How to reach out to investors on your target list

How to actively get in front of the people on your target list

Assuming you now have a list of people you’d like to reach out to and at least some of their contact information, the next step is pretty straightforward. You simply ask yourself a series of questions and act accordingly. I’ve made a flowchart to both demonstrate what that series of questions is and flex my amazing PowerPoint skills:

Now that that’s out of the way, I think some examples of emails and LinkedIn messages would be helpful for each step of the above chart.

If you know someone directly

First up, here’s an example of an email I sent to a buddy of mine from my fraternity (I know, I know) that is now an investor in Los Angeles. I felt like I knew him well enough to reach out directly, so I did.

Obviously, use language that fits both your natural personality and the relationship you have with the person. The fact that we were in a fraternity together paired with the fact that I tend to say things like “crushing it” in real life made using the phrase in this email authentic. This is just meant to be an example that helps you get started, not replicated verbatim.

If you know someone that can make an introduction

So, how do you figure out if you know someone that can make an introduction? The answer is LinkedIn

As mentioned in the prior article, you typically won’t even have a specific person who you want an introduction to, you’ll simply know the firm that you’re interested in. So, what you’ll do is go to LinkedIn and search for the name of the firm. Once on a firm’s profile page, the top of the page will look like this:

You’ll then want to click on the link that says “See all 16 employees on LinkedIn”

As you can see, for each person that works there you’ll see in small grey text the mutual connections that you share with that person.

Once you identify a person within the firm that shares a mutual connection with you that you’re willing to reach out to, you’ll need to draft an email to that mutual connection asking for an introduction. That looks something like this:

In these cases, the person you reach out to will often ask you to provide a blurb about yourself to include in the introduction email. Here’s an example of one I wrote:

Lastly, there will inevitably be people that you’ll have no choice but to reach out to as cold as ice. Like this:

Notice the sweet subject line. When you’re just a random person in a sea of people begging for their attention, it helps to be a bit creative (my friends at Listen Ventures taught me that). You’re probably one of 20 aspiring VCs that hit them up just that week, so using a corny subject line could be the reason they answer your email over the others.

The above example assumes, however, that you were able to get a hold of their email address. Sometimes, though, you have to use LinkedIn. When using LinkedIn, you can’t DM someone unless you’re already connected with them. So, what I usually do is send a connect request and include a little blurb in it like this:

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

But one thing that’s nice about venture is that no one will ever fault you for shooting your shot.