Relationship Building – 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.

LinkedIn Search is broken… and another Workomo use case

Workomo gives you actionable context on the people who truly matter!

I love the days when I organically encounter a solid use-case for Workomo (“Relationships Intelligence for Power Professionals”). Today, I was having a Whatsapp discussion with a good friend, who is also an ex-founder (I had invested in her last startup). As part of another early stage startup now, she is incubating a new micro-lending product in India, and wanted to check with me whether I could intro her to someone working in the space.

Now, being an active startup ecosystem stakeholder & connector, I really want to help her. Given my Alibaba/ Ant Financial/ Paytm background, finding someone with “lending” experience/ expertise should be fairly easy for me. Except it’s not. Barring 1–2 people who are top-of-mind for me right now, it’s extremely hard for me to know who among the people I already know/ have shared history or context with, will be relevant for a potential warm intro. I tried to do a LinkedIn search with keywords like “lending” and “fintech”, but got crappy results wherein I don’t even know any of the people in the first page search results. PS: I don’t even know why I am being shown “company results for fintech”, which btw, are also beyond crappy.

Actual search results page from my LinkedIn profile

Compare this with how Workomo helped me solve for this pain point. Currently, the product is in early private beta stage, wherein for me personally, I am tracking about ~160 of my top-priority professional relationships. These are ex-colleagues, customers, batch-mates, investors etc. — essentially, people with whom I already have a shared history, context, modicum of trust and double opt-in.

I went into Workomo, clicked on the “Relationships” tab and ran a search with the keywords “fintech” and “lending” (at an MVP stage, these are few of the many manual tags I have been using to curate my relationships). I got 9 and 2 search results respectively, comprising founders, VCs and operators, all of whom I know well-enough to ping and check.

This is what Workomo is doing at such an early MVP stage. We are in process of building an AI-powered “context engine” that will ingest hundreds of signals and “auto-tag” your top-priority relationships. Imagine your own, personalized, contextual “LinkedIn Search”, working in the way it should, helping you search & curate a high-quality dataset comprising only of relationships that truly matter to you!

Intrigued? Sign-up to request a private beta invite today. We will be delighted to partner with you as an early adopter, in building Workomo out.

Introducing Workomo — smart simple professional relationships management

Am excited to share the private beta launch of the product I have been building over last few months — Workomo.

Workomo is your smart & simple professional relationships management hub.

Workomo was born out of my own frustration of finding it really hard & inefficient to engage deeply & build stronger relationships with my top professional networks. During my career as a VC, startup operator and founder over the last decade, spread across US, India and China, I have been a power user of LinkedIn & Twitter to expand my network. However, while they have helped me to grow my “connections”, they have added minimal value to my effort to build truly meaningful career “relationships” that drive tangible value in my professional endeavors and help me achieve my career goals.

This is because I need a very different set of product capabilities to truly go deeper with my networks. Workomo’s product vision is specifically centered around these elements — I call them the CUDO stack:

Curate — Defining who these top relationships are, where I need to double down. Maintaining an intelligent & interactive database that makes networking “actions” like sorting, tagging, messaging, searching etc. easy.

Updates — Staying contextually updated on these people, to have a personalized view of their career approach, aspirations & needs. Likewise, also being able to share more privileged & personal updates about my career with them. This makes it easier to double-click on mutual areas of interest, proactively identify tangible collaboration opportunities & have powerful talking points during mutual interactions.

Dialogue — Being able to have a rich dialogue around specific topics or opportunities. Easily sharing privileged career updates, moments & info with a curated group of people in a clutter-free environment that doesn’t create noise for both sender & recipients. Enabling high-quality, two-way, double opt-in interactions to happen, instead of impersonal emails or noisy messaging groups.

Opportunities — Finally, if I can curate my network, stay contextually updated on them and have a meaningful, double opt-in dialogue with them, I can combine these 3 forces to drive tangible value exchange with my top career relationships. Eg. reaching out to 5 old customers for product feedback on my new startup, sharing an angel/ VC deal with a small, curated set of people, connecting a top engineer with select firms where I see a mutual fit, doing a limited & high-quality outreach while looking for a job etc.

While CUDO is the long term product vision, Workomo will initially offer a tantalizing sliver of this stack, something that delivers immediate value to early adopter users, and then closely partner with them to build it out as per their needs.

While the genesis of Workomo is aimed at solving my own pain points, am creating it for YOU — the new-age professional, working in this disruptive knowledge era. I want to equip you with tech-driven capabilities that help you move away from garnering more LinkedIn “connections” that you have never met or heard of, or more Twitter “followers” that only drive dopamine & no real job value, to having a set of deep, meaningful professional relationships that help you achieve tangible career goals.

Ultimately, Workomo’s mission is to build technology that helps professionals move away from generic, top-of-the-funnel networking, and towards creating a set of meaningful, highly engaged relationships that truly help you achieve your career goals.

Workomo is currently in private beta. If you find this intriguing enough and would like to become an early adopter, please sign up to receive a free private beta invite.

Excited to hear your initial thoughts & feedback, and looking forward to serving you in becoming an empowered professional relationship builder.