-Bill Gates
If you occupy an executive role in business, your inbox gets flooded with spam. Emails from SaaS companies, recruiting services, operational services, outsourcers, and investors wanting to do an intro call. Spam is worse than ever and only going to get worse.
Take the Call?
When Paul Getty was the wealthiest man in the world, people constantly wrote letters asking him for “a little money.” I mean, he’s so rich he wouldn’t even notice, right? Getty had his admin add up all the requests for money— one year of requests was more than his net worth.
Similarly, if high-profile people in business accepted all the cold requests for 15-30 mins of their time and “quick coffee meetings,” they wouldn’t have time to sleep. No one who is back to back with relevant work and meetings wants to meet up with a random stranger to “pick their brain.”
Cold Requests
Fractional CFO and fractional CTO services. Consultants for business development and sales. Design services. Life coaches and CEO coaches.
Founders cold reaching out asking for an intro to one of our investors. Founders asking for diligence on one of our investors. I respond positively and then learn that they’re reaching out to ask for an intro to that investor.
Outsourced recruiting. Outsourced designers. SaaS products galore– CRMs, cap table management, security, compliance. Someone found a cybersecurity vulnerability in your public website and wants you to pay them to tell you how to fix it. Selling insurance and payroll services.
Phishing emails– your device may have been hacked– call them for more info. Your colleague or friend asking you to buy them a gift card.
Conferences– “exclusive” events where you pay thousands of dollars to hang out with other people who also pay thousands of dollars. Asking to “pick your brain.”
These are all examples of cold requests from my inbox last week.
The Future of Spam
We all receive lightly customized digests and newsletters we’ve never signed up for. It tricks me into reading the first couple of sentences. The future of email spam will get customized beyond your wildest dreams.
LLMs will make email spam customized based on your public persona. All info about you that’s online or even offline. I’m a higher target than the average person for email spam, but it will worsen for everyone.
Intrusion
As a function of my role, my inbox is, at least partially, my to-do list. Imagine your to-do list having a ton of random, incoherent requests popping up. It forces you to context switch.
I have a smaller public profile than most startup CEOs. We’ve kept our company stealth with a low-profile public site. Spam is most pronounced with high-profile individuals. A high-profile friend has their admin track down and spam the spammers in retribution. Beyond catharsis, their goal is to punish bad actors.
If there’s zero cost to flooding people’s inboxes and a minuscule bit of upside, the flooding will continue. He argues that we must impose a cost on those flooding our inboxes.
How to Reach Out
The most annoying part is that some of the cold reachouts work. I’ll forward one in a hundred to someone on my team to explore. Business personalities on the All In podcast admitted that cold emails sometimes work when relevant. But there’s a massive chasm between what is relevant vs not. There’s an easier way.
Get introduced through a mutual connection. The more your target respects the mutual connection, the better. Between LinkedIn and social media, there’s likely someone you have in common. If no one wants to introduce you, that’s a red flag.
I’ve had people reach out cold a dozen times and then finally ask for an intro through someone. I respond immediately. It’s not hard for someone in the tech or real estate world to get a warm intro to me or anyone like me. If they can’t, then they really need to work on their minimum-viable networking skills.