A VC Doesn't Respond To Your Cold Email. What Does That Mean For Your Startup?

No response is a response, but there's a way to fix it.

Author’s Note: Where do I begin? With an apology. Being a first-year student at HBS has proven more challenging than I expected. I underestimated how busy I would be here in business school, but I’m making the newsletter a priority going forward.

I’ll be publishing one article a week every week for paid subscribers going forward, starting Oct. 30th. Paid subscriptions will be turned on again. Today’s article is an example of the stuff I’ll be writing in the weeks and months to come. You might think, “Hey, isn’t this pretty basic stuff?” Yes, it is, but the content will get more sophisticated and tactical, I have to cover the basics first for all my newcomers. Remember, you gotta meet your users where they are first!

I’ll send out more information in a follow-up email come mid-week (Wednesday or Thursday).

I wrote this on LinkedIn the other day:

Addressing the question in the photo: The answer is yes. But not for the reasons you think.

Sure, any given VC receives a countless number of pitches in their inbox that they lack the time to review thoroughly and provide high-quality and actionable feedback.

There is a practical reason for a VC to rely on warm intros. It’s a convenient way to quickly filter through potential startups. However, there’s an implicit lesson that most founders (and VCs) miss!

If you can’t get a warm intro to a VC, it doesn’t mean that your startup isn’t worth paying attention to. 

It means that your network isn’t strong enough.

For early-stage startups, the biggest predictor of success is the strength of the founding team’s network.

There’s no way to test for this explicitly; no VC will ever ask you directly in a pitch how strong your network is.

Yet, they will question your ability to repeatedly and reliably acquire new customers at minimal cost.

They will question your power to consistently hire top talent, and whether your current team is elite.

They will question your ability to convince other investors to cut you a check in later rounds of funding.

The answer to all of these overt questions is to already have a strong network that gets you connected to the key hire, the difficult-to-reach customer, and the elusive investor.

But how does a first-time founder go about intentionally building one?

It’s challenging for founders who don’t already have a robust network to begin constructing one while building their startups at the same time.

That’s why I’ve built F2F: to help my subscribers connect with one another and people in my network that I’ve encountered over the years writing for Forbes and this newsletter. I want to connect founders to other founders, operators, and investors, and help play a (small) role in their overall success.

The more I can help you build your network as you build your company, the greater chance you’ll have with that VC.

So if you don’t get a response from a VC from a cold email, it’s not a reflection of you or your startup. But the sooner you build your network, the sooner you’ll have success going forward.

And this newsletter is going to help you do that.

Soda

Previous Startup Spotlights:

• Startup Spotlight #210: Candidate.fyi - candidate.fyi is the missing candidate experience layer that integrates with 40+ ATS’s. We believe every candidate deserves an excellent experience, hired or not.

• Startup Spotlight #209: Founder's Cupid - Founder's Cupid is a growing, in-person community for 350+ student entrepreneurs between Michigan and Stanford’s campuses to support the top student founders.

• Startup Spotlight #208: Rivet - Rivet is a platform that utilizes artificial intelligence to generate actions and recommendations that make fan community management and revenue generation easy for artists and creators.

• Startup Spotlight #207: Diddo - Diddo is building a next-gen computer vision to empower a paradigm shift and open up new revenue streams for social commerce.

• Startup Spotlight #206: reUser - reUser provides software to help dining services and their clients, such as universities, hospitals, and corporate campuses reUse takeout packaging.

• Startup Spotlight #205: Swapt - Swapt enables businesses to capture data and deliver personalized consumer experiences in the physical world powered by intelligent QR codes and NFC technology.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.