In April, Dani Grant, CEO of Jam.dev spoke on how founders should approach reaching out to people of interest at Stanford University

“Compel, not sell.”

Dani said that a founder’s main goal when reaching out is to compel the recipient and make them curious. Emails should be kept short, between 3-4 sentences long, and the reader should be left wanting to know more.

She suggested a five step approach to writing cold emails:
1. State how you know the person
2. Who you are? What’s your experience? Why are you a good founder?
3. What are you building?
4. Is it working? What traction and metrics do you have?
5. Call to action. Ask for advice, schedule a meeting. Don’t ask for money.

(I have personally been using this five step approach and it’s forced me to write concise emails that were receiving notably higher response rate than emails I’ve written before. Thanks Dani!)

Dani also discussed how founders should approach meetings. She said one of the most time-wasting portions of a meeting is the initial small talk. Dani urged founders to skip the conversation about the weather and go straight to the meeting agenda.

For example, when asked “How are you doing?” Instead of saying “I’m doing good… the weather is nice today…”, one could answer “I’m doing great. I was actually speaking to customer X about feature Y of my product, and they raised a question about Z. I was hoping I could get your advice on this matter.”

Dani also suggests that founders shouldn’t automatically start using their pitch deck (unless explicitly asked). She finds that pitches are most effective when it feels like a high energy conversation instead of a monologue.

Finally, when founders are asked tough questions, Dani says that founders should be honest. Be honest that it’s a question they currently don’t have answers to, but put some structure around the problem (I.e. action plan, SOP) to show how it could be dealt with.