Networking – An Operator's Blog

How to Get Warm Intros Right: My Ground Rules as a VC

Learn the ground rules for warm intros—double opt-in, reputation, skin in the game, and more. Avoid common mistakes & get intros right.

As a venture investor, warm intros are my lifeline, both as a receiver (new deals) and a giver (for portfolio founders & co-investors).

Given the sheer volume of the intro pipe I deal with, I also see the goods and the bads of it all. In particular, I see folks making 101 mistakes and breaking what have become fundamental rules of intros that the Valley plays by. Break them, and it screams, “I am not ready to play in the major leagues yet!” to the ecosystem.

For the benefit of everyone out there, sharing some of my ground rules for warm intros:

1/ Double opt-in

Internalize this deeply – double opt-in is the only right way to do intros. Violating this cardinal rule significantly reduces your credibility.

2/ Reputation

Implicitly underlying every warm intro is your personal reputation. In the venture ecosystem, judgment is everything, and who you are vouching for is a major signal for it. Think about that the next time you agree to introduce someone.

3/ Skin-in-the-game

I treat intros without skin in the game or demonstrated conviction as low-signal “favors”. Personally, I don’t do this type of intros at all. But definitely receive a ton of them.

As they say, talk is cheap. Or in the context of this post, “sending an email is cheap”. The signals underlying the email are what matter.

4/ Limited bullets

When I started my career in venture, one of the Partners taught me a valuable lesson that I follow to this day – “you only get 3 bullets with each relationship in a lifetime. So fire each bullet carefully”.

Being indiscriminate with warm intros is the worst thing you can do as a professional. It’s like spamming – your credibility goes down exponentially with each ask that hasn’t been thought through properly.

5/ Acceptance rate

Controlling the acceptance rate is as important as the send rate. As a constructive participant in the flow, you are individually responsible for ensuring no time gets wasted on either side.

So it’s important to control that carnal urge to “network” and vet each inbound request properly to ensure there is a high likelihood of mutual fit before the actual meeting.

It’s exactly like qualifying sales leads. Just because someone is doing a warm intro doesn’t mean it’s a good fit at this point in time.

Hope these rules are helpful. Wishing you a long track record of fostering interesting & useful connections.

On Who Really Shows Up When It Matters

Support at critical moments rarely comes from where we expect. Familiarity, expectations, and timing often shape who really shows up.

I have observed this weird phenomenon across both my professional and personal lives. In fact, it keeps surfacing every year or so, and therefore, I am compelled to blog about it today. Here’s how I would describe it:

At every important turning point in my life, where I desperately need a few (what I would consider) extremely close relationships to step up for me, almost all of them have failed to show up.

But at the same time, a few connections, whom I don’t have any significant shared history with and wouldn’t consider “close” by any stretch, end up stepping in and backing me at these key moments.

It has happened so many times now that I feel this is some random rule of nature that should have a name. Here are some personal examples:

When I moved to the Bay Area in 2014, having never studied in the US, with no job in hand, and with literally 2 bags, the person who gave me what turned out to be one of the most significant breaks in my career was…the then-husband of my wife’s ex-colleague.
One of my most important backers, who was an extremely small angel in my startup but ended up becoming a key influencer in both my decision to come back into venture as well as a major tangible supporter in many ways since then, is the husband of the 1st cousin of one of my past venture collaborators (interestingly, I lost touch with the original person who connected us many years back).
While we as a family were going through challenges on multiple fronts during the pandemic years and hit several low points, the people who saved us were not our oldest friends but a family we met through our older son’s first daycare.
The person who ended up giving what turned out to be an incredibly strong referral to my wife at Google more than 8 years back was someone I had overlapped with at a startup for barely 3 months and had no direct work history with.

I have many other examples that are unfolding as we speak, and which I hope to add to this list after a few years.

I don’t know if you have experienced something similar in your lives, but I have been thinking hard for at least a year now about why this happens repeatedly. Here are a few underlying things that I have noticed:

1/ Familiarity bias – when people have been too close to you over an extended period, they see all sides, moods, emotions, and fallacies in your personality. Because of this, I feel they end up subconsciously discounting your skills on many occasions.

I see this play out in venture all the time. Existing investors usually see the sausage being made, and therefore, are often more pessimistic on a portfolio company’s prospects compared to new investors evaluating the same opportunity.

For those who understand Hindi, there is a grandma’s saying on this phenomenon – “घर की मुर्गी दाल बराबर”.

2/ Expectations bias – humans have a tendency to keep very high expectations of people they consider close, especially if they are family or have been known for a long time. So whatever these relationships do at the crunch moments, it’s perhaps impossible for them to live up to the high bar they are being held to.

3/ Timing – the quality & extent of human collaboration depends a lot on timing. Where are each of the subjects in their own life arcs? What is their mind space looking like then? What is the macro environment in which the collaboration is playing out?

In almost all situations, humans are essentially acting in their own self-interest first. So, while to the “receiver” (me in the initial examples), it ends up being a game-changing intervention, the act is also delivering a major utility for the “giver”.

A parallel idea is seen in a key principle of marketing strategy – the job is not to convince uninterested prospects, but to be in the consideration set of leads when they are actively looking to buy a product. Sounds like a simple idea from a b-school course or Kotler’s book, but I have only learned its power at this stage of my career.

Translating this to the core idea of this post, best collaborations happen when both givers and receivers are in the market, and are a great fit for each other’s needs at that specific point in time. This has nothing to do with how close the people have been previously.

Given that I have now observed this core phenomenon, I am trying to do a few small things differently so that I can be on the right side of this rule of nature more often and with a much lower emotional toll. These include:

Instead of meeting the same set of people all the time, strive to continuously meet new folks and add them to an ever-growing funnel of relationships.
Be present and show up strongly even in first meetings with new people.
Following my guru Charlie Munger’s age-old advice, have lower expectations of close relationships and replace that emotion with gratitude that they choose to include me in their lives.
For major turning points every couple of years, instead of just repeatedly putting “asks” in front of the same set of people, cast a wider net out into the universe using a combination of cold outreach and warm intros.

Anyway, I know this post is a bit all over the place. In fact, I was struggling to even think of a title for it. But these ideas are from my lived experience, and are important enough to be put in front of you.

Quick US GTM Tip For India-Based Founders

From recording many episodes of An Operator’s Blog on US-India GTM, one clear pattern is emerging from the experiences of many founders:

“If you are new to the US, don’t have a strong brand and/or connections to existing cliques (eg. haven’t done your Masters here, haven’t worked a Big Tech job, haven’t done YC etc.), cold outbound is likely to have a low success rate, especially in the initial phases of US GTM.”

Cold outbound tends to work better when done on the back of adequate customer validation, social proofing & ecosystem reputation, all of which take time to build.

Rather than depending too much on cold outbound, a better use of time when on the ground in the US is to:

1/ Build 1:1 ecosystem-level relationships with influential/ connected founders, operators, and investors.

2/ As you meet each person, try and get some warm intros. That’s your best shot at getting a relevant 30-minute meeting where the other side is leaning in.

Meet → Ask for one intro → Meet this new person → Again ask for another intro → Rinse & repeat…

3/ In parallel, execute an ongoing track of building your early reputation in the US (Bay Area?) ecosystem via social media content, engaging in relevant communities, regularly showing up in VC mixers & meetups, and generating value for the people you are meeting.

The main objective of the first 6 months of US GTM is to put the foundational elements of a future GTM engine in place. At the heart of it is:

(1) unique value + (2) reputation + (3) relationships = (4) brand.

How to cold-pitch your startup in 30 seconds to VCs at events

Putting your strongest foot forward quickly, coherently and in an interesting way is the key to getting VCs to lean-in during a cold-pitch at an event.

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks of tech events, with SaaStr, SaaSBoomi, VC mixers, and now Dreamforce. Meeting hundreds of founders cold across these events, I have noticed that most of them struggle to quickly pitch themselves/ their startups to investors.

In fact, in most of these meetings, I was only able to figure out their unique strengths, progress, and fit with the problem statement after 3-5 mins. into the conversation. Unfortunately, most investors have short attention spans and given they meet multiple founders daily, their ability to recall is even worse.

This means as a founder, you have to achieve 2 things while cold-meeting investors at events:

1/ Leave an impression in the first 30 seconds so that the investor starts leaning into the discussion and becomes inclined to spend 3-5 minutes more.

2/ Post this initial buy-in, leave the investor with something of high recall value so you have a higher chance of a post-event follow-up discussion.

A. The 30-sec pitch

For the first 30-sec pitch, I recommend having 3 parts to it:

[The Grandmother’s Explanation]

followed by…

[Social Proof of Team]

followed by…

[Proof of Business]

a) The Grandmother’s Explanation means explaining what your startup does in the way you would explain it to your grandmother. Yes, most investors aren’t domain experts in your field. They are likely investing across sectors, and aren’t living and breathing your specific area/ problem statement. Assume they are as ignorant about your business as your grandmother.

I am literally shocked by how most founders can’t explain their startup in simple tech-layman’s terms. Barring a few, true deep tech startups coming out of research labs and universities, most enterprise software, SaaS, and consumer Internet startups should be able to explain their business in simple words. This is the bare minimum signal of clarity in thinking.

TLDR: if an investor isn’t able to understand what you do in the first 5-7 seconds, there is no way in hell that investor is going to lean in. Even if the person might appear to be listening, in reality, they are actually zoned out/ looking through you.

b) Social Proof of Team means talking about your credentials in a straight-up manner, without beating around the bush. These could be:

Education-related – undergrad and grad schools, unique course work etc.;

Work-related – past employers, roles, needle-moving projects, accelerators like YC or Techstars etc.; and

Execution-related – products shipped, content created, social following, word-of-mouth etc.

Especially for founders in the US-India corridor – we are taught to be overly humble and in most social situations, we tend to talk down our achievements. Unfortunately, you are faced with intense competition in the Bay Area from talent coming in from all over the world. You have no choice but to talk about things that make you stand out from the crowd.

c) Proof of Business means talking about the business progress of your startup in tangible terms. Things like user base, retention, engagement, number of customers, revenue, customer acquisition etc.

It’s important to remember that while providing Proof of Business, both “absolute numbers” and “growth rates” are important. So, frame statements like “we have $Xk ARR, growing y% m-o-m” or “We have Xk users, growing y% week-on-week purely by organic word-of-mouth. People are also now starting to pay”.

Most startups attending these events don’t have enough Proof of Business yet.

For the ones who do, make sure you talk about it as traction trumps everything, and especially at the seed stage, any traction will help you stand out.
For startups who don’t have much Proof of Business, you can still talk about proxies of business progress like the velocity of shipping new features, people on the waitlist, early design partners, and how they are deeply engaging with your product etc.

PS: An important recommendation for the 30-sec pitch format:

If you have compelling traction, pitch [Proof of Business] first and then [Social Proof of Team].

If you are very early and don’t have compelling traction, pitch [Social Proof of Team] first and then [Proof of Business].

The idea is simple – always lead with your strongest suit.

B. The post 30-sec-pitch part

Ok, so you delivered an amazing 30-sec pitch to Investor A. The person is now leaning in and wants to have a longer conversation for the next 5-7 mins.

In this part of the convo, your main job as a founder is to leave a high-recall impression on the investor. The person meets tens of new founders every week. Your job is to ensure that post this interaction, you go into the deal flow software for the VC firm at the minimum, and ideally, the person remembers you for some standout qualities and/or stories.

This is the “art” part of having a good conversation. There are no specific rules for how you build camaraderie and leave an impression. Everyone has their own style, and everything from body language and listening skills to storytelling and tonality has a role to play.

While I can’t offer you any specific hacks for this, here are some things I have seen work well in my experience:

a) Tell an interesting story – people don’t remember facts, but they remember stories. Instead of bombarding an investor with jargon, business numbers and technical info while having a cocktail, focus on telling an interesting story. Could be about your childhood, maybe something from your past life, or even something quirky that has happened while building the startup.

The biggest risk you have in a cold-pitch situation is to make it boring for the other person. A good story is something that brings a smile and/ or a questioning look on someone’s face. Basically, it interests them.

b) Bond on commonalities – the classic sales technique of finding commonalities to break ice always works. Humans are wired to want to belong to certain identities – A New Yorker, A Delhi-wala, A Knicks fan, a worshipper of Sachin Tendulkar, a backpacker, a wine connoisseur, a Japanese food lover etc. The moment they meet someone who belongs to the same identity, there is an instant connection that gets established, which is the first step towards building trust.

As you are chatting with the investor at a mixer, try and probe for some commonalities (where they grew up, went to school, worked, where they are living now). It will give the conversation much more substance and make it enjoyable for both sides.

c) Be genuinely curious…and listen – in my previous posts ‘Curiosity As A Networking Cheat Code‘ and ‘Networking at Events for Introverts‘, I have talked about the power of being genuinely interested in other people. It usually manifests in you asking good questions and listening more than talking.

As much as you are trying to ‘pitch’ in the conversation, don’t make it a one-way street. After the 30-sec pitch, focus on consciously giving talk-time to the investor by asking questions that spark an interesting discussion vs a founder-to-investor monologue.

C. Closing thoughts

I was feeling so frustrated listening to some awesome founders give such broken and unengaging 30-second pitches at recent events that I had to write this post.

Essentially, all the above inputs are based on 2 core ideas:

#1 Put your strongest foot forward as quickly as possible, and in a coherent structure.

#2 Make the conversation interesting. Tell stories. No one likes to be bored.

Happy pitching!

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Curiosity As A Networking Cheat Code

Do you struggle with creating an instant connect with a new person during events, dinners, or warm intros? Sharing the cheat code for cracking this problem.

Whatever career you might be pursuing, there is a core aspect that never changes – every business is a people business and our success depends on being able to create an authentic connection with employees, customers, partners, and investors.

Creating this connection is the easiest when there is some sort of shared history or commonality. However, this tends to be a relatively small circle of people that can get tapped out pretty quickly. Our professional and personal growth depends on continuously expanding this circle by being able to connect with and influence a fresh set of people, perhaps each week if you are in sales or are a founder, but every few months at the minimum for most of us.

We meet these new folks at events and conferences, through warm introductions from shared networks, and in many cases now, establishing the first contact on social media. Given the noisy world we live in, each one of us barely gets a few minutes during a first meeting to establish chemistry with a complete stranger. If we fail to create a positive vibe during these initial minutes, it’s unlikely that this relationship will ever enter our professional funnel for a possible collaboration later on.

As a venture investor, I am at the mercy of this problem statement every day. Being able to quickly bond with a new set of founders, LPs, co-investors, and operators is a core part of the job. I totally concur with this thought from Semil Shah (Haystack):

Venture capital is a people-flow business.
Semil Shah (Haystack)

Personally, going to events and mixing around has given me unprecedented ROI (I previously shared my events playbook – “Networking at Events for Introverts“). I have also made some wonderful friendships by doing 1:1 meetings via warm intros.

During these conversations, I have tried various mindsets, approaches, and mental models to deconstruct interacting with strangers. I keep running experiments across mixers, dinners, and 1:1s, introspecting what worked well and what didn’t in a particular context. Essentially, I have been trying to distill it down to whether there is something fundamental that seems to work across contexts, and which, therefore, merits being incorporated as a core behavior.

One such element I have seen work really well is demonstrating a natural curiosity during the first few minutes of interaction with a new person. With each passing year, I have come to believe more and more that:

The cheat code for faster career growth is having the ability to influence strangers by demonstrating curiosity.

We live in a highly egotistical, self-absorbed world where everyone is a creator, trying to market their personal brand and posting content about themselves. Most people love to talk, and talk only about their stuff!

I have observed very few people taking a genuine interest in another person’s journey. Asking interesting questions of someone you have just met has become a lost art. The social conditioning of this era drives people towards talking more and listening less.

However, humans have a basic yearning to be heard. Have you noticed that when someone appears to be taking interest in what you have to say, you feel a natural pull towards this person? In this attention-starved society, when someone devotes that scarce currency to a first conversation, it’s extremely powerful.

I see this working in so many situations. When pitching to a potential customer, the key to closing a deal is taking the time and devoting attention to understanding their pain points and concerns, instead of mindlessly plonking your product on them.

An investor can leave even the most seasoned founders with a warm feeling during the 1st meeting if they take the time to go beyond superficial pitching theatrics and truly try and understand their journey, their backstory, and what they have painstakingly built.

The key to a successful partnership is listening to the other side to understand their goals, motivations, and what they care about, including the personal journey and incentives of the individual championing the deal.

Genuine curiosity can be incredibly disarming. It’s about putting the constant internal self-talk to the side, being in the moment, and focusing on understanding the other person. If this becomes a consistent part of your personality, you will automatically see this translating to a bunch of new meaningful relationships each year.

How Innovators use Workomo #1: LunchClub meetings

It’s been almost 3 months since we launched Workomo on Product Hunt. Since then, we have seen double-digits week-on-week growth in new users, with Innovator users from all over the world using the product and giving active feedback on how to make it more useful for them🙏🏽 We are also starting to notice interesting patterns emerge from how retained users are using the product.

Given Workomo’s core value proposition of “one-click people insights for virtual meetings” applies to many different kinds of professional personas and scenarios, I have been getting this question a lot from users — “what are the kinds of meetings & situations where Workomo will provide the most value to me?”💡

Am starting this “How Innovators use Workomo” series of posts, essentially to share how our most retained users are using the product. Hopefully, this will help better explain Workomo’s potential benefit to you as a professional, and illustrate ways it can help make your video meetings over Zoom/ Meet more productive.

To begin with, let me talk about LunchClub meetings as one of the main scenarios where users are finding Workomo extremely useful. During our Product Hunt launch itself, the community highlighted how LunchClub & Workomo could potentially be used together in a powerful way.

Source: Workomo’s launch post on Product Hunt

Doing people-prep before meeting a new person

LunchClub is a global platform that does curated 1:1 introductions, helping professionals connect with other like-minded people. It’s HQ in the Bay Area and rapidly growing in traction across key markets.

In its current form, Workomo has immense value when meeting a new person & hence, is being used by LunchClub users to prep before meeting a new person they got matched with on the platform.

Typically in this scenario, users pre-Workomo looked up people on LinkedIn or via Google search, each meeting-prep requiring multiple clicks & significant mental bandwidth. If one wanted to go deeper and also lookup people on platforms like Twitter, this took even more time. In fact, trying to fit this people-prep effort within a user’s crammed professional life led to most just giving up on prepping, despite fully understanding the value it creates.

Workomo solves this problem really well:

— With one click in the browser, Workomo ‘Cue Cards’ show you summarized professional insights aggregated from multiple platforms, all in one place. This eliminates the need to go to multiple platforms, saving mental energy, time (& clicks!)⏳

— Because Workomo integrates into the calendar📅, it’s able to auto-identify meeting schedule & attendees, thus popping up the Cue Card at exactly the right time with exactly the right info. One-click, zero-typing experience 🖲

2. Especially strong benefits for video meetings during WFH

With the prevailing WFH environment, LunchClub meetings also went fully virtual over the last few months. This has helped unlock Workomo’s video meeting value proposition. Today, LunchClub users, via the browser, view info about the person they are meeting with, without leaving their Zoom/ Meet/ other meeting screens👩🏽‍💻

3. ‘T-60 to T+60’ secs

Specifically in the video meeting workflow, we have noticed an interesting pattern from how users are leveraging Workomo. Most use it in the time window of 60 secs before+60 secs after meeting start time⏲ Because networking meetings typically get crammed in the middle of hectic job tasks & personal errands, prep-time at disposal is really less, and therefore, time-saved in people-prep is extremely important.

Given Workomo Cue Cards have been designed to make the info skimmable & easy to digest in <60 secs, they perfectly solve this problem. Carefully-timed pop-up reminders embedded without friction in the user’s workflow, combined with the ability to view people-info directly within Meet & Zoom via the browser, further drives the 3P benefit (Productive People Prep) for users.

T-60 secs (on the calendar)

T=0 (entering the video call)

T+60 secs (beginning of the video call: waiting room scenario, round-the-table intros etc.)

So next time you are meeting someone new, especially on a virtual networking platform like LunchClub, do give Workomo a shot and see if you find it useful🙇🏽‍♂️

Tag: Networking