The background: I split my 30y career half & half between investment banking and startups. Yet I am located in Italy, an area where VC is in its infancy.<p>After having devoted 7 years to my own startup (<i>) I started helping other startups for funding and business development with a few friends. We are all ex bankers with lots of international exposure.<p>We got ourselves a Pitchbook subscription to find intelligence on who was active in the relevant sectors, made sure the pitching material for our first startup was solid (it's a world class tool for genetic diagnosis, just confirmed by a US competition where the best global players attended) and started reaching out with the infamous cold emails, with Docsend links.<p>Not that I am particularly good at replying to cold emails, but if they are personal and carefully written I will probably oblige.<p>Yet we basically received one (most likely) automatic answer and a second immediate refusal out of 25/30 attempts. One of the two opened the links. Period.<p>What can we do to have reasonable chances to get in touch with relevant people?<p>One thing that we, as a team, ensure, is that we do our work on the "item" that we speak about. Both from the startup side and the candidate investors one.<p>After all if banking teaches you something is that you are supposed to go really deep on the topic if you want to make it work.<p>Thanks for any pointers you might share.<p>(</i>) which has never been able to get funded even if it got a grant and a Seal of Excellence from the most competitive institution in the EU (EIC)
30 cold emails? this is 100x harder than you think. start by targeting angel investors who are experts in your space; they have more time (VCs see 5000 pitches per year and invest in 12). one well connected angel with conviction in you can provide you all the intros you need. note that getting acquired also starts with the warm intro game, so start working on it now, there is no avoiding it.
Honestly I always used personal connections - I'm not exactly an extrovert but I'm comfortable talking to just about anyone. Sometimes it's surprising who knows who and the connections are often not what you expected.<p>The other trick is realizing it's not only VCs who have money. Most Angel investors outside SV are NOT even involved in Tech.