Getting investor introductions

Don’t ask for “an intro to some VCs”—do your homework and make a targeted, tactical request.

687 words • 3 min read

About once a month, I get an email from someone asking: “Can you intro me to some venture capitalists?” This is the wrong question to ask, and won’t lead to much success. Here’s why, and what you should do instead:

Asking for “an intro to a VC” doesn’t work

All investors are not created equal. They generally have their own investment theses, industries they like to fund, and check sizes they like to write. If you’re building a consumer gaming app and looking for an initial $1 million seed check, you’re wasting your time talking to a VC who writes $100m checks to late-stage B2B fintech companies. The conversation will be useless to both of you. 

Said another way: most investors are not relevant to you. When someone introduces you, they’re expending their own social capital with the introduction—they’re vouching for you and for the fact that the introduction is a good use of time. But if it’s not a good use of time (for either you or the investor), your introducer won’t want to make the introduction.

Finally, this request puts the onus on me to do the research into who might be a good fit for you—but this research should really be done by you. After all, you know your business far better than I do.

So how do you do that?

Finding relevant investors

Your most likely potential investors are going to be ones that invest in your space, and that invest at your stage. You can find investors that are a good fit in the following way:

Are there companies that are in your space? Look them up on Crunchbase or Pitchbook. Which venture capital firms invested in them? Which partners at those firms led those investments? Are there a few investor names you regularly run across in this process? Those investors might be good candidates for you.

Next, do some additional research on them: read their bio page on their firm’s website, find articles they’ve written, etc., and see who your mutual connections are on LinkedIn.

Importantly:

• This search is about the partner more than it is about the firm. The wrong person at a great firm will not be of much use to you.

• Don’t reach out to people that have invested in your direct competitors—they won’t be able to invest in you because of the conflict of interest.

The strongest VC introductions

The gold-standard VC introduction is one made by a founder of a previous investment who can also vouch for you.

When Pilot was raising money, Patrick Collison (of Stripe fame) intro’d us to Sequoia. The Sequoia team of course thinks highly of Patrick, and Patrick could also vouch for us—he’s known our team for almost two decades now.

Obviously that’s not an option for everyone.

Of “this person is a founder in the VC’s portfolio” and “this person can really vouch for you”, optimize for “vouch for you.”

As an example, if you, dear reader, emailed me and asked me to introduce you to a specific investor who’d invested in Pilot, I’d consider forwarding along your email. But the first question the investor will ask me is “How well do you know this person? Can you vouch for them being good?”

If my answer is “I’ve never met them but they read my Substack,” it’s not a compelling introduction, even if it demonstrates that you have good taste in Substacks.

But if someone in your network emailed the investor—even if they don’t know the investor as well as I do—and said  “I used to work closely with so-and-so at Company X and they were in the top 5% of engineers I’ve ever worked with,” that’s a much more powerful introduction.

Actually asking for the intro

Once you’ve identified a specific investor you’d like an intro to, and you’ve found someone they’re connected to (on LinkedIn or otherwise), craft a forwardable email for your shared connection—something they can easily just hit “forward” on, that tells your target everything they need to know about your company.

Here’s an example:

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From: Waseem
To: Sarah
Subject: Intro to Mark Goldberg re: Pilot.com?

Hi Sarah,

I hope you’re doing well. I saw that you were connected to Mark Goldberg at Index. Would you mind seeing if he’s open to a short chat about participating in Pilot’s seed round? His investments in Plaid and Vouch make me think that he’d be a really great partner to the business.

As a quick recap of Pilot:

• Three-time founding team, all met at MIT undergrad where we studied CS, previous ventures acquired by Oracle and Dropbox

• We do accounting for startups, in a tech-enabled way: we pair you with an expert on our team who takes care of your accounting, and under the hood we’re building the Iron Man suit for our experts—software that lets them do the work more accurately and scalably, with AI superpowers

• We have [xx] customers who love the service

• Revenue is [xx] and has tripled over the past year

We’re closing our seed round later this month, and I’d love to chat with Mark to see if he might be interested in joining the round.

Thanks,
Waseem

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Some important notes about this email:

• It’s incredibly turnkey—Sarah can just hit forward with no modification, not even to the subject line.

• It’s sent to Sarah, but it’s really written for Mark—Sarah might already know these details about the business, but you should include them anyway

• It’s from you, so you get to frame it up exactly as you’d like to—and the introducer doesn’t need to do a bunch of rewriting to make it sound like them

• Note that the request is “Do you want to meet to learn more?”—your objective is to secure the next meeting, not to secure the investment

Preparing for the first meeting

If the investor accepts the introduction, you will end up scheduling a call (in-person or virtual).

For any meeting to be successful, you have to understand the objective. What is your objective in this first meeting? Counterintuitively, it’s not to get the investor to invest. An investment decision is almost never made on a first meeting, and it’s almost never made alone—generally, the partners of the VC firm will have convene to approve any investments.

So what is the objective? It’s to get the investor interested in learning more. How do you do that? Ultimately, it’s about telling a compelling story. You need to explain why your startup is inevitable.

What’s next?

If your story is compelling, and you’ve found an investor excited to work with you, then it’s time to go deeper: the investor might want to see some data from your company (financials, user stats, etc.), they might want to try out the product, or they might want to talk to a few happy customers.

Your investor is now doing two things: (a) deciding whether they like the business enough to want to invest, and (b) deciding whether they like the business enough to make the case to the rest of the partnership that the firm ought to invest, and in some ways (b) is the harder bar to clear.

Good luck!