How to Get an Investor (Or, More Specifically, David Tisch) to Talk to You

Dave Tisch is the managing director of TechStars NYC, the elite startup accelerator that was born in Boulder, CO. He spoke at NYU’s Stern School of Management last night about best practices for communicating with potential investors, and I wanted to share the highlights. Tisch dresses like a skater, swears like a sailor, and talks a blue streak. It’s clear that he processes an enormous amount of throughput daily and gets a lot done (the TechStars book is Do More Faster, after all).

Tisch says he gets upwards of 400 emails a day and is often up until 4am battling his inbox. He uses a multi-tiered system for ranking emails in terms of importance and actionability (he actually pulled up his Gmail inbox on the projector and showed the room). The bottom line is: he and his peers like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, are incredibly busy and you should be using the most efficient and effective methods possible when making initial contact and then maintaining the conversation.

And if you stick around until (or skip down to) the end of the post, I’ll also tell you how I messed up and had it boomerang in my face.

The highlights, in no particular order…

Investors are looking for companies and entrepreneurs whose actions add up to a compelling pattern of progress. Each action and milestone is a dot, dots make a line, and the line needs to move up and to the right. This means that each interaction with an investor has to be better than the last, and show progress trending in the right direction.

Do a bunch of homework on the person you’re contacting. We live in world where investors blog, tweet, and basically tell you exactly what they are into and looking for. And definitely don’t take up their time asking questions they’ve already addressed elsewhere.

Go after investors who invest in your space. People don’t invest in industries they don’t know well.

When you send an email:

…be brief (they’re probably skimming, so get to the point)

…be human. Try to cultivate a relationship and paint a picture of yourself that’s likable and accessible.

…make it searchable. Make sure your name and the name of your business are in each email so it can be found later.

…if you’re asking a question, make it concrete, not open ended.

When is the best time to send an investor an email? Tisch says Sunday around 6pm. Why? Because it’s the rudest time. The recipient has probably spent the evening clearing their inbox for Monday morning and now you’re at the top of the list. Tuesday is probably 2nd best because people have hit their stride for the week. Most VCs have partner meetings on Mondays.

The best way to contact an investor is through a warm lead, someone they know and trust. Getting introduced by someone an investor doesn’t know is bad. Better to approach them yourself at that point. Oh, and LinkedIn is probably the worst. In fact Tisch told everyone to go home and unfriend all their LinkedIn contacts they don’t actually know directly.

Be early to new stuff. Sign up for new services and try stuff out before others. Especially if it’s relevant to your space. This isn’t just important market research, it shows that you’re on top of what’s going on and it helps you stand out as an early adopter.

Send thank you notes always.

Don’t tweet or blog anything you wouldn’t want your most serious business partner or customer to read. The fact you got blackout drunk probably isn’t something you’d want your most serious customer to know about. Tisch admits that his Twitter feed is super noisy, but he’s comfortable with the potential that anyone could read it.

Don’t be inflammatory or start fights on Twitter or in comments. This just suggests you’re a confrontational person who likes drama.

It really made an impact on me to hear Tisch say that he (and most VCs he knows) really do reply to email, and that they really do appreciate thoughtful and genuine interactions. But knowing this, people need to follow best practices so these interactions are effective. Sounds good to me.

Okay, now my embarrassing gaffe.

As you may know, Nemonics is applying to TechStars NYC this year. Sure, they pick only 10 to 15 companies out of some 3,000 applicants, but it’s worth a shot. I decided to stop by TechStars HQ (in the old FourSquare offices) on my way over to NYU for the talk. I took the elevator up and walked into the nearly empty space that will soon be a throbbing hive of activity. Two people were working quietly on the periphery.

“Hi, I was just wondering if David is here and I could say hello?”

“Sorry who are you?”

“I’m a TechStars applicant.”

Then a blunt and very unambiguous “No, he’s not here.”

After a pretty painful few minutes standing there awkwardly waiting for the elevator to come back up, I walked over to NYU for Tisch’s talk. Midway through the presentation he stopped to read a text message, then explained that three TechStars hopefuls had already come by the office today unannounced and his biz partner is “freaked out.”

“By the way,” he said, “that’s the absolute worst way to get my attention, just showing up saying, ‘hi, is Dave around?’”

I felt my whole body shrink about eight inches. Perfect. In trying to be tenacious I did the worst possible thing to get the attention of this investor, and was getting publicly called out on it.

But I wrote an apology email in the morning and, true to form, Dave Tisch wrote right back. “All good.”