Jason M. Lemkin (speaker) describes several successful venture investments he sourced from cold emails, citing specific company examples (Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Greenhouse, Salesloft, Mango) and their exit or financing outcomes. He argues that well-crafted cold emails can effectively lead to investments and references a longer post on SaaStr where he and other VCs shared example emails and preferences. The tone is anecdotal and prescriptive: cold emails must be exceptional to work.
Chapters
I published on Saster. So I've done maybe 10 investments from the founders cold emailed me. People say cold email doesn't work for investing. Many folks don't like it. Okay. I invested in the. The first one was a pipe drive from a cold email that sold for 1.5 billion. I called the seed. Okay. I did Algolia, which is going to IPO. It's a 240 million from a cold email. Then the next one was a talk test. There were 10 billion that was a cold email. Okay. The fourth one was greenhouse for 800 million. I knew them. The fifth deal I did was salesloft. It exited for $2.3 billion from a cold email. Okay. I just did one last week that TechCrunch wrote up that I. TechCrunch wrote up that I invested from a cold email in this company called Mango Man. Okay. And then I wrote a whole thing on Saster. I asked David Sachs, Keith Ravoy, Aileen Lee, Satya Patel from how do they. And they all said, here are the type of cold emails we like to work, but they have to be great. The reason I invest off cold emails is because it's not the one that says, do you want coffee? Or I saw you at Saster, or when are you free? Or I'm in Palo Alto. It's like, the email is so good. Like, I want to invest before I get below the fold. And I. And if you want to see some VC examples, I wrote an old post two email cold emails I funded for millions. And the CEOs of Talk Desk and Mapistry let me publish their emails. When I show these to founders and they read them, they're like, yeah, I would fund that. I don't know much about investing, but yeah, so make your product email as good as those two.
