Nail Your Cold Email with Lombardstreet Ventures
Probably not the best way to reach out to a VC, but if you want to be effective in writing a cold email to Lombardstreet Ventures, here is what we suggest you do.
Probably not the best way to reach out to a VC, but if you want to be effective in writing a cold email to Lombardstreet Ventures, here is what we suggest you do.
Even though cold emails are not the best way to contact a VC, we keep receiving tons of cold emails. Today we will explain how to make your email interesting enough for us and attract our attention.
Geography + Market
We try to reply to every email we receive with a personal message, but often we receive too many of them. At least 40% of the time, we receive emails from founders who didn’t even read our website homepage. That, of course, is not respectful of our limited time and makes us wonder if we should delete it in the first 3 seconds.
We don’t invest in every geography, nor do we invest in every market. So the best way to attract our interest is to be aware of our geography and market interests. To simplify things, we wrote an article a few months ago to explain this, and if you didn’t, please read it now.
TL;DR If you are not a Delaware C-Corp and your market/traction is not in the USA, we wish you all the best, but, unfortunately, you’re not a good fit for our fund.
Cold Emails That Might Work
We’re not suggesting that you send us cold emails because we don’t love them, but that’s life, and we’re getting used to it. If you think we are a good fit for your company, please note how a cold email is effective for us.
a. Make it short. Writing a quick email is a good starting point if you want to get into our daily email reading process. Six or seven lines are more than enough. Longer emails get delayed or deleted most of the time.
b. Tell what your company does in less than 20 words. If you can tell what you do clearly and concisely, that’s something we appreciate a lot. It’s the 15 seconds pitch done well.
c. Give us your primary metric first. Every company has a primary metric that defines best how the business is moving—just one, not two or three KPIs. Typically MRR is the metric we appreciate the most, but that’s not a good fit for every case. Airbnb used to talk about “nights booked”, for example.
d. Give us your weekly growth rate. We invest very early in the company journey but having at least a few weeks of data is always a good way to make your statements more interesting for us. For example, “In the last six weeks, we grew 7% WoW”. Week-over-week is what we need to know.
e. Tell us where the company is based. We invest in US companies only, and you can find good opportunities everywhere, but we think some places are better than others to take off quickly. The right place depends on what you are building, but San Francisco and the Bay Area, in general, are the best place to be for software companies. The place has minor glitches, but the tech community is vibrant and supportive. So don’t overthink it; we love founders based in Silicon Valley.
f. Tell us who are the founders. Do you have the builder or the engineer on your team? Name, role, and a LinkedIn/Twitter address are enough.
g. Ownership of the company. The—fully diluted—ownership founders have in the company is always valuable data for us. It’s a long journey, and starting with 75%+ is a good choice.
h. Don’t write about your story. We love to hear how you decided to create this product, but the first email is not the right time to do it. All we need are numbers and data.
i. Do I need to send a pitch deck? It’s always appreciated. Or you can send us a link to your 90-second video pitch. Watching the CEO in action is always interesting.
The Best Way to Connect With Us
Recently we introduced a Google Form to gather the data we need all at once.
That’s the best way to reach us and to bring us to reply to you ASAP.
A one or two-minute video pitch is not required but recommended 😉—just put yourself in front of a camera, tell us about your company, and share the video link.
Lombardstreet Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park. We back distributed teams from day zero to Series A.
