you acquire a "whale friend" by consistently posting quality content that a STEEM stakeholder sees as valuable to the platform. Many quality content creators on my list had no friends when they started out, then someone viewed their content and wanted to support them. As a result, they either get votes from them periodically or set automatically.

It doesn't require anything other than community engagement and persistence.

Anyways, as STEEM grows and more quality content creators join, the vested votes will have to be distributed more.