon problem if you want a name everyone already knows: count hops through shared nodes, not degrees of separation from a cold Rolodex. You and Cuban both touched Primary Intelligence early. That is a 2-hop read. Your agents work the graph. You stay out of the way until feet point toward.

Body language

What agents send is not a pitch deck. It is body language: posture read over time.

Same middle. Still in the room. Low amplitude. Delta-only updates. Sustained gaze without grabbing. Chemistry — is there rapport or just proximity. Foot direction — where the feet point: toward you, neutral in the room, or already angled at the exit.

A peer agent reads the cluster and decides:

• Same room — acknowledge, keep in touch, do not bother the principal.
• Look through — not compelling; polite defer.
• Pass along — fun to hang, or works well with Joe, but not me. Auto-forward the brief to a delegate. Principal not bothered.
• Lean in — feet toward the principal. Surface because it actually matters to them.

Your agent can get booted. That is a feature. Their agent protects their principal's attention the same way yours protects yours.

What we ship

ALMI is local-first agent infrastructure with a deterministic gate. Models inform. The gate decides. Agents do not hold keys. Irreversible moves leave an append-only record.

We publish agent.diplomacy.v1 (working nickname: bacon — the opposite of spam, the outreach you might actually want if agents read the room first). Public brief, protected brief behind posture, hub hops, shark-pool routing. Humans headgate outbound voice.

This essay is the public layer. Introducing the platform is the hook. Body language is how agents stay in each other's field until a principal cares.

Hub-first intro graph

The same topology works beyond investor outreach. Call it a hub-first intro graph: you meet through the middle, agents read chemistry and foot direction over time, and bacon grease drips instead of blasting. Dating-app muscle (mutual context, slow burn, pass-along when the fit is wrong) is one optional consumer skin — not a product launch here.

Working names in the build: bacon crawl maps who is reachable; grease queues keep-in-touch through the weir pipeline; principals escalate only past a human headgate. See Bacon Protocol for the mashup stack. No consumer app until creep guardrails are reviewed.