How do you get in touch with VCs in SV or other serious ecosystems?

13 points by giampaolo44 4 years ago | 9 comments

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.

After having devoted 7 years to my own startup () I started helping other startups for funding and business development with a few friends. We are all ex bankers with lots of international exposure.

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.

Not that I am particularly good at replying to cold emails, but if they are personal and carefully written I will probably oblige.

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.

What can we do to have reasonable chances to get in touch with relevant people?

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.

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.

Thanks for any pointers you might share.

() 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)

dustingetz 4 years ago |

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.

giampaolo44 4 years ago | |

Thanks for the wake up call, I suppose. Re targeting angel investors: even when we are talking about a 5M funding round? In continental EU it feels a bit over the powder of angels, or is it?

dustingetz 4 years ago | | |

One well-connected angel who writes $25k checks can provide a founder intros to appropriate seed investors, and these intros are the strongest possible since they are coming from someone who has already invested or intends to invest in the round. The angel can also coach founders and help them prepare, detect weaknesses and validate their strategy, give inside information about who they are pitching etc. And they have more time to coach them whereas professional investors do not.

FunnyBadger 4 years ago |

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.

The other trick is realizing it's not only VCs who have money. Most Angel investors outside SV are NOT even involved in Tech.

giampaolo44 4 years ago | |

Yes, that's our primary route, but the great majority of potential partners seem to be 3rd and over in our LinkedIn degrees of separation :/ Which is somewhat strange given that we are all bankers. Maybe the areas where we were involved (equities, large corporate, DCM, structures & solutions) are too different from the typical VC contacts. Certainly we had much more exposure to the UK financial business than the US.

adrianwaj 4 years ago |

Perhaps you'd be better off cold-emailing an Italian startup (in the same space?) who're on the same path but further along.

giampaolo44 4 years ago | |

There's only one AFAIK, but I am not sure they are friendly among each other, unfortunately. Given the size of our market it's not rare that certain segments are not too crowded. Plus consider that last year (approximately, I don't have the exact numbers on me), which was our best, counted probably 200 deals? Of the 1.5BN in total, half was for Italian startups that have most if not all of their operations abroad, and for the remaining half >50% went for less than ten companies.

peyton 4 years ago |

You need FOMO.

giampaolo44 4 years ago | |

Well on that side we should have a decent amount of it. These guys overcame the competition of the diagnostic powers of institutions like Yale, Johns Hopkins or Berkeley and are coming in a few days to the latter to get the award and explain their methodology.