Market Rate for Your Time

Pricing time to clear demand

Geoffrey Woo runs his own time as a market. He started charging roughly 300 dollars per 15 minutes for advisory calls, and the slots filled faster than he wanted to take, so he kept raising the price, a straightforward demand-clearing mechanism, up to at least 1,000 dollars per 15 minutes for what now amounts to roughly two hours a month of calls, a level at which he says he is now unsure he wants to sell those calls at all.¹ The number's purpose is a filter rather than a revenue target: whatever someone wants from him should be worth at least 4,000 dollars an hour to both sides.

Underneath the price is the scarcity it is pricing: time is the scarcest asset, since a person can make more money but cannot make more time. The whole approach is a person-as-interface idea, a literal written protocol, an API for himself, first drafted around 2023 and updated since, that he expects a person to read before reaching out, so both sides waste less of each other's time.

The paired principle: you can't make new old friends

Trust, in Woo's framing, is a function of time and repeated exposure to excellence and commitment, which is why he declines most new introductions: his own network is up against what he calls his Dunbar threshold of 150 people, already maxed out, and what he wants from any new relationship is not another banker, lawyer, or broker but a best-in-world operator.¹ His summary of why this cannot be shortcut: it is easy to be charming for 30 minutes, and hard to be charming for 30 hours.¹ Because trust cannot be priced or accelerated the way access can, the highest-value relationships in his accounting are the old ones, the one asset money cannot buy back.

Why it matters

It turns time from a soft request to be respectful of someone's calendar into a hard economic instrument: name a price, raise it until supply and demand clear, and let the number do the gatekeeping instead of a person's judgment in the moment. Pricing time to clear demand also optimizes for immediate willingness to pay, which can screen out exactly the kind of low-credential, high-trajectory young person Woo elsewhere says he wants to meet through other channels, meaning the priced call and the free people-flow on-ramp are two different, partly opposed doors into his time. And treating old friendships as irreplaceable is a reason to invest early and broadly in relationships, but taken as a strict rule it can also ossify a network once it reaches capacity, and risks missing the outlier newcomer who would eventually have become an old friend.