Hot Tips for Piquing Our Interest With Your Cold Emails
To be effective at their job, VCs need to share with founders exactly what the best way to grab their attention is. For us, it is cold emails, and this is how you can make us eager to schedule a meeting with you.
At Lombardstreet Ventures, we invest mostly in companies raising their first round. Like any other venture capital firm in the Valley, we receive thousands of pre-seed cold emails a year. Some VCs neglect this inbound flow, and very few reply to every pitch deck they receive. We belong to the second category.
We thrive on receiving founders’ cold emails, and we’re dedicated to responding to each and every one of them within just a few days. While the workload can be huge, we believe this approach is the optimal way to infuse serendipity into our deal flow screening process.
Today, I am not going to write about how to handle cold emails in general to draw the attention of venture capitalists. Instead, I want to give you some advice on how to increase your chances of getting a meeting with Lombardstreet Ventures through your email.
Not all cold emails are created equal
By putting in some effort and paying attention to detail, you can create an email that truly connects with us and generates great results. While some emails can be dull and lacking the necessary information, others catch our attention and encourage us to learn more about the sender.
Several indicators suggest when something is amiss. For instance, when sending an unsolicited email to our team, it is essential that it comes from the company's CEO and founder. We want to invest our time in getting to know every member of the founding team, but the CEO's character is a signal we try to intercept very early.
What makes us excited to schedule a call
Very few venture capitalists offer clear online guidelines on how to grab their attention when connecting with their team for the first time.
This is quite surprising, as reaching out to a VC or screening incoming opportunities takes a considerable amount of time for both parties. In most cases, founders who seek funding from Lombardstreet Ventures tend to overlook key details when contacting us by email; sometimes they share too much, or the emails are too short and presume that the pitch deck attached can clear any doubt—which it doesn’t 90% of the times. When sending emails to investors, it is important to keep them concise and informative. The details you provide should be relevant to our initial evaluation. As each investor may have different preferences, we have clearly listed on our website the key points we would like you to cover and how to structure them to make our decision process faster.
✋ I suggest taking a break from reading this article and visiting our FAQ page.
Even if that page includes crucial information you want to know before getting in touch with us, it doesn’t tell you how to write a perfect message to inspire our team. That’s why I have taken the time to list a few reasons why certain emails fail to grab our attention.
Reason #1
You haven’t taken the time to read about how we work, what we are mostly interested in, and the best way to submit a pitch to our team; I can’t emphasize this enough: read our FAQ page. Sending an email is the only way to present your company idea to us, so it’s very important to make it right.
When you finally create the VCs list you want to connect with, you cannot use MailChimp and deliver everyone the same message. You must spend time reading what they are interested in, what’s in their investment portfolio, and how to best catch their attention.
Reason #2
For the record, we only invest in North American companies with no exceptions. We normally require the entire team to be in the United States, and it’s much better if they all work together in the same office. It is extremely difficult to build a successful company, and we believe that being in close proximity to your co-founders gives you a significant competitive advantage. If we are discussing a software company, we would prefer it to be located in the Bay Area. While this is not a requirement, it is certainly a factor we consider. When you share a physical space with your co-founders, like an office or an apartment, you can tap on your teammate's shoulder and act immediately.
As Michael Seibel—a YC Partner—said recently in a YC video, “This game is so hard without this stuff. Why do you want to make the game harder? Is it fun?”
Reason #3
Even if we invested in a plant-based company six years ago, that doesn’t mean we still do it today. We deploy capital in multiple markets and have a generalistic approach. Pay attention to the last ten or fifteen investments we closed and compare them with our current investment interests. Our investment interests include developer tools, open-source solutions, databases, SaaS, infrastructure software, and API-first platforms. We invest in both B2B plus some selected B2C companies, and the founding team is the first thing we evaluate. That’s why, among the information we suggest you send us, we’ve included a short video with all the founders in front of the camera — possibly in the same physical space. Samples of Y Combinator application videos on YouTube are a perfect example of the kind of result we are seeking. It’s unnecessary to repeat all the information that’s already on your LinkedIn profile; instead, tell us something we can’t find anywhere else. Why did you decide to start this company? What did you do to validate your idea with customers? What has been the outcome? Ensure all founding team members are included and spontaneous speeches are given instead of reading from a script. We are not evaluating how perfect you are in front of a camera, but we appreciate how unique and maybe unconventional you are.
Reason #4
We love software engineers leading their companies, probably because we’ve been programmers and DevOps ourselves. Or maybe because they can build what they envision, and if they are formidable, they can do it blazing fast. You cannot build a software company without a passionate and relentless technical co-founder in your squad. We are always happy to make exceptions when the founding team has demonstrated itself to be truly exceptional and can prove the business opportunity is real, even without a structured product already published. Can you generate revenue and prove your point with a prototype or an MVP?
In all other cases, it's best first to find a technical co-founder and validate the problem you want to solve.
P.S. 99% of the companies at the last CY W24 batch had a technical co-founder.
Reason #5
We look for defensible and unique opportunities. A good portion of the emails we receive propose just another marketplace or SaaS, slightly different from many others but, in the end, hard to protect. When we come across an email and think to ourselves, "I've seen several proposals like this in the past few months," it's usually not a good sign. Such opportunities lack a technological advantage over existing platforms, and they don't provide any evidence that users are willing to switch to their new platform.
Another solution for a very crowded space is a hard bet.
Reason #6
This last reason for not picking our interest is hard to guess from the outside. It’s more an internal reason. We know which of our past investments are performing best, and that inherently becomes a reason to follow a pattern in our investment strategy. For instance, the founders’ personality, their approach to the market, or the uniqueness of the challenge they are facing.
Unfortunately, it's impossible for those who send us cold emails to know about this, but it counts. So, sometimes, we make the huge mistake of not scheduling a meeting with someone who unsolicitedly sent us a pitch deck.
We seek unique founders who are very good at one specific thing. The art of writing great emails is in making us perceive your uniqueness.
Wrapping Up
This list is not exhaustive, and I could probably spend the rest of the day explaining what not to do in your first cold email to us. I personally review more than 1,500 cold emails a year, and not many of them communicate the kind of care I expect when you are seeking investors. In multiple cases, founders send everyone on their list the same standard message, but it rarely works.
Before ending this short and practical article, I’d like to share one last thing that we value when reviewing cold emails. As a general rule, we love enthusiastic young—maybe first-time—entrepreneurs because they are at the peak of their entrepreneurial spirit. Creating a successful startup is a hard game to play and a marathon. They may lack business experience but are quick learners and eager to pursue their dreams.
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Here are some articles that can help you get to know us better and understand what we're looking for:
