How To Cold Email Investors - Michael Seibel

Founders often ask me how to cold email an investor when they're interested in raising money. 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. Oftentimes, I'll store 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 60 seconds or less, you can pretty much guarantee that I'll read it. That's the most important thing you need. You need not to sell me on writing a check or investment in your company; you need me to just read what you're working on and understand it enough to want to reply back.

The second thing that's important is that in that short email, there are 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 co-founders? Do you have the ability to write code? Do you know something about the problem, 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 am 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, oh, I see all the time, is there's a difference between a customer pitch and an investor pitch. When talking to a customer or user, they know the jargon of your industry. When talking to an 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.

The 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 often times really weirdly formatted personal emails, so I can't tell what the person's name is, or like an info@ email address. It’s just kind of weird to get an email from a person talking about their company, not from their company email address. It just sets things off the wrong way. Also, most investors are using some type of tool that gives them information about the person who's emailing them—rapportive, superhuman, or so forth—and if you don't send email from your actual email address, 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 questions about what that format is, just google search “Airbnb fundraising deck” and that will give you a basic look at 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 startup 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 do's: 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, and we can kind of go back and forth and how to 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 we're really looking for is for me to check my email all the time, every day—can I see your email, be interested, and reply all within the same, let's say, 60 to 120 seconds? That's what you're looking for. If you have any confusion about how long your email is, write it and then read it to yourself, or record yourself reading it. Pretty simple, but it works.

Next, don’t immediately request an 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 going to want more information. The investor is going to want to continue the conversation. If you are perceived as just pushing for an internal in-person meeting, it’s more often than not that investors are 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 going to be a 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. Once they've read the email, they have made the choice on whether to reply to you now or reply to you later, so you don't need to hit them over the head with multiple emails.

The last thing, and the most important, 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 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. You want me to be the one seeking more information from 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.