Investors

Investor names are not the secret. The list is.

Almost every founder I have worked with started the same way: opened Dealroom or Crunchbase, wrote down eighty funds, and sent them all the same email. Two replied. The email was not the problem — the problem was that most of those eighty had no business being on the list.

Fund names are public. Their theses are published, their portfolios are online. What is not public is the answer to the only question that matters: whether this particular fund, in this particular month, can write a cheque to you. That is the actual work, and most founders skip it.

Five filters every fund has to pass

Before a name goes on your list, check five things. All five are answerable in ten minutes from the fund's own site and its last two or three announced deals.

• Stage. A fund writing Series A cheques will not help you at pre-seed, however "stage agnostic" the website claims to be. Look at what they actually invested in over the last twelve months.
• Cheque size. If their typical entry is €2M and you are raising €400k, you are administratively expensive to them. The same applies in reverse.
• Geography. Some funds have regional restrictions written into their LP agreements and cannot invest outside them even if they want to. This catches out founders without an EU entity more often than you would expect.
• Sector. "We invest in everything" means "we invest in what we understand". Read the portfolio, not the positioning.
• Conflict. If they hold a direct competitor, they will not invest in you — and you will have handed them your numbers on the way to finding that out. Check this one properly.

The fund-by-fund method is in how to find investors for your startup.

What a working list looks like

Forty to sixty names. Fewer means you do not have enough attempts for the maths to work; more almost always means you stopped qualifying and started copying.

That list holds two different kinds of investor, and mixing them up is expensive:

• Lead candidates — funds that can issue a term sheet, set terms and run the round. There are fewer of them and they move more slowly.
• Followers — angels, smaller funds, syndicates. They come in behind a lead and fill the round. Without a lead, their yes is worth nothing.

A round with eight followers and no lead does not close. This is the single most common way a process stalls after three months of work.

Three waves, not one mass email

Split the list into three groups and work them in order:

1. Calibration. Five to eight funds you do not mind losing. You learn which questions come up, where the deck falls apart and what you are missing. Do this before you approach a fund you actually want.
2. Targets. The funds you want most, approached with a deck that has already survived the first wave.
3. Momentum. Everyone else, once you have real interest to mention. Interest can be communicated honestly — it does not require inventing anything.

A warm path beats a good cold email almost every time

The conversion gap between an introduction from a portfolio founder and a cold email is not marginal, it is an order of magnitude. So for every fund on the list, ask whether anyone can introduce you — a founder in their portfolio, an advisor, someone who used to work there.

When no warm path exists, a cold email still works — it just has to survive the first ten seconds. That is how to approach VCs, and the specific wording is in the VC outreach email template.

Before you send the first email

The list is half the job. The other half is whether you have ready what they will ask for the moment they reply — deck, model, data room, numbers. That is the fundraising checklist, and it is worth working through before the first approach rather than during it. Every gap discovered mid-process costs weeks.