There is a time for long, flowing prose. Cold emails to people whose time is worth a lot of money isn't one of them.

I've never explained the problem I'm solving in public -- not yet. When I have an open beta, then it will be obvious, but I want to keep that much detail non-public until my beta and going live.

Sometimes I stop there. Sometimes I include some more of what I gave above. I never include as much technical information as above -- that is for an HN audience.

I wrote the above for the HN audience to explain what I can that HN could understand.

For the list of "accomplishments", some VCs, including SUSA, claim that they like to see such.

My main point is, in conflict with the OP and with SUSA's remarks on their Web site and in this thread, VCs including SUSA don't respond anything like they claim to. I wasted HUGE time contacting VCs, sent them dozens of highly polished e-mail messages, e.g., including very carefully written PDF foil decks, some with only 10 or so foils and only 250 words in total, and the response was essentially always the same -- silence. Could call, get an assistant, give her (always a female) a heads up about the e-mail, could leave phone messages, could send e-mail follow ups, etc., and in all cases, nothing significant.

My conclusions: Flatly, VCs essentially never take unsolicited e-mail messages seriously, no matter what the content, short, medium, long, highly polished, formal, informal, technical, non-technical, etc. Nothing, not even zip, zilch, zero -- phone calls, e-mail -- unsolicited counts.

Point: Don't waste your time. About all that counts is traction and publicity enough that VCs hear about the company NOT from the company. Maybe "warm introductions" count, but an entrepreneur like me just doesn't know the same people as VCs. We just don't know the same people. I know some very high up people that know me well, but those people don't know VCs.

The "warm introduction" idea is a bad joke on the VCs because the people they would really like to meet don't have the same associates as VCs.

To VCs, everything from the company unsolicited is "from over the transom" and regarded with contempt.

Now with the much lower prices of computing and Internet data rate and lots of free infrastructure software, etc., it's a new day: A sole, solo founder can bring the company to good traction alone. Then a solo founder can have such a low burn rate that by the time a VC firm wants to write a check, the founder will no longer need or want the check -- because such a check has the BoD with all the power in the company and has the founder essentially again an at-will employee.

I can rewrite my pitch anyway I want, and I can promise you that from the 100 top US information technology VCs, an unsolicited, "over the transom" e-mail contact will get a significant response from at most 2 firms but very likely none. It's just an unspoken secret of Sand Hill Road: VCs ignore unsolicited e-mail messages, no matter what is in them.

--- Executive Summary, Elevator Pitch ---

There are about 3 billion Internet users in the world. There is a problem (I can explain very quickly but won't explain in public yet but have explained to lots of VCs) that is pressing for essentially all those users but so far solved at best poorly. I have developed an excellent, and the first good, solution, now in software about ready to go live. Ballpark, good users will visit my Web site solution a few times a week, and from simple arithmetic the company should relatively soon be worth ballpark $1 T.

Short enough?

Ballpark, there's not a single VC in the US who will touch that with a pole five miles long.

"Innovative, leading edge, disruptive, high value, low risk, low cost to start, good barriers to entry" -- has all those but no VC in the country will take even 10 seconds to look at it.

Why not? Educated guesses: (1) Most important, the VCs want traction, significant and growing rapidly. (2) The VCs hate the idea of a solo founder. (3) The key to such astounding value is some crucial, core, original applied math, and VCs have never seen a successful startup based on math, know that they don't know the math, and really hate that some math might be relevant to an information technology startup. Instead, the VCs' idea of technology is some routine C++ software or some such. (4) No one has yet built a company worth $1 T, so the VCs just reject that possibility. (5) The VCs have total contempt for anything they receive via unsolicited e-mail. For a good startup, the VCs want to hear about the company from some solid source other than the company. The VCs are totally convinced that that source of information will be plenty soon enough for their investing. (6) The VCs believe, solidly, that if my startup starts to be successful, then I will come crawling back to them, desperate for equity funding for "the big build out," the "big staff up," the "big go to market push," "the explosively rapid growth," for the necessary high rate of growth to capture the market before others do (the VCs assume that anything one startup could do other startups could easily duplicate or equal, i.e., the VCs have never yet seen anything like crucial, core, proprietary technology genuinely ahead and difficult to duplicate or equal; the VCs believe that what is crucial is just the market and any relevant technology will be routine -- false!) for their help with marketing, staffing, business acumen, more funding rounds, exit strategy, etc. Nope.

The idea that my work can get me to $10,000 a month in revenue, maybe $200,000+ a month, then that revenue could let me scale to $2 million a month, then that revenue should let me scale to $20 million a month, then that revenue should let me get a lot of office space and hire a lot of people and grow to $100 million a month, ..., to a company worth $1 T is just to be laughed at, ignored, scorned, junked, etc.

VCs are necessarily chasing things that are really exceptional, but when they hear about such a thing they reject it without even a glance because it is not what they are used to!

Maybe the VCs are jealous, already making money enough, want desperate, subordinate entrepreneurs, etc.

But they don't want me, and my startup has such low burn rate and my checkbook is still thick enough that I don't need the VCs and should be able to get to revenue of $10,000 a month at which time "no VC need call".

My Point: I wasted a LOT of time pitching to VCs, and I want to warn HN readers that VCs can be really tough to communicate with. E.g., some VCs claim that they "seek out" some really good stuff, but when send them e-mail outlining just such stuff they just ignore the e-mail.

Warning: It's a big secret in information technology VC that they take great pride in ignoring unsolicited e-mail. So, don't waste time writing them.

If you really want them, then get some traction and publicity and let them call you. Of course, if you are a solo founder with tiny opex, you may not want to talk with them!

Some of what worries me is what I've experienced with VCs so far -- we're not even on the same planet.

E.g., if the business goes well, then soon I will come to the Board with a project for some ad targeting that makes crucial use of the data only we have. The targeting has a shot at being better than what is in the industry now, primarily because the data is different (unique) and we can have better applied math for processing it (uh, my applied math might not apply well to the data, say, our ad networks have).

Why better data? Uh, as above, the data is from those on average 20 Web pages each user sees and the data they enter in response. For more, that data is from the moment and focused, actually usually uniquely well focused. E.g., I may not know what the heck the user had for lunch, but I've discovered that that he's just dreaming of breakfast with apple-cinnamon oatmeal tomorrow, just tomorrow. Presto, bingo, slam, bam, thank you Ma'am, the user gets an ad from General Mills. But it only works just then, and is useless in 24 hours.

So, I come before the BoD with this new project. For the quarterly budget, the BoD will have to approve the project. I'll direct the project but only loosely since I'm still busy being CEO. So, I'll have to hire, basically some good applied mathematicians. There will be some math, maybe some new math, but also a lot of data handling, e.g., digging into the many terabytes of the Web site log files. Might have to write some one-shot code.

The project will likely go for several quarters. The project in total can blow $1 million, more than once. Like most Ph.D. dissertations, it won't be clear just how well it will go or just when it will be done.

But, since the BoD has to approve the budget, they will have to approve the $1 million, some number of times, for some number of quarters. I have in mind roughly how to do it now, but I won't be able to stop my CEO work and will have to hire for 99% of the work.

So, I try to explain to the BoD how the project will go.

Tilt. Halt. Alarms go off. The BoD doesn't like it. They have a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders, including themselves. No way do they want to spend $1 million at a time, at a pop.

I saw such BoD resistance at FedEx. It was about to kill FedEx. I was the guy who did some computing with a little math that turned the BoD around. Founder, COB, CEO F. Smith said at a senior staff meeting that my work "solved the most important problem facing" the company. Yup, I saved the company from going out of business, literally.

But to me, the FedEx BoD was just bonkers; there was no good reason for their resistance. They were foolish. They couldn't see rationally as far as their hand in front of their face. It was worse than trying to teach the family kitty cat to use the toilet in the garage workshop.

So, on my startup now, as CEO, trying to teach the BoD, I take out full time for half a week, put together a good tutorial dog and pony show, and try to explain what the opportunity is and how the math will go.

There's no way I can explain the math itself directly. Even among Ph.D. math profs, fewer than 10% have the math prerequisites. Among Ph.D. computer science profs, fewer than 1%.

So, since I can't actually use the math, I'll have to work just with analogies and draw some cute pictures to be seen just intuitively.

Maybe I'll get lucky, take a very simple, basically just a first-cut guess, at the math (remember the targeting math is not all done yet!), take some data from the log files, write a little prototype software, get lucky, and show that the targeting works better, say, goes from the Mary Meeker's $2 per 1000 to $4.25 per 1000. Uh, with everything else constant that more than doubles revenue. And, if that works for ads based on actual sales, the result, for those ads, could go to IIRC ballpark $50 per 1000.

That work could take me longer, maybe three weeks away from my CEO duties. I'd have my door closed, and when the COO, head of HR, Chief Counsel, and CFO pounded on the door, I'd have to tell them to work it out on their own.

So, the big day comes, and I pitch to the BoD. Soon they start looking at their smartphones. There is little so painful as listening to an advanced math lecture where don't have even a clue about even the basics, especially when are supposed to understand the stuff, even when I try to make it easy. The first BoD Member gets an urge, soils his chair and the carpet as he rushes to the men's room. Soon I'm the only one in the Board room; all the rest of the BoD has visited the men's room and retired to a bar down the block. There I get a new title, Senior PIA, pain in the ass. The ad targeting project is cancelled. All the BoD Members are pissed.

Later the rest of the BoD Members meet and can't decide what to do, and I've got a big BoD fight on my hands. All the rest of the work stops to settle the BoD fight. The company ship is starting to leak slowly.

So, BoD squabbles.

"Partners"? The famous co-founder disputes, e.g., with the usual, some chance of a nice short term gain but with a risk of a long term loss, say, a big anti-trust issue, a user privacy issue, some accusations of collusion in restraint of trade, pissing off some EU regulator. So, make some extra money for six months and then work off and on for years trying to clean up the mess.

Then the question is how the heck to solve the problem, and why I have a solution and no one else does. The answer there is my original applied math. Sorry 'bout that, but I'm fully capable of doing such math, have done good original math back to high school, and have a Ph.D. from a world class research university and peer-reviewed publications as evidence. For the e-mail I sent SUSA, I included a PDF of one of my papers that clearly shows good math ability; I included the PDF and also the reference to the paper on the shelves of the research libraries. The journal for the paper? Information Sciences, an Elsevier journal. Fully serious stuff.

Exceptionally good projects are what the VCs need, e.g., "another Google", and that's what I write them about.

To take my claims seriously, sure, the VCs and I would have to communicate further. E.g., one poster here says that my pitch should be about five words on one, line, short enough to be just the subject line of an e-mail. I've done that, too, e.g.,

$1 T Quickly

or some such with the e-mail body with an elevator pitch of just 2-3 sentences. That gets ignored, too.

IMHO, a lesson for HN people if they want is what I did or didn't write is just irrelevant. Instead, nearly no VC will ever read an unsolicited e-mail. They all go "straight to the bin".

For the really solid evidence of "demonstration or hook," that would be when I have $2 million a month in revenue, right? Then they can give me a call, and I will look up when I wrote them and told them what I was doing that they ignored. So, I'm at $2 million a month, and they want to buy 30% of my company for a seed round of $1 million? And I should be thrilled by that?

> VCs almost certainly hear this kind of claim multiple times a week and are thoroughly experienced in how frequently this turns out to be true (practically zero)

Right. So, they'd be a lot happier if I projected only 1 million good users instead of 1 billion, a company worth $1 B instead of $1 T? I'd be just the same: Again, once again, the VCs ignore unsolicited e-mail messages, no matter how short, long, rough, polished, etc. The VCs believe that any entrepreneur who sends anything to info@BigVC.com is a fool. Maybe so. But, who is the fool, the entrepreneur or the VC who invites entrepreneurs to send to a black hole?

E.g., as elsewhere in this thread, SUSA claims to "seek out" good startups. Well, they don't "seek" very far if they ignore their e-mail.

The US is awash in people and institutions that can do really accurate evaluations of projects described just on paper. In fact, they insist on descriptions on paper, and projects that pass such evaluations are high payoff and low risk. Examples include GPS, Keyhole, the H-bomb, stealth, and much more. High end engineering projects are done that way -- on paper. There is hardly a single VC in the country qualified to evaluate such papers. For the organizations, e.g., NSF, DARPA, ONR, Army Durham, Air Force Cambridge, CIA, NSA, etc. hardly a single VC in the country is qualified for such a job. The core technology comes from the best US research universities, and hardly a single VC in the country is qualified for a faculty slot at such a place. For commercial work, the IBM Watson lab is comparable, and I've been a research scientist there on an AI project, wrote and gave a paper at an AAAI IAAI conference at Stanford, etc. There's hardly a single VC in the country qualified to do that.

There are not very many projects good enough to be "another Google", and the ones that are the VCs can't evaluate.

So, I have a lesson for HN readers: The VCs are not good partners in a technology project and won't read their e-mail. For warm introductions, they don't know the right people.

Why not make any difference? (1) They will nearly never pay any attention at all to unsolicited e-mail. (2) If they do read anything, they will essentially always look for something about traction and not seeing that will junk the e-mail.

The reactions about traction are so uniform that I have to conclude that they all have a common source, and that would be VCs agreeing (required to agree) with their LPs, and the LPs coming together to agree on traction, etc.

I don't write such involved prose to VCs with, e.g., lots of details in parentheses. I accept that VCs want to zip through text at about the fourth grade reading level.

I've never mentioned an NDA to a VC, and I doubt that a VC would want to look at my core math or have it reviewed outside -- my guess is that VCs just don't do that. I mention the math because without it there's no way known to accomplish what my work does.

For the $1 T, that's easy enough to justify at the back of the envelope level: Assume 1 billion people connect for a few sessions a week with each session from a few minutes to 30 minutes or so. On average, each session shows them about 5 ads per page for about 20 pages, 100 ads. Assume the Mary Meeker $2 per 1000 ads displayed. Assume a reasonable P/E. Multiply it out for yourself. If assume more, especially better ad targeting, which my data and math permits, then can get several times $1 T. For a back of the envelope estimate, the $1 T is fine. Look, it's simple: My work is an excellent, the first good, solution, so far with the best solutions poor, for a pressing problem for essentially every user of the Internet in the world. We're not talking niche here, or just teenagers, or just dog lovers, cooks, restaurant fans, etc. For the more advanced countries, get maybe as a standard Internet application 1 billion people. Then multiply that out. There's nothing outrageous about the $1 T.

Okay, I'll do the back of the envelope arithmetic for you:

Assume 1 billion users from the more developed countries. On average each connects to the site 3 times a week. Each connection lasts on average 30 minutes where they see an average of 5 standard sized ads per Web page and see 20 Web pages. The revenue is KPCB Mary Meeker's $2 per 1000 ads displayed. So revenue is

     12 * 1 * 10**9 * 5 * 20* 3 * 4 * 2  /
     1000 = 28,800,000,000

Assume have 40:1 P/E (I'm ignoring tax details here) for a market capitalization of

     40 * 12 * 1 * 10**9 * 5 * 20* 3 * 4 * 2
     / 1000 = 1,152,000,000,000

With the good data from the users and some more math of mine, I should be able to do better ad targeting and get, maybe, $6 per 1000 ads displayed for market capitalization of

     40 * 12 * 1 * 10**9 * 5 * 20* 3 * 4 * 6
     / 1000 = 3,456,000,000,000

There are some options for some virality that should raise the 3 visits a week to 6 for

     40 * 12 * 1 * 10**9 * 5 * 20 * 6 * 4 * 6
     / 1000 = 6,912,000,000,000

Gee, it's just simple arithmetic.

With some resulting changes in culture, such as we've seen often enough in information technology in the last 10-20 years, the numbers could go several times higher, but I'll omit that.

Okay, I only get 500 million users and only $3.5 T.

Lots of people see the problem; they don't say anything about it because they see it as like death and taxes, something that can't be fixed. They assume the problem can't be solved because they don't have even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about how to solve the problem. That's common, standard: E.g., Henry Ford said "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." Well, they didn't believe in a faster horse and had no clue about a car. So, they didn't say anything. It's that way on the Internet now; people don't see a solution so don't say anything. Same for the Internet itself before the Internet.

Uh, some original applied math processing some good data can be some good stuff. The US DoD has known that for a long time; so has the NSF; VCs have yet to learn this lesson.

At one time a VC could have had 20% of my company for $500,000. Not now!

That would have been

     0.20 * 3.5 * 10**12 / 500,000 =
     1,400,000

Lesson to HN readers: VCs are low quality people, losers; don't waste time with them.

I'm no longer looking for VC funding; it's hopeless. I don't really need VC funding. So, my point here is to do a big favor for HN readers and push back against a lot in the OP.

I know this "prior" stuff, Bayesian stuff, has a lot of respect here on HN, but it never did make much sense.

So, I should send the VCs some information that indicates I'm serious and credible. For a technology project, I do have credentials, far above those of hardly any VC in the country -- especially now that Chris Sacca retired, and I did complete my Ph.D. and Chris didn't complete his.

E.g., for credibility, SUSA says that they like to see some surprising accomplishments, big things done quickly. Well, I posted a list, (A)-(I) or some such here, and included some of those when I wrote VCs.

Here's my point for HN readers who want it: VCs don't read unsolicited e-mail messages. Since they junk such messages, it doesn't matter what is in them. VCs like warm introductions, but we don't know the same people. By the time my project looks good to VCs, since I'm a solo founder (they don't like that, either) with meager opex, I will have plenty of cash for rapid growth. E.g., if my company really is growing, then $1500 in server parts can generate ballpark $200,000 in revenue a month. Just multiply it out assuming 400,000 bits per Web page, 5 ads per page, $2 per 1000 ads displayed (from the Mary Meeker reports), much more with good ad targeting of good demographics, etc.

http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/2012/07/institutional-limit...

on average the VCs have not been making much money.

My typing here is long enough to provide evidence enough to make my points. Just short assertions with no evidence are not meaningful.

VCs are commonly treated as heroes, the smartest people in the room; maybe you are upset to discover they are not.

Uh, my purpose here is to respond to the OP, not to raise funds from VCs.

I gave the elevator pitch just as an example of what, with what you want that is missing in what I gave here, VCs totally ignore.

I also gave my best argument for why they ignore: They refuse to read unsolicited e-mail messages. They insist on traction. Nearly all applied science and engineering are funded just from paper evidence, but VCs don't do this. Why? My guess is that their limited partners (LPs) don't so permit. Or, the LPs want something closer to a tangible asset that has market fit and not just paper. Okay.

The OP did not make this point clear, and to me for information technology VC funding that is the most central point of all.

But for a sole, solo founder with a good project and tiny opex, by the time a VC is ready to write a check, such a founder will no longer need, want, or accept it.

My purpose here is to respond to the OP and warn HN readers.