Over the years, there has been plenty of discussion around cold emails/outreaches to VCs. Some VCs have said they welcome it, and some say they will only take warm intros. To each their own on this topic, but some thoughts:

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1/ First, when we think about cold outreaches, we are really primarily speaking about the 1st institutional round of funding (whether that is seed/Series A, etc.). After getting an institutional investor, you usually will receive the benefit of that investor’s rolodex and brand.

2/ I’ve heard many VCs say that they take warm referrals only (and often rank by referrer type) because of 1) higher quality of deal flow and 2) the belief that entrepreneur should be resourceful enough to find a warm referral in given the public nature of information.

3/#2 is a poor reason to shun cold emails: there are many entrepreneurs that simply don’t have the installed networks to do this and it has nothing to do with hustle/resourcefulness. And it’s hard to know perfectly who would be the best signal anyway for a particular individual.

4/#2 also creates a natural bias toward entrepreneurs that are just lucky enough to be part of the club, versus truly supporting those that may not come from the same pedigree of education, work experience, geography, or background (but are great founders).

5/ The higher quality of deal flow point is an interesting one to consider and while this may be true from the lens of deals looked/deals done, it perpetuates a culture of echo chamber/piggyback diligence investing & creates implicit biases against co’s that cold outreach.

6/ Now, an unfortunate reality of the emerging fund VC business (particularly non-inst backed ones) is that there is heavy incentive to not take non-consensus risk early: having early mark-ups, and showing the ability to co-invest with brands is a big part of raising new funds

7/ to be fair, a real reason in not accepting cold emails is bandwidth. Unlike larger firms, smaller seed mgrs only have 1-2 investing personnel; hard to sift through 1000's of emails (on top of everything else needed to run a firm). Many VCs lose great opps because of time.

8/ But it is something that needs to be figured out if we are serious about creating a truly egalitarian capital market for entrepreneurship. Some funds have employed venture partners, scouts, software, etc. to help with this.

9/ Founders also can help their cause w/cold outreaches; Always include:1/Why you are reaching out to that investor (establish relevancy) 2/What the ask is (make sure it demonstrates relevancy) 3/clear summary that provides necessary context for the VC to opt-in/decline.

10/ From my experience as an occasional angel investor, cold outreaches must avoid 1) Any notion of building the next Unicorn 2) unrealistic market opportunity/TAM 3) Any statement on how much money the investor will make by investing.

11/Since I'm skeptical this will be fixed organically, it makes me much more interested in the diverse/underrepresented audience who have faced these same issues and will have an unfair advantage in reach into the non mainstream entrepreneurship funnel.