Two Emails Every Every-Stage Founder Should Master

How to grow your network before you need to raise money

Raising money for your seed-stage startup is hard. It’s even harder if you don’t already have relationships with investors.

That’s why we always tell founders to start networking early.

That’s much easier said than done, of course. VCs are busy and they won’t always have time to meet with a seed-stage company.

The secret weapon? VC fund associates.

These more junior team members can often be overlooked but play a critical role as scouts and sources of deal-flow for their respective funds and internal advocates for your company.

Now, it’s likely that they, too, are too busy to meet with you. But they’re more likely to want to establish a connection and keep track of your company, because your company could one day be an attractive investment for their fund.

I believe that there’s a quick and relatively painless way to create these relationships and keep them warm.

It starts with an introductory email making a modest ask:

Can I include you on our company email update?

Then follow through with regular email updates to everyone in your network.

There’s a formula to both of these, so I’m providing templates you can use for your own.

To check out the two templates, here is a link to my full article here for an in-depth breakdown of why these emails work and how to prepare them.

And of course, feel free to include me at jshure@svb.com on your regular updates and/or connect on Twitter here.

Good luck!