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The key to finding and meeting VCs isn’t cold emails or playing a high-volume game — it’s all in the introductions. And anyone can get them.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have success in building technology businesses and have established great connections. This made our Series A process for Atrium much more straightforward.
To be clear, establishing yourself in Silicon Valley makes it much easier to meet investors.

But it’s also beside the point.
All too many founders say ‘I’m not connected in Silicon Valley, I’m not successful, so I’ll never be able to raise money for my business’.

Of all the common questions I get, “How do I meet investors?” ranks at or near the top. As a founder who went through an exit, and later invested in companies myself, I have experience from both sides of the table.
There are two critical factors to consider when you want to fundraise for your startup:
1. Almost everyone who has been successful in Silicon Valley had no network when they arrived and just figured it out.
2. Meeting investors is like a sales funnel. Success is predicated on a repeatable process of building and leveraging connections. It’s nothing special and anyone can do it. There are millions of successful sales people around the globe today.
It’s not who you know: it’s who your network knows. Building and leveraging your network to get intros is the tried and true way to meet investors and get funding.
I’m going to show you the process and explain how I was able to raise a Series A with 0 investors in my contact list.
But first . . .

How not to meet investors
It’s important to precede a list of suggestions with a stern warning of how you can shoot yourself in the foot before you begin.
The amount of bad advice out there about meeting investors is appalling and detrimental to the startup community. It’s hard to know where to start, but here is a brief list of what not to do.

1. Cold Email
When I was a YC partner, I would get emails every day from random people saying “Invest in my startup.”
No intro.
Not even a good explanation of what they do or what’s in it for me.
Nothing.
Have empathy and think about your audience (this applies to all aspects of business communication, not exclusively to investors).
For 99.99% of those inquiries, I just didn’t have time to actually respond to them. Otherwise, I would spend my entire day talking to random people.
Cold email is almost never going to work and is a subpar use of your time — which is the single-most valuable asset …