The emails founders send potential investors can be the difference between getting millions and getting nothing.
One of the things nobody warns entrepreneurs about when they start fundraising for their startups is how many hours they’ll spend writing emails introducing themselves to venture capitalists. To give a rough estimate, I spent 15 years fundraising for venture-backed tech companies and, during that time, met hundreds of investors. Most of those meetings were with investors I didn’t personally know and were arranged via — you guessed it — email. The same will be true for most founders looking for investors. At some point, if you want to successfully raise capital, you’re going to have to email people and convince them to meet with you. Do you know how to get a positive response?
By the way, in case you’ve already been emailing lots of investors and getting responses, the key distinction here is a **positive** response. In general, investors are good at responding to random entrepreneur emails. After all, talking with entrepreneurs is a critical and necessary part of their jobs because, if they ignore entrepreneurs, they don’t have deal flow and don’t have companies to invest in. In other words, getting a response from an investor isn’t the same as getting a positive response. Investors know how to respond to entrepreneurs in ways that are polite but not necessarily an indication of their willingness to invest.
For example, when you email an investor, and that investor connects you with an associate at the firm, that’s a response, but it’s not positive. Associates, for those who don’t know, are like baby VCs. They’re like temporary interns interested in careers in venture capital, and VC firms use them to run interference for their general partners (GPs). In other words, VC firms have associates meet with the random entrepreneurs who email them so the GPs — the actual decision makers — don’t need to waste their time. Sure, on rare occasions, associates identify a company worth elevating to the GPs, but, in general, once your startup gets routed to an associate, your chances of raising money from that firm have basically dropped to zero.
