How to get warm intros to VCs

A venture firm runs on referrals rather than on its inbox, and the partners will tell you so if you ask. In a survey of nearly 900 venture capitalists by Paul Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev, “over 30% of deals are generated through professional networks. Another 20% are referred by other investors while 8% are referred by existing portfolio companies” (2019). Ten percent came inbound from company management. Nearly three in five deals arrive through somebody the firm already knows.

That is worth reading as an instruction. The introduction is the first screen in the process rather than a courtesy at the front of it. When a founder the fund has backed writes “this is worth 30 minutes”, the partner is not being polite by opening the deck. They're acting on a filter that has been right before, applied by somebody whose ability to judge founders they've already paid money to trust.

The same message lands differently depending on who sends it. Nothing about your company changes between a cold email and a forward from a portfolio founder, only the amount of somebody else's credibility attached to it. The connector is the one spending that, so the job is to pick the right person and keep the spend small.

A step above a warm intro is a partner hearing about you unasked: a portfolio founder mentions in a board meeting that a billing problem got solved by a company they use, and the partner goes looking. Nobody can request that, but being useful to the founders in a fund's portfolio is what causes it, and those founders are the same people at the top of the connector ranking below.

Working out who can introduce you is what takes a week by hand. Happenstance searches your own network instead of a database of firms: connect Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, then ask “Who can introduce me to a partner at Accel?” in plain English. Every result carries the path in, whether it runs direct, through a friend, or through a group, and which account the connection came from, so you can rank connectors by how well they know the partner rather than guessing.

Groups are the part founders underuse. Add your cofounders, angels and advisors to a group and their networks become searchable alongside yours, which is usually where the portfolio founders are hiding. Happenstance is free. The free plan is the whole product, with usage limits on chat and web searches beyond your network. Pro raises the limits: unlimited web searches and results, higher chat limits, and CSV export.

Happenstance for fundraising walks through the rest of the raise, and the firm by firm routes, from Sequoia to Y Combinator, are under Pitch to a firm.

One message, two parts: the ask on top, the forwardable email underneath the line. Replace everything in brackets, keep it under a screen, and send it as plain text.

For the etiquette around the ask itself, how to ask for a warm introduction covers it. If the connector prefers to check with the partner first, that is the double opt-in intro, and it is worth knowing before it happens to you.