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?
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.
Easiest = You can target specific VC/Angels that focus on your target group. You have option to introduce yourself using your contacts network, and it's still better than sending cold e-mail to random VCs. Also, VC List doesn't have public e-mails, you still need to find them.
Just not true. This topic is complex and yes sending a cold email to a random investor is worse than getting a warm intro but these are two extremes. There are many ways to raise significant funds without intros.
So, I have to click on a clumsy website around and don't get email addresses? No thanks.
if you're going to share this sort of data, why disable the export option - it just makes it annoying to extract the data out, it doesn't prevent someone from doing so .
It took Google Docs what seemed like several minutes to serve it to me (mostly waiting time before the first byte), so I copied and pasted it into an Excel sheet, here you go:
Exactly. People love to bitch about Excel but any other product I've tried fails miserably handling the many large files we have at work. I'm talking "epic failure" level performance from any other product I've tried. Most either can't even open the files or outright crash at some point along the way.
Excel is also extremely powerful and, in my opinion, pretty fast when you consider it's basically an extremely advanced REPL software that also checks cell dependencies and evaluates/updates on the fly. Not to mention extended functionality through scripting (VBA).
(If you wanted to make a quick buck -- you could probably publish part of your list for free, and charge people a few bucks for access to the rest of it... I'm sure they'd pay... it's valuable info...)
But, this being said... I am grateful your list is free!
I think the email list is already up for sale, they just don't mention it. See how the email column says "Yes" for most entries, as in: "yes, we have their email". Though you'll have to follow the clues and use the contact information from the header to get a quote.
The way all of this is presented, along with saving the doc being disabled, is pretty sneaky.
For any founder who thinks this list is comprehensive or worth paying for: It's laughably incomplete, even in major VC markets. From a cursory scan I'd guess at least 50% of VC firms I've done deals with in Boston, SF and LA are missing.
The insight I was trying to provide is that buying the list of emails from the list owner probably isn't worth it as it's not comprehensive.
For my methodology, I sorted alphabetically and cross-referenced with our internal deal tracking tools. About 50% of the first 20 firms I checked were missing. I call my scan cursory because I didn't continue after that, and we only invest in a subset of markets and company types.
I see lists like this for sale fairly frequently, and based on what I see it's likely a list of all firms with partner emails that were easy to find.
a) This is very incomplete. Australia has more than just two VC.
b) If you're looking for a complete list just signup for a Crunchbase Pro trial, scrape the site and then cancel it. Or just invest in it if you are seriously fundraising.
