How to cold email investors

Founders often ask me how to cold email an investor when they're interested in raising money. And I receive tons of cold emails from founders, and I try to actually reply to all of them. Here are some tips on some things you should and shouldn't do when cold emailing an investor. First, the do's. Make it short.

If you send me a wall of text, if you send me an email that takes two to five minutes to read, it's really hard for me to read it in the normal course of me doing my work. And so oftentimes I'll start it, save it for later and then it's not clear when I'll get back to it. If you can make your email something that I can read in sixty seconds or less, you can pretty much guarantee that I'll read it.

And that's the most important thing you need. You need not to sell me on writing a check and investing in your company. You need me to just read what you're working on and understand what you're working on enough to want to reply back. The second thing that's important is that in that short email, there's some things that I'm really interested in knowing.

The problem that you're trying to solve, what your solution is, have you launched or do you have any growth at all, how big do you think the market could be, do you have cofounders and do you have the ability to write code, And do you know something about the problem or the market or your opportunity that you feel like is controversial that other people don't know or wouldn't agree with?

Those are the things that I'm most interested in understanding. I'm not interested in a long history of how you came up with the idea. What I don't need is a story or a narrative in the beginning. What I first need is just raw facts. It's even more important that you don't use jargon. One of the things we say at YC all the time is there's a difference between a customer pitch and an investor pitch.

When talking to a customer or a user, they know the jargon of your industry. When talking to investor, you have no idea whether they know. So make sure you're using simple language, language that you can use with any friend that you have regardless of whether they're in your industry. Next thing is send your email from a company email address and an email address that has your name in it.

You'd be surprised at how many emails I get from oftentimes really weirdly formatted personal email addresses so I can't tell what the person's name is or like an info at email address. It's just I don't know what it is, but it's just kind of weird to like get an email from a person talking about their company, not from their company email address. It just it it it sets things off the wrong way.

Also, most investors using some type of tool that gives them information about the person who's emailing them, you know, reportive or superhuman or so on and so forth. And if you don't send email from your actual email address you use, I don't get to see that information. The next is that it's fine to attach a deck to your email but it is not required.

What I will tell you though is that there are extremely common formats for decks that investors in Silicon Valley are used to. Please do not attach a deck that lives outside of that format. If you have any question about what that format is, just Google search Airbnb's fundraising deck and that'll give you a basic look of what a deck looks like.

What's interesting and what I've learned is that in different industries decks look completely different. So if you're from finance or from marketing or from any other number of industries, there's a style of deck you might be used to that could be completely different from what startups normally pitch with. So just copy the template from a successful startups deck.

Don't roll with what you're used to in another industry. The last thing is track opens. If you're emailing investors, track the open rate and make sure that people are actually seeing your email. Now here are the don'ts. Some of the don'ts are the opposite of the dos. Don't make it long. I'm saying this over and over again because the most important thing you want is a reply.

The most important thing you want is the beginning of an email back and forth. Oftentimes founders try to shoot for too much in that initial email exchange. They want a meeting. They want a phone call. They want an investment. And in reality what you want is a conversation. Once we're in a back and forth, that's when I can ask questions. I can learn more about your business.

I can learn more about you. We can kind of go back and forth and kind of develop a relationship. So make sure you're not making the email so long and so thick and so jargony that I'm just like, it's too much of a burden in the moment for me to reply. What you're really looking for is that like, I check my email all the time every day.

Like, can I see your email, be interested, and reply all within the same, let's say, sixty to a hundred twenty seconds? That's what you're looking for. And if you ever any, confusion about how long your email is, write it and then read it to yourself and record yourself reading it. Pretty simple, but it works. Next is that don't immediately request a in person meeting.

Many investors have very different styles of how they like to do their first engagement. And in reality, if you say something interesting, the investor is gonna want more information. The investor is gonna want to continue the conversation.

If you are perceived as just pushing for an internal in person meeting, the it's more often than investor is going to think, oh, well, I don't want my arm to be twisted in a meeting where I don't know whether it's gonna be high quality meeting. And so I feel a little uncomfortable. The next is don't send multiple follow ups quickly.

You can trust that if your email is short and you have read receipts, track opens, you know whether someone's read the email or not. And once they've read the email, they have made the choice on whether to reply to you now or apply to you later. And so you don't need to hit them over the head with multiple emails.

And then the last thing and the most important thing is you don't this is a double negative. Don't not describe what your company does. You'd be so shocked at how many emails I get basically saying, Michael, I'm coming to town. I'd love to meet in person for an hour and so I can tell you what I'm working on. That's the exact wrong order of operations.

What you want to do is you want to say, Michael, I'm working on this really interesting thing. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then get me to reply back to you. Right? That is the right order. Right? You want me to be the one seeking more information for you. You want to kind of put something enticing out there and have me come to you.

That's what gives you leverage. As opposed to saying to me, Michael, the only way you're ever gonna learn what I'm working on is to meet me for an hour for lunch. Well, you know, now that bar is a lot higher for you to get that meeting. So that is some advice on how to cold email an investor. Thank you.