> The go-getter networking ethos of founders and small business owners can be hard to distinguish from the way MLMs find and prey on people.

Aren't all those the same thing?

A different thing would be someone wanting to meet up only because they wanted to see you (not to nurture or harvest a resource).

With MLMs, the people doing the pitching know that it’s a bad deal, and they are trying to suck you in so that you will suffer and they will gain. It’s overt that the system can only work via deception, and the MLM is tuned to make that work at scale.