Cold outreach to VCs - advice and best practices

Speaking lately with a lot of early stage VCs in deep tech, they say 30-50% of their deal flow is inbound (companies reach out to them), with 50-70% of their deal flow outbound (they reach out to companies). I've heard a range of 10-20% from cold connections, but this really depends on the process they've setup for their dealflow. With LinkedIn so ubiquitous these days, it seems like there is no excuse anymore for NOT finding a connection to someone, and interacting with an investor's LinkedIn posts is a great way to start building rapport and help them pay attention to your DM (which can be in the 1000s for many investors).

There is clearly a right way and a wrong way to do cold outreach. Not only do I delete cold outreach that isn't personalized and clearly came from a CRM or AI bot, I often report this as spam. Cold outreach doesn't fail because it is cold, it fails when it is lazy. The 'spray-and-pray' approach is going to work 0% of the time these days, since AI is building tools that flood inboxes with a lot of generic lazy cold outreach. Do your research on the investor and make sure there is a clear fit before sending out that email. It takes a lot more time to personalize the emails yourself, but it will pay dividends when the human touch is there. In a good process you should really only have ~50 or so on-target investors to reach out to.

I think investors give the best advice on cold emailing or cold LinkedIn messaging:

Nicholas Sauvage of TDK Ventures on a cold email that became an investment https://medium.com/tdk-ventures/the-cold-email-vcs-want-614b2a8297e0