So, you cold emailed me saying “Hey I’m working on something awesome and I could really use your help.”
Thank you! I suspect I can indeed likely help you out. However, I get lots of these inquiries and my first thought is not “I’m too busy” but “I could help you more if you did some other stuff first.”
Here is that other stuff:
Learn about startups on your own. I now teach a class at Columbia about venturing, and here is the syllabus. Read all that stuff.
Read my own humble writings about startups: Ship While You Sleep and Amol’s Guide for Beginners.
Read the 10x larger set of writings at Amol.Sarva.co and A.Sarva.co and Blog.Drwn.com
Join the LifeX Community WhatsApp group and come to some meetups that we circulate (or follow my linkedin)
Come to a Salon hosted by LifeX, often in a city where I am (mostly NY) on a Thursday. Just ask me where/when in the group above.
Then, come up with something really interesting to say and email me again to a at sarva dot co.
What’s really interesting? How should you reach out to a busy founder or investor?
- Don’t say “I want to pick your brain” or some variant –> you are asking for their time, what are you offering?
- Don’t say “I want to introduce myself” –> do that in the email and do your darndest to make sure you are interesting and standout in some way
- Do say “I’ll do this incredibly valuable thing for you for nothing just for the chance to hang out with you or report back on the work” –> you’ll need to demonstrate you have the competence and do your research to choose something to offer that might actually be incredibly valuable
- Do say “I have this high value thing that I’d like to share with you, but I need to talk with you to do that.” –> e.g. I have a podcast where 20 huge folks are on it (or just invited…?) or a major report on your market space that I’m completing and would like to have you featured… You’ll need to be enterprising here. But journalists can talk to whoever they want pretty much, and many times they have little readership more than you do
I’ll try to reply!
April 2025