How not to cold email a founder

I can't breathe without seeing a tweet from a VC telling me to only use 7 slides in my pitch deck, to 'bring energy' to my Zoom pitch, or to only fart sideways when driving down Sand Hill Road.

But it's absolute tumbleweed when it comes to founders returning the favour to VCs.

This needs to change if we're going to build a better ecosystem.

Let's start with cold emails. As a VC you should be the Steinbeck of cold emails. After all, you should probably be sending 10 (20?)+ of these a week to the best founders on the planet.

So I find it bizarre that the modal VC email looks like this one (sent to me recently from a well-known firm).

Let's break it down:

1. Zero personalization - literally no attempt to say "I've spent 2 minutes researching your company, and here's why I find it interesting".

2. Zero inducement to chat - no mention of how they can help. No mention of how they differentiate from the thousands of other VC firms out there.

3.  Plain weirdness - the basic message is "I'm not personally interested. My boss might be. But only if you have a round open. And only if you fill out this Google form. If all those things align, I'll get someone else to set up a call".

Instead of the 75 words they chose, they could have just written 11: "I am the personification of transactional, and know nothing about Sales".

In a world where VCs make their money by attracting the best founders - and the best founders wake up each day wanting to build and sell their product rather than jumping on a 1-way-benefit Zoom call - this weirdly popular cold email strategy is a painful waste of time.

Personalize. Induce. Don’t be a nutjob.