How do I get a meeting with a VC??

The Ascent Conference starts today! I'm looking forward to being there and will be hosting a roundtable discussion on 'When and how to scale your sales team.' With a conference comes a lot of requests for meetings - over a hundred actually. It would be tremendous to meet everyone there but I'll be running to a bunch of different events. So, it seems like a good time to dust off this old blog post about getting meetings with the right investors.

Have some fun at the conference! In the meantime, here is some advice for founders. And a RomCom...

Nearly every founder-focused panel I speak on includes this question. 

A breakfast panel about valuation: ‘How can we meet?’

AI and its impact on society: ‘What’s the best way to meet you?’

Blockchain incubator session: ‘What gets VCs to respond?’

If I am hearing this then I’m sure every other investor is too. It is so pervasive that I usually just talk about it during my obligatory ‘what do I invest in’ spiel. And it's a really good question. Investors can be like the Wizard of Oz to track down.

Today I’m going to put this down on the internet for all to see so that when you do some googling before the next breakfast panel you might come across this and have the answers before everyone else - ahead of the pack already!

Venture capital is a funny little world that’s hard to understand from the outside but, for those of us who live this stuff, we toss insider ideas and verbiage around like it’s common knowledge. It’s basically our version of ‘corporate buzzword Bingo’ which always made my head explode as an operator in tech companies.

So here is a list of ways you can reach an investor with some of my own personal insights/biases/shortcuts for you to use:

‘Get another VC to send it to me’ - Cool. That’s basically the same response I’d get if I asked how to hang out with Clooney. I don’t know him and I don’t know his friends… This is definitely the best way to get to the top of the VC inbox but it presents the obvious ‘how do I hang out with Clooney’ challenge stated above. Perhaps you know some VCs, angel investors, or my buddy Kevin from high school who all also know me and you can (1) get them excited enough about what you are doing and (2) actually get them to send along an intro with some sort of meaningful context. Maybe you can actually motivate Kev to text me back...

Odds are, you do not know who I work with regularly and swap deal flow. Being a curious and scrappy founder you want to be efficient in your efforts so how can you narrow the search? Here are a few suggestions:

• Start with LinkedIn
• Check out our portfolio companies. Once you have that list, you can go check out our co-investors on Crunchbase. 

Still no luck? Well, at least you now know everywhere I worked previously, where I went to school and you can probably track down more of my friends besides Kev. That will open up a bunch of other avenues for potential intros.

Try another founder - This approach is also effective. As VCs we have to say ‘no’ a lot but we also build meaningful relationships with founders even when we don’t invest in their companies. You may run into the same issues of getting them excited enough to take action but it’s worth a shot and it widens your net quite a bit. Even better, if you can get one of our portfolio companies interested then you have drastically improved your odds of getting a meeting.

Ask one of our service providers/partners - One of the best parts of being in venture is our spot in the middle of an extensive ecosystem designed to grow and support companies and teams. Our network includes lawyers, venture bankers, corporations, software and service providers, investment bankers, research analysts, tax specialists, recruiters, accountants and so on. 

Every investor will have their own list of formal and informal partners across these categories so it’s always good to check with your respective providers to see if they can help you out. For us, McCarter & English, Early Growth Financial Services, First Republic and Square One Bank have all been great referral partners; some are so good that it’s almost like having another Associate on our team.

Write a really thoughtful email -  Yes, it’s true that VCs have a crazy amount of communication to manage across about 47 different communication platforms and you might be feeling like Drew Barrymore in ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ [Go ahead and watch it. I’ll wait and won’t judge.] I can assure you that 90% of the well thought out emails I receive get a reply within a couple of weeks from me or someone on our team.

Here are a couple other miscellaneous pieces of advice. Not to be a lecture but hopefully it’s helpful:

• Use email, not LinkedIn. LinkedIn is tough because it doesn’t have a feature for managing the inbox. Depending on what’s going on at a given point in time, I generally get 20+ requests and messages per day via LinkedIn and everything gets pushed down a long list with no real way to manage it. My email inbox gets a lot more attention and it’s actually posted on my LinkedIn page. Shhh… don’t tell.
• Please try not to ask a question that requires a long, detailed answer. I really want to answer questions from college kids, interns from other funds, and other generally curious people but the longer the required response is, the less likely you are to get one. Keep it short and if there is a compelling reason to chat further then it will naturally come together.
• Unfortunately that does not necessarily mean we should grab coffee to learn more about what each other is working on. In a perfect world, it would be great to meet everyone to chat about startups, the Red Sox, blockchain, whatever... but I’d be in cardiac arrest if I accepted every coffee meeting request.
• Service providers, consultants, recruiters, etc. - definitely appreciate all of your hustle but it’s just not possible to take calls with all of you for future opportunities. I sold a lot of software and have been ignored by a lot of prospects for years on end. I wish I had better advice to give but if you can contextualize your outreach to something I’m trying to solve for in our fund or portfolio then I will do my best to get back with you ASAP. 

A future blog will feature our Associate, Han Jing, and how he got a job with us via a cold email and four ‘No’s.’