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Comment by algo_trader | Hacker News Reader

Has anybody, ever, raised a seed round (say more than a $100K) by cold calling a fund?

Lets say u r decent developers, and a web site, and some revenue, and usage is growing. But its not doubling every month, and you are not 4 FAANG technical leads.

Do serious people spend more than 10 seconds on reading such an email?

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Associates do. Routing cold reach to associates is your best bet vs GPs or other managing roles. Literally the associates job to read all those emails. Couple of my buddies are associates at VC firms, they talk about this a lot. They’ve definitely done deals from cold initial outreach.

Yes, it happens. Deal flow is a common performance metric in funds so if you catch someone at the right time they will read it. You can't raise a whole round that way, but you can definitely get a meeting and leverage that for intros into other funds. Once you have a foothold it doesn't really matter. Most VCs do deals referred by other VCs, even if the first VC doesn't make an investment.

Important note: this only works if you are credible. Credible doesn't mean FAANG, it means you can be googled and you look like you might be a credible founder.

> Credible doesn't mean FAANG, it means you can be googled and you look like you might be a credible founder.

So glad to hear this!

I have rejected offers from FAANG before and generally avoid their recruitment consultants to save myself from their golden handcuffs. I am sure not all investors will overlook not having credentials of FAANG but some of them will. And those are the ones that matter to me.

Look at the YC application. One of the questions essentially asks to give an example of your exceptionalism. There are lots of ways to get there but if a founder has no notable previous accomplishments it's difficult to make the leap as an investor that suddenly they will have success. Most VCs don't want to take founder risk because it tends to be negativelty, not positively correlated with large outcomes. Cold email someone and in one to two sentences mention factual impressive academic or professional accomplishments of you and your team.

Also it's fine to email associates. They do a lot of the screening work since partners are trying to spend more time with an existing portfolio, networking, and startups further fown the funnel. If you can't impress an associate it's unlikely that you'll have impressed the partner.

I’ve effectively built my VC network through cold calling emails. It works. Not all the time but it also depends on your credibility, idea and communication skills.

Yes, all non-top-tier investors and angels have currently a crappy deal flow. They read every email they get and they have a hard time to get into good deals right now.

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