When I tweeted about cold emails yesterday, I was curious if we have ever invested in founders who cold-emailed us. So l looked at our 1st fund - we invested 23 cos from 2016 to 2019, and how did we meet them? Result https://twitter.com/teppeitsutsui/status/1293923820261130241

First, some contexts.

- our 1st fund was raised to invest only VR/AR cos, and in 2015-2017, there was a big hype of VR/AR with lots of conferences
- we focus on seed stage
- we led some deals but participated in most of cases
- 22 cos is in US and one in Australia

Here are how we met with these 23 cos

- 5 thru accelerators like @thebetacamp @ycombinator @techstars & Rothenberg (!)
- 5 thru industry friends, ie games
- 5 from intros from other VCs
- 5 at VR/AR conferences
- 2 from cold emails !!
- 1 is outreach from us

So we invested in 2 cos which we met thru cold emails!!! But caveat here is that we didn’t invest right away but after they made some progress, so we kept in touch with them after initial mtgs. So a cold email does work sometimes but not always

And as you can see, warm intros worked better - 10 (from VCs & industry friends) out of 23 came from warm intros. And here is a good advice by @yoheinakajima on asking for intros. https://twitter.com/yoheinakajima/status/1294126499080019968