How to introduce two people over email

The person you most need to convince decides fast. Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets, reported that “85% of emails are read in under 15 seconds” (May 2024). Your introduction arrives in the middle of that stream. Whatever decision you want somebody to make has to be visible in the first two lines, on a phone, without scrolling.

So work out which of the two is doing the other a favor. Almost every introduction is lopsided: a founder wants an investor's hour, a candidate wants a manager's attention, a seller wants a buyer's patience. Sometimes it runs the other way, and a manager who has been hiring for a year owes the candidate the twenty minutes. Once you know which it is, the rest follows. Whose name goes first, and whose reason gets the specific sentence, and who is expected to reply.

A symmetrical email gives each person a paragraph of praise and neither of them a reason to act. A good introduction spends its fifteen seconds on the person whose yes is in doubt.

Everything below assumes both people have already agreed. That check, including the case where one side never answers, is the double opt-in intro. The line-by-line craft, subject lines, credential lines and the handoff, is on how to make a warm introduction by email. Here the question is how the same email changes when one side wants it more than the other.

Spotting the pair is the part that needs a tool. Introductions you make unprompted depend on remembering, at the right moment, that two people in your network belong in the same room, and nobody holds a few thousand people in their head. Happenstance searches the accounts you connect, Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, so “Who do I know working on hospital staffing?” returns the people, how you know each of them, and where the relationship came from.

That's how a pair becomes obvious: two names in the same answer, one of whom mentioned the problem the other one solves. It's also how you check yourself before sending, since the evidence tells you whether you know somebody well enough to describe them accurately in one line, which is the only sentence in an introduction that carries any weight. 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 founders covers the fundraising and hiring version of this, and warm introductions explains how the paths between people are found and ranked.

The easy case comes first, and it is the shortest email you will ever write. The lopsided ones follow, written from the less obvious side: the founder introducing somebody to their own investor, and the hiring manager who has been asking you for names.

The third template inverts the usual shape on purpose. When a manager has been hunting for a year and the engineer is happy where they are, the person who needs convincing is the manager, and writing it the other way around insults one of them and wastes the attention of the other. Read the direction rather than the job titles.

If you are on the other side of this and want somebody to make the introduction for you, how to ask for an introduction by email covers the request and the paragraph you should hand over, and how to ask for a warm introduction covers what it costs the person you are asking.