Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous, and as such are generally pretty happy to respond to emails.
In ~2014 I sent an email to Joe Armstrong (one of the creators of Erlang) asking some questions about concurrency because I still didn't fully understand why Erlang was supposed to be better for it. I expected him to just point me to an FAQ or simply not respond [1], but instead he wrote a very long, detailed explanation about the rationale of Erlang's design. It was well-written and it made a lot of things "click" in my brain.
That simple act by Joe was extremely instrumental in my career, I think for the better. I became very interested in Erlang, but also just concurrency theory and distributed systems, and I would like to think I almost understand it now :)
He and I would exchange emails occasionally over the next few years and he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about programming, Erlang, and people using it, and despite me barely knowing the guy, I was genuinely pretty sad when he passed away in 2019.
I think about that a lot; if I hadn't sent a dumb cold email my entire life would likely be very different.
[1] Which, to be clear, would have been perfectly fine!
A long time ago my mother sent a short hate mail to Mark Cuban after seeing him in a TV interview. He actually responded. Then he signed her up for the Mark Cuban newsletter. She could not figure out how to unsubscribe from it. It was honestly pretty hilarious.
I've sent cold emails to Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett and received prompt and friendly replies. (I had met each briefly and mentioned that in my emails ... that may have helped.) I emailed Chomsky on 9/11, asking about blowback from U.S. operations in Afghanistan. He responded the next day, apologizing for the delay (!) because he was receiving so many queries. He sent me numerous citations, including a Newsweek (IIRC) article that was very much on point, as well as his own thoughts. I remember that he wrote "there are dark days ahead".
I also recall having an email exchange with Guy Steele about Java. Of course these days you can interact with all sorts of people publicly on social media -- I've had exchanges with Andrew Kelley and Walter Bright here on HN. Back in the day the "social media" was usenet -- and I had exchanges with various prominent people, including Marvin Minsky who sent me a draft of his book "The Emotion Machine" for review.
In 1978 I was working for a client of Interactive Systems Corporation (the first commercial UNIX developer) and a friend who worked at ISC said there was an opening but they couldn't initiate interest because it would be poaching from their client, so he suggested I send a letter. I sent a glowing letter about their being an innovative company in many ways (I meant every word) -- they were impressed and arranged an interview and I got the job.
> Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous
Yes. I've experienced this in many fields, from reaching out to the founder of a magazine, to several big name fans (artists and writers) in fandom, to touring hip hop artists (!!!), to people steering a programming language.
The first time, you can't believe they responded. But if you pursue excellence in that same field, eventually you realize y'all are peers, and then you get someone freaking out that you responded.
Erlang is so freaking cool, I’ve been itching for a project to use it (or Elixir, especially because I’m a huge Ruby fan) with ever since I learned about it/OTP when digging into the internals of Chef (server) and RabbitMQ, followed up by the book “Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good!” (an adaption of /book inspired by another wonderful book I read called “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!”).
Non-sequitur but I used to bike past a “Haskell Street” on the way to/from a previous job and it always made me smile.
I'm here to make your itch worse! we're using Elixir to build a fintech SaaS and it's by far the most dependable, boring, lovable part of our stack. We built critical parts with it (syncing data with external services, for one) and were just able to basically forget about it for years because it just... ran?
Erlang/Elixir are definitely not the best for everything, but if there's a good match it's unbeatable
Sometimes I think about how much of a pain it would be for our company to not use elixir. We would be spending so much time on mundane ops stuff and not building the thing. Such a lovely programming model and ecosystem.
I remember reading about Elixir (or was it Erlang) and tried to follow a tutorial and trying to solve some simple exercises. I don't remember the details but I do remember writing the simple functions and they just stacked and fit like Lego bricks. I kept thinking that I will get stuck but I didn't and just kept going. Didn't have to engage in any flow-control or if/else etc. It was nothing like I had seen before. Unfortunately my curiosity pivoted to something else and I didn't complete it but I hope to swing back to Elixir someday soon.
In 2013 there was some question about the SuperCow Powers that some programs had. I took time to ask Jason Gunthorpe about it. He didn't answer my email: we make a post about it [1] that became the canonical explanation. That had a huge impact on me: how could I take so long to answer simple questions from friends when Jason Gunthorpe took time to answer mine?
Yeah, genuinely sad when he passed. He's not the most influential person in computing, but for some reason, he was the one person I most wanted to meet. Probably the way he presented himself. Seemed like a genuinely good guy.
The people who are celebrities, or public figures, or likely to receive a lot of email, also have secretaries, or PR/social media managers who open all their messages and respond to strangers.
This is why it can be so easy to find someone's contact email address, versus phoning their office and trying to get past the voicemail or front desk.
Also, lots of them seemingly read emails themselves, or at least have their secretaries forward emails written by passionate people to them, as I've also gotten replies to a bunch of emails from people I didn't expect such involved reply to, even when they're "celebrities".
One thing about this is you never can tell how one thing will lead to another, so even if you don’t get a good response to your cold email, if you do it well, it can still unlock doors later on that you never expected to.
To illustrate this I’m going to share a personal anecdote that actually isn’t a cold email, but it’s similar enough that hopefully it demonstrates the point. I made the crucial connection in a meeting, but it could just as well have happened from an email.
I was co-head of a startup that built enterprise saas risk software of a highly specialised type and one of our investors convinced me to take a meeting with a very successful and highly-regarded hedge fund. I was expecting a very initial call, but when I got on the phone it was just me, the COO, the chief investment officer, their head of trading and their CTO. So pretty much the top of the house.
Now, I could have just gone straight for the big pitch and tried to sell them on our solution but it was super obvious right at the beginning of the call that we were solving a problem they just didn’t have, and there was no pivot we could make that would make our software relevant for them. So I did the high-integrity thing (even though we were pretty desperate for clients) and said that to them, thanked them for their time and ended the call cordially, but early.
Years later I got a cold call from a recruiter working for two founders looking for a CTO for a fintech. Turns out she was the wife of one of the guys on the call that day and he had told her about it, said he had been impressed by how I handled the situation, so when the opportunity arose I ended up on the shortlist (and got the gig btw) for a job I would never even have known existed yet alone applied for.
The point is sometimes if you just do the thing it may not even work out in the immediate short term in an obvious way, but could have positive long term ramifications that you can’t necessarily know ahead of time, whereas if you do nothing, nothing will happen.
I'm probably somewhat older than most here. What OP is describing is what used to be normal and should still be!
In the past it was normal to write a CV (resume) and a covering letter that was mildly tailored to each target firm, either in response to a job advert or on spec. I'm not talking quill pens here - you'd do a mail merge and buy a really large book of stamps.
Linked In is possibly the worst thing that ever happened to HR but it was inevitable and someone else would do it instead if they did not.
The whole point is ... show interest, actual interest in an employer you are interested in and whatever they are doing. Find a way in. If they only use LLM based 'bots and can't be arsed with a 'phone call then fuck 'em!
I abandoned cover letters when I showed up to an interview and the interviewer complained that my resume was too thin. That was on purpose because a lot of the meat was in the cover letter that he never received. I just merged them and gave up on customization when ATSs started being used to cull 99% of applicants.
Once, an applicant had a pipeline to correlate open positions to his resume and generate cover letters. He was open about it and shared a public repo, thus it was perceived positively.
Finally the job didn't correspond to his profile and objectives. I have not checked if he improved it later, I guess he did.
Well my little company has at least three employees that came back again after leaving. Two of them are still here. We are not particularly interesting ...
What I'm advocating for here is trying out new (old) methods of waving your CV/resume at an employer.
I graduated as a civil engineering technician (BTEC HND) in the UK in 1990. I did a "sabbatical" ... cough rag (basically pissed up for a year for charity is a fair description of that).
The building industry in the UK collapsed in 1991 along with a rather nasty recession.
Obviously I ended up in IT! It took a while but I completely reskilled and to cut a very long story short in 2000 me and a couple of other chaps formed a little company that is still running.
Enough of me.
Getting hired is hard but I would suggest that you don't simply rely on Linked In.
When applying for jobs I often wish I could just have 5 min with the "boss" in charge of the given role. Or even just have them do a video talking about what they do... that's it, that's all the meat. I'll happily watch thousands and skip what doesn't fit me and pick what does ...
And what is your advice for the employer to actually reciprocate that interest instead of treating their employees like cattle? Both sides of the equation have changed
I started to write my story here along the same lines. Perhaps more along the lines of don't be afraid to ask. Almost every job I got, and they've mostly been pretty fantastic, I got cause I called and ask for it. I was told some of those jobs just weren't available or impossible to get but I called and got them. One job the manager wasn't even thinking about it till I called but I got him thinking about it and he hired me. Two impossible to get jobs I got cause the secretary left her desk for a moment and the manager answered the phone instead. I got two half hour interviews in prime time for someone and his business cause I called someone and asked for it.
This is a great read, but I wonder how effective cold messages are in the AI era. I now receive customized cold emails and LinkedIn messages. There are several tools like Clay that make AI messaging effortless. It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine if message are AI-generated or if a human actually took the time to write them and care.
I see in-person networking becoming increasingly valuable. Unfortunately, for me, I live in the Detroit Metro area. We just don’t have the tech community that other areas like the Bay do, and despite several people‘s best efforts. We don’t have the best networking opportunities and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Yep they went from a rare to an almost daily occurrence for me this summer. It upsets me because I have met so many interesting people through my inbox.
> It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine if message are AI-generated or if a human actually took the time to write them and care.
Could you share some examples? Based on my experience (and other replies here) it's exactly the opposite, and you could easily see if the message was AI-generated.
> but my dad kept saying it wouldn’t hurt to really make it clear I wanted to get into the school.
My mother convinced me to do the same after I was also wait-listed at my top choice university. I sent them an email updating them on things I had done since applying (in May, two weeks before graduating), and two days later, I got my acceptance letter.
Look at it from the school's point of view. They already spent time evaluating your credentials and decided you were qualified for the "waitlist" pool of applicants. They aren't going to want to invest a lot more time in further evaluating or stack-ranking those people, so anyone who stays engaged and communicating will probably be favored over those who just passively wait.
Worst case, those applicants are already ranked by whatever metrics they use and they will just pull people from the top of the stack as they need. Your continued efforts won't help in this case, but they also won't hurt. And there's a good chance that many of those people already accepted other offers, so the school might prefer to save time and only deal with people who are obviously still interested.
As to what to write as a "starting point" in a cold email:
It's nice to write nice things about the things that person has done. nice tweet, nice post etc.
But it's nicer to write about things they've created and you paid money for. a book, a course, a software etc.
('nice' in this context means the chance of getting a reply.)
My own cold email story:
I was in a paid telegram group of a fitness guru I followed on Twitter. He once complained about how he's having a hard time managing his many info products, emails, having to write promotional content etc.
I then spent the night collecting all the things he's could do better: dusting off his unused wordpress site to keep as source of content rather than just tweeting bangers and let them be forgotten due to the algorthm after some time, writing better sales copy for his copy instead of just trying to list its merits in every tweet and email, new ebook ideas based on stuff that people in his telegram group are already complaining about (how do I recover better?!) etc.
I didn't expect much out of this. It just felt nice to come up with ideas honestly. but he replied with with 2 sentences: "How can I pay you" and "When can you start?".
That started a 2 year sidegig as a copywriter, a profession I didn't know I was interested in at all before this, lol.
Hmm.. thinking back.. have I learned this lesson myself? I can't think of any other instances where I replied to people's stuff that I purchased. But maybe I forgot. I'm going to think about it though, and write hot cold emails!
And thanks Zach for this. The one thing I remember about you from your early blogging days. That "glue technologies" blog post - where you said about how things like bash, sql, server management etc.. are all not main character skills, but are glue skills that are still important. That term stuck with me, and I do see their importance.
So you were a customer, and this business owner created a job opening, announced the responsibilities to a list of his paying customers, and then he offered one of his existing customers a job while making it seem like it was your idea.
I got my first job (an IT traineeship) because after my interview, I rang them every few days to ask how I did and if they were keen to progress further. In the end they said they gave it to me because I was obviously SO keen, what withi the ringing every other day, and I had interviewed well.
Anyway my point is, as the author implies, showing interest is key. I genuinely wanted that job and I showed them that.
Sadly these days (that happened to me in ~1998) it's so, so much harder to stand out. There's a wall of bits and "employment services" between you and the person who'd hire you, and I don't know how the younger generation is going to be able to navigate that easily.
In the late 90s I was a huge Michael Schumacher and Ferrari fan. I found Jean Todt’s (the Ferrari F1 team principal at the time) email address and wrote a passionate email asking if there was any way I could join their team - even if it was sweeping the floor. Never got a reply :(
Previously I worked at Auth0. I joined fairly early, just a couple of years after their founding so the company was still small. I remember one of my collegues who joined around the same time got his job by sending (multiple) cold emails to my manager at the time telling how much he admired the company and wanted to join. Eventually he gave in and gave him the job. The guys stayed on long after I left so it obviously work out well for both parties.
Hold up.... you created good-tutorials in high school? I credit that site with launching one of my first 'hobbies' back in middle school and teaching me a new skill I was able to use to help friends/family for years to come. Thank you!
Cheers! That era of the internet was such a fun chunk of time. All the little design tricks and bite-sized approaches people shared… it was a lot of fun.
This is why I tend to write real letters using my IBM Selectric III and send them via physical mail. I enjoy writing. Writing with purpose is time well spent. 90% of the time I get no response. I’m not actively trying to find the next recipient, it just comes naturally, so I see no reason to stop.
When is the last time you got an actual typed or hand written letter? That’s my advantage.
One key turning point in my life was approaching Red Whittaker, the head of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon. I knew who he was and had met him briefly before, but this was pretty much a “cold call” even if happened to be in person. I was finishing up my degree at CMU and felt like if was going to stay in Pittsburgh, I wanted to work somewhere that was working on really cool projects. My degree was a BFA in sculpture, but I guess my enthusiasm and interest in novel mechanisms was enough for him to take a chance and make a position for me. I learned a lot from (and with) the team of PhD students and staff. The job had me starting to use parametric CAD at very early point (Pro/E 6.0). After a few years I moved on and eventually left Pittsburgh for SF, but without taking that chance, I really don’t know what path my life would have taken.
I was rejected from a job interview a few years ago - wow 13 years ago now - and was honestly shocked after how well the interview went.
I decided to write a letter (email) to the HR department implying they'd made a huge mistake (the head of HR was in the interview too). She (as much as I knew at the time) overruled my would-be boss and the rest is history.
Bold move, and it clearly worked out for you! I do think it's a risky strategy, though. A respectful follow-up asking for feedback or reiterating your interest can leave a great impression, but telling a company they made a mistake could easily backfire with a different hiring team. Every situation is different, so I'd be cautious about recommending it as general advice.
I was in a similar situation and probably sent a cringy, emotional email because when I read it back now after all these years, I am embarrassed at how desperate my tone was. It all worked out well, though; I learnt to handle rejections better, and in fact ended up with way better gig in merely 3 weeks after that.
Almost all of them are salespeople, sometimes finding my phone number and calling me on my personal number, even early in the morning. Insane stuff. That's 90% of cold calls. 8% are recruiters (also salespeople) telling me they either know a genius candidate or they can get me. 2%, that's probably the topic of this thread.
Yup. I get lots of cold emails from salespeople whose products I couldn't possibly give less of a shit about. But I agree, those aren't what this thread is talking about.
I got my first job in the U.S by emailing the local PHP user group introducing myself. The CEO of a dev agency was on the list, and 2 weeks later I had a job offer.
Moving to a new country not knowing anyone and with barely any money, fair to say that one email changed my life.
You joined a special interest technical group which is specifically for professional networking and informal meetups and you sent a general email to the entire group which led to a hiring process. Nothing about that is “cold calling” or “cold email”.
Likewise, the posted article describes a Tweet from someone who announced they were hiring specific skilled professionals for an open position, and the author privately responded to that informal job posting. That is not a “cold call” or “cold email” just because you didn’t go through Indeed dot com.
But if you do send actual cold emails, then you undoubtedly have the prerogative to post and say that “<Company> Ghosted Me During the Hiring Process!!1” /s
I got a cold email recently and was happy to engage, but I warned them upfront that LLMs change the game, and asked for more info about their background (to authenticate them as a human). They replied with another unnecessarily long email that was light on details and reeked of AI Voice, so I ghosted at that point, unconvinced they were acting in good faith.
Demonstrating authenticity and effort are super important in this space.
That's been my biggest annoyance lately. Everyone's trying to AI these sorts of things, but for people who get a lot of these frequently, it's pretty easy to spot. Talk like a human and you can go pretty far, though.
You can also try a reply like "please send back a photo of yourself with a shoe balanced on top of your head" and see how they reply. The replies from a human who is going "wtf?" will be very different from an LLM.
I once called the phone number on a website for an obscure local event, and it happened to be a local business magnate's personal cell phone number, and he helped me out with my request, so that was awesome.
I cold emailed a researcher in Japan about gut bacteria e. Americana for cancer treatment and registering my dad for clinical trials as and when they happen. And hell yea - professor replied :)
Things evolve though. Early 2000, I received a lot of reactions to cold emails (eg when organising events), but these days, it's rather rare. Even people I know might ignore my mails! One explanation I got is that there are a lot more phishing mails these days, and people have learnt to be suspicious.
Is human-like cold emails (with stuff like :D) better or worse than professionally written formal emails? Im a student and would like some tips. I know it depends on the situation but what would you rather see? And based on your experience, what would you respond to more?
Definitely short and informal. You should have a legitimate reason to email (like, tell the person genuinely why you respect them or what about them you like), and a clear ask if there is one (asking for help, looking for a job, etc).
Don't talk about yourself, except if it's directly relevant to them.
I can easily tell when someone wrote 100 of them generically, vs when it's genuine, and I'll always respond to the genuine ones.
(And to be clear, I'm referring to the type of cold emails Zach is... people wanting a genuine connection. This doesn't apply to trying to sell something.)
Best emails I've gotten are terse (nice subject line getting to the point) and a no-nonsense body.
I think trying to make a "playful" personality turns off some people and is more work than just getting to the point. Opening with "here's the thing I want/what I'm reaching out for". then reasons. Then close out with a thank you.
Added bonus: short emails tend to get replies more often in my experience.
You need to provide the reason in the first sentence. Sure, once in a while a do read some cold emails but most of the time if the one-line snippet in the list of all other messages doesn't provide a reason - it goes to the trash.
The most important thing is that you are really, truly engaged in trying to connect with the person. I've had great success with cold emails, but only because I write to people that I seriously want to get to know, even beyond just quick networking.
Fuck it, I feel the hype. Time to cold email some people a couple of tokens of appreciation. I don't expect anything, but they need to know the positive impact they've had.
Thanks once again HN, this is gonna be fun.
Also, feel free to reach out to me ;-)
On average it currently happens once per month (or every 2 months?) so I have the bandwidth atm, haha.
The most fun conversation was when I met a fairly good Haskell or Erlang programmer (I forgot) and we were talking about dating and I think, I made it click for him a bit. It probably only helped slightly but it helped and that felt good.
For people with dating problems, I've had them too. If I can help engineers to find their dream partners, even if it's just a little bit, that'll probably the most productive thing I'd do in my life anyway.
I've been out of the game for the past 4 years already, happily married nowadays, kinda made a mini science out of it, haha.
Also open to other topics, I love to learn about everything.
Now, I'm going to cold email a couple of people!
--
Edit: damn this is getting me emotional. It really presses the question who has had such a positive impact on my life that I feel the need for them to know that.
I'm literally writing mails now with stuff like "in 2006 you had a talk and it really helped me build the foundation of my current life. Thank you."
My closest friendships and two relationships started with a cold email. I love when strangers write to me and I give them my full attention. I also write words of praise to bloggers. A simple heartfelt email goes a long way. An LLM-authored email goes right to spam.
I struggle to apply this openness to real life, where the rejection is a lot more instantaneous and awkward. All the data shows that it works and that failure won’t kill me, but my whole being is trying to stop me.
Do it despite the suck. At some point you grow indifferent to it. The point is not to avoid the discomfort but to make "rejection" feel like a meaningless prick. Like walking on grass with bare feet: yes, sometimes you step on a tiny stick or whatever, but walking in shoes instead would be such a waste of a pleasant experience. :)
That's in line with all the wisdom I've received. A rejection is not a measure of your worth, just the cost of doing business. After all I reject a lot of perfectly fine people for various reasons.
When something like this was happening to me, I heard people were saying "Oh, he is just lucky". It kinda made me a bit mad because of how much work I've put in a particular thing behind the scenes and in general how unlucky I was with many other things.
Then I stumbled upon the concept of "luck surface area" [1] and it's kinda clicked with me. Yes, luck is a factor, but you definitely can increase your chances. Cold emails from the post is one of such instruments.
I have had reasonable success with cold emails. My favorite genre is every so often I email a musician or author whose works I tremendously enjoyed asking for a signed copy, an opinion, or simply to say thank you for having a profound influence on me. Some are very well known. But almost all reply with enthusiasm.
In the Netflix series The Good Place, there is an AI character named Janet, who helps assist people who have gone to that place where you go after you die.
One quirk when you're in the Good Place: you can't use swear words. If you try to say "fuck" it comes out "fork".
Janet is portrayed brilliantly by D'Arcy Carden. Her dad is Dennis Erokan, who published MicroTimes and BAM (Bay Area Music) Magazine and produced the Bammies award festival. MicroTimes was one of those big thick magazines like Computer Shopper, full of interesting ads and a few articles.
After I discovered this, I found Dennis' email and wrote to him:
---
Hi Dennis!
Yes, I know it's usually D'Arcy who gets the autograph requests.
My friend Ro and I recently finished watching The Good Place. What a wonderful series!
I always enjoy learning about the people who worked to create a great show like this.
After a bit of research I was like "What the fork? Janet's real life dad is the MicroTimes guy!"
So I checked my archival drawer and found one of my old MicroTimes from 1996.
Ro lived in New York in the late 1980s, and she flew to SF a few of those years just to go to the Bammies.
Her secret hope was to somehow get acquainted with Steve Perry. But she did see Ted Nugent staring at her in a bookstore. So that was at least a consolation prize.
Ro's birthday is coming up later this month. I stealthily searched eBay and got the 1986 and 1988 BAM Magazines with the Bammies Scrapbooks.
I wonder if you could autograph these? I would be more than happy to take you out for lunch or dinner at any of your favorite places up in your neck of the woods. Or I could just bring them to your office or any location you want if that's more convenient for you.
And if we can work out a time when Ro could join us (probably easier on a weekend), she would be delighted to meet you!
---
Dennis was quite tickled by this. We took him to lunch at his favorite restaurant, he signed our MicroTimes and BAM magazines, and we all had a great time sharing stories about some of the people we knew.
SPAM isn't: I don't want automated cold outreach. I don't want something trying to fake making it look personal.
I wish that we could turn off email / phone where anyone can reach out to anyone, and instead make it so that you have to work through your network; and your network acts as the first filter. (And if some bozo in your network passes too much SPAM to you, you can block them.)
I read a dozen inbound cold emails every day. I used to love it. I don't anymore, because every other single email uses The Sentence. Or, The Paragraph.
Whatever model these people use, it always always puts in The Sentence (I don't want to disclose it publicly! I'm running an experiment. I'll write it up when it concludes. :) ). Or, worse, The Paragraph.
Please use models to research people and learn about them. But please write the email yourself.
It's instantly obvious. And even though I do my best not to hold it against someone, I would be lying if I didn't say that it isn't a bit annoying.
Imagine reading endless variations of The Sentence 3,240 to 4,000 times a year. It feels straight out of the Twilight Zone.
There’s such an opportunity, it has never been easier to differentiate oneself now, all you have to do is ignore whatever online advice or LLMs say and do your own thing, it’s sad that almost nobody does it.
This makes me think of an email support request I got at a job a long time ago that began with the words "Fucking cunts how fucking dare you", before gradually cooling down and gesturing broadly at what the problem was, without ever reaching for the crutch of punctuation. I printed it out and stuck it on the wall.
HN reader, now you too know what it takes to make a powerful human impression via email.
My biggest mistake in life was thinking too big and aiming too high. Now I absolutely hate the saying "If you want to reach the moon, aim for the stars." This belief ruined me.
The people who were writing desperate emails and bending over to get a wage-slave job are much better off now.
Meanwhile I was trying to raise funding for big ideas from big investors; it was a complete waste of time.
Reality is "If you want to reach the moon, aim for the clouds." Then you have a better chance of actually achieving something, even if it's not your first preference.
Makes me think. I can't be as confident there as I got lucky in that respect so my perception is distorted towards "it's easy". Based on what I observe from other people, I would think so as well.
I think relationships are heavily based on who you are and what you project and it's extremely nuanced. Some trivial physical or personality feature that you have can radically shape people's perception of you and there's often nothing you can do about that.
Sometimes a (perceived) flaw that you have can actually work in your favor as the other person may see it as a benefit. Relationships are as much about attracting the right people as they are about repelling the wrong people.
I hired someone when we were contemplating a Linux version of our product. The unsolicited email I received just radiated passion and interest. Easiest decision ever.
when I started my vidalia onion project, I cold called the vidalia onion committee, explained my domain purchase and rough plan, and asked if I could stop by their office to say hello & see if there were ways i could serve that industry. They said 'sure', so I did, and then I began selling onions on the internet.
I agree wholeheartedly with this article and this is something I'm struggling with my daughter about: the worst thing anybody can say is no and in some cases, they already said no. If you ask (or ask again), you might get a really good answer or more.
Build up with small challenges. Not sure how old your daughter is, but, for example, our 7 year got a gift card. They wanted to know how much it was worth -- so they were the ones who had to go up to the counter to ask the employee. Just practicing going into uncomfortable or unfamiliar situations is valuable, and leads to confidence for the bigger stuff.
Zach is good people. I still can’t believe I met him at a random meetup in SF once and he walked up to me to say hi and I didn’t connect the dots until many hours later that he’s the Zach whose blog I’ve been reading on and off my whole career and is one of the inspirations that got me to Silicon Valley.
As a teen and in my early 20s I was a pretty skeptical / negative dude. I probably would be on team "not worth it, don't bother" when it comes to cold email.
I was also kinda bad in school (not really trying and not doing well) and so on.
Buddy who worked outsourced tech support with me while he took school seriously and I did not graduated (while I did not) and got a job. They had a referral bonus at his company and he convinced to "just apply". I hadn't graduated and really wasn't making much progress or very impressive, but I did it just for the interview experience.
I got the job, the guy who hired me later said "you seemed honest". My whole tech career took off from there, good money, I got lucky and worked with good people. Later after age 40 after a layoff I decided to try a coding bootcamp when folks were downplaying those programs. Some rando small company took a chance on me and didn't pay much but it was a job and I took a chance on them.
Nearly 10 years later I'm happy with my work, doing good financially, all because I took a couple shots.
The local university has a coach who is big on "failure is progress" and other cute slogans, and in my collage years I would have been cynical brushed it off as "just words". But it was also just words when the guy told "just apply".
I watch that coach's team and there are kids out there failing, I think they're some of the bravest guys. They daring to bust their ass year round and maybe just fail in front of tens of thousands people. I wouldn't have done it at their age, but they're taking their shot.
It took me a long time to understand the value (and low cost) of taking a shot, and what "just words" really represents.
I think another aspect of this is that the author experienced positive feedback from this approach early on. Rejection is tough to deal with, but having an instance that turned out well in mind is a huge benefit.
The author is doing his article a disservice by calling this cold email. He just sent a few one-off emails to strangers. That's quite different than the BDR team at Startup Du Jour scraping LinkedIn and blasting out an enless stream of "hope this message finds you well" slop.
I'd wager that the majority of us do not differentiate between cold email and spam, especially in the AI era.
"Cold email" - I hate this term. Call it what it is. Spam.
And no, personalizing your spam doesn't make it any less spam, especially with AI these days, but this is a hot take for a VC forum whose companies survive on spam.
Send me a "cold email" or any other sort of spam, and I will never see anything more from you, as your address will be blocked. Spamming is against the law here in EU, and for a good reason.
And for the record, it's fine for people to set their boundaries wherever they want. All the author loses in this case is a bit of time writing one email
Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous, and as such are generally pretty happy to respond to emails.
In ~2014 I sent an email to Joe Armstrong (one of the creators of Erlang) asking some questions about concurrency because I still didn't fully understand why Erlang was supposed to be better for it. I expected him to just point me to an FAQ or simply not respond [1], but instead he wrote a very long, detailed explanation about the rationale of Erlang's design. It was well-written and it made a lot of things "click" in my brain.
That simple act by Joe was extremely instrumental in my career, I think for the better. I became very interested in Erlang, but also just concurrency theory and distributed systems, and I would like to think I almost understand it now :)
He and I would exchange emails occasionally over the next few years and he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about programming, Erlang, and people using it, and despite me barely knowing the guy, I was genuinely pretty sad when he passed away in 2019.
I think about that a lot; if I hadn't sent a dumb cold email my entire life would likely be very different.
[1] Which, to be clear, would have been perfectly fine!
A long time ago my mother sent a short hate mail to Mark Cuban after seeing him in a TV interview. He actually responded. Then he signed her up for the Mark Cuban newsletter. She could not figure out how to unsubscribe from it. It was honestly pretty hilarious.
Sometimes I wonder how much of Russ Hannemann from HBO's "Silcon Valley" was based on real life anecdotes of people who interacted with Cuban.
RADIO ON THE INTERNET!!!
I've sent cold emails to Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett and received prompt and friendly replies. (I had met each briefly and mentioned that in my emails ... that may have helped.) I emailed Chomsky on 9/11, asking about blowback from U.S. operations in Afghanistan. He responded the next day, apologizing for the delay (!) because he was receiving so many queries. He sent me numerous citations, including a Newsweek (IIRC) article that was very much on point, as well as his own thoughts. I remember that he wrote "there are dark days ahead".
I also recall having an email exchange with Guy Steele about Java. Of course these days you can interact with all sorts of people publicly on social media -- I've had exchanges with Andrew Kelley and Walter Bright here on HN. Back in the day the "social media" was usenet -- and I had exchanges with various prominent people, including Marvin Minsky who sent me a draft of his book "The Emotion Machine" for review.
In 1978 I was working for a client of Interactive Systems Corporation (the first commercial UNIX developer) and a friend who worked at ISC said there was an opening but they couldn't initiate interest because it would be poaching from their client, so he suggested I send a letter. I sent a glowing letter about their being an innovative company in many ways (I meant every word) -- they were impressed and arranged an interview and I got the job.
This is really cool thank you for sharing.
> Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous
Yes. I've experienced this in many fields, from reaching out to the founder of a magazine, to several big name fans (artists and writers) in fandom, to touring hip hop artists (!!!), to people steering a programming language.
The first time, you can't believe they responded. But if you pursue excellence in that same field, eventually you realize y'all are peers, and then you get someone freaking out that you responded.
Erlang is so freaking cool, I’ve been itching for a project to use it (or Elixir, especially because I’m a huge Ruby fan) with ever since I learned about it/OTP when digging into the internals of Chef (server) and RabbitMQ, followed up by the book “Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good!” (an adaption of /book inspired by another wonderful book I read called “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!”).
Non-sequitur but I used to bike past a “Haskell Street” on the way to/from a previous job and it always made me smile.
I'm here to make your itch worse! we're using Elixir to build a fintech SaaS and it's by far the most dependable, boring, lovable part of our stack. We built critical parts with it (syncing data with external services, for one) and were just able to basically forget about it for years because it just... ran?
Erlang/Elixir are definitely not the best for everything, but if there's a good match it's unbeatable
Sometimes I think about how much of a pain it would be for our company to not use elixir. We would be spending so much time on mundane ops stuff and not building the thing. Such a lovely programming model and ecosystem.
I remember reading about Elixir (or was it Erlang) and tried to follow a tutorial and trying to solve some simple exercises. I don't remember the details but I do remember writing the simple functions and they just stacked and fit like Lego bricks. I kept thinking that I will get stuck but I didn't and just kept going. Didn't have to engage in any flow-control or if/else etc. It was nothing like I had seen before. Unfortunately my curiosity pivoted to something else and I didn't complete it but I hope to swing back to Elixir someday soon.
In 2013 there was some question about the SuperCow Powers that some programs had. I took time to ask Jason Gunthorpe about it. He didn't answer my email: we make a post about it [1] that became the canonical explanation. That had a huge impact on me: how could I take so long to answer simple questions from friends when Jason Gunthorpe took time to answer mine?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190322061230/https://plus.goog...
Yeah, genuinely sad when he passed. He's not the most influential person in computing, but for some reason, he was the one person I most wanted to meet. Probably the way he presented himself. Seemed like a genuinely good guy.
The people who are celebrities, or public figures, or likely to receive a lot of email, also have secretaries, or PR/social media managers who open all their messages and respond to strangers.
This is why it can be so easy to find someone's contact email address, versus phoning their office and trying to get past the voicemail or front desk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
Also, lots of them seemingly read emails themselves, or at least have their secretaries forward emails written by passionate people to them, as I've also gotten replies to a bunch of emails from people I didn't expect such involved reply to, even when they're "celebrities".
QED
Will it b possible to share the problem and the insight he provided?
You should ask him if we can read the email please :-)
Do you have the email by any chance ? That sounds like an awesome read
One thing about this is you never can tell how one thing will lead to another, so even if you don’t get a good response to your cold email, if you do it well, it can still unlock doors later on that you never expected to.
To illustrate this I’m going to share a personal anecdote that actually isn’t a cold email, but it’s similar enough that hopefully it demonstrates the point. I made the crucial connection in a meeting, but it could just as well have happened from an email.
I was co-head of a startup that built enterprise saas risk software of a highly specialised type and one of our investors convinced me to take a meeting with a very successful and highly-regarded hedge fund. I was expecting a very initial call, but when I got on the phone it was just me, the COO, the chief investment officer, their head of trading and their CTO. So pretty much the top of the house.
Now, I could have just gone straight for the big pitch and tried to sell them on our solution but it was super obvious right at the beginning of the call that we were solving a problem they just didn’t have, and there was no pivot we could make that would make our software relevant for them. So I did the high-integrity thing (even though we were pretty desperate for clients) and said that to them, thanked them for their time and ended the call cordially, but early.
Years later I got a cold call from a recruiter working for two founders looking for a CTO for a fintech. Turns out she was the wife of one of the guys on the call that day and he had told her about it, said he had been impressed by how I handled the situation, so when the opportunity arose I ended up on the shortlist (and got the gig btw) for a job I would never even have known existed yet alone applied for.
The point is sometimes if you just do the thing it may not even work out in the immediate short term in an obvious way, but could have positive long term ramifications that you can’t necessarily know ahead of time, whereas if you do nothing, nothing will happen.
That's such a nice story! I'd like to think that having integrity pays off on the long run.
Sometimes the payoff is simply feeling good about yourself. Anything extra is just bonus.
I'm probably somewhat older than most here. What OP is describing is what used to be normal and should still be!
In the past it was normal to write a CV (resume) and a covering letter that was mildly tailored to each target firm, either in response to a job advert or on spec. I'm not talking quill pens here - you'd do a mail merge and buy a really large book of stamps.
Linked In is possibly the worst thing that ever happened to HR but it was inevitable and someone else would do it instead if they did not.
The whole point is ... show interest, actual interest in an employer you are interested in and whatever they are doing. Find a way in. If they only use LLM based 'bots and can't be arsed with a 'phone call then fuck 'em!
I abandoned cover letters when I showed up to an interview and the interviewer complained that my resume was too thin. That was on purpose because a lot of the meat was in the cover letter that he never received. I just merged them and gave up on customization when ATSs started being used to cull 99% of applicants.
...99% of applicants who apply through the standard route.
The craziest part is that this tailored approach is now a red flag, because HR just assumes your covering letter is LLM-generated.
“Damn kids, they're all alike” vibes.
Assumes? They're using an LLM themselves, and they don't read the cover letter anyway, and if they did, they don't see what's wrong with using an LLM.
Using a LLM is probably seen as a positive thing by recruiters, it shows you are an AI “Engineer”.
Once, an applicant had a pipeline to correlate open positions to his resume and generate cover letters. He was open about it and shared a public repo, thus it was perceived positively.
Finally the job didn't correspond to his profile and objectives. I have not checked if he improved it later, I guess he did.
I feel like companies that are genuinely interesting are pretty rare.
Then you'll still get two rounds of leet code and system design.
Well my little company has at least three employees that came back again after leaving. Two of them are still here. We are not particularly interesting ...
What I'm advocating for here is trying out new (old) methods of waving your CV/resume at an employer.
I graduated as a civil engineering technician (BTEC HND) in the UK in 1990. I did a "sabbatical" ... cough rag (basically pissed up for a year for charity is a fair description of that).
The building industry in the UK collapsed in 1991 along with a rather nasty recession.
Obviously I ended up in IT! It took a while but I completely reskilled and to cut a very long story short in 2000 me and a couple of other chaps formed a little company that is still running.
Enough of me.
Getting hired is hard but I would suggest that you don't simply rely on Linked In.
Good advice. Job boards are actually the lowest probability option. The trouble is, they are often still the best option.
When you don't have previous experience or contacts in the industry you can wait a long time for an opportunity.
Interning, open source, microqualifications, freelancing, self employment -- I've done the lot.
What I have learned is: work for your salary, but always keep your eye on the next job.
The marketplace is extremely transactional. Expect to provide value from day 1, and forget working your way up.
When applying for jobs I often wish I could just have 5 min with the "boss" in charge of the given role. Or even just have them do a video talking about what they do... that's it, that's all the meat. I'll happily watch thousands and skip what doesn't fit me and pick what does ...
But everything is hidden.
And what is your advice for the employer to actually reciprocate that interest instead of treating their employees like cattle? Both sides of the equation have changed
In a world with LinkedIn perhaps sending a letter is a good way to bypass the hordes.
In a world of automated junk mail and spam, there are good odds that the unread message will be immediately trashed.
Most people won't take a call from an unexpected number even if the phone is already in their hand.
I started to write my story here along the same lines. Perhaps more along the lines of don't be afraid to ask. Almost every job I got, and they've mostly been pretty fantastic, I got cause I called and ask for it. I was told some of those jobs just weren't available or impossible to get but I called and got them. One job the manager wasn't even thinking about it till I called but I got him thinking about it and he hired me. Two impossible to get jobs I got cause the secretary left her desk for a moment and the manager answered the phone instead. I got two half hour interviews in prime time for someone and his business cause I called someone and asked for it.
It never hurt to ask.
"It never hurt to ask."
Rejection can hurt if you are fragile, but one can learn to handle and accept it.
Being ghosted hurts more
The more painful way of reject someone.
This is a great read, but I wonder how effective cold messages are in the AI era. I now receive customized cold emails and LinkedIn messages. There are several tools like Clay that make AI messaging effortless. It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine if message are AI-generated or if a human actually took the time to write them and care.
I see in-person networking becoming increasingly valuable. Unfortunately, for me, I live in the Detroit Metro area. We just don’t have the tech community that other areas like the Bay do, and despite several people‘s best efforts. We don’t have the best networking opportunities and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Yep they went from a rare to an almost daily occurrence for me this summer. It upsets me because I have met so many interesting people through my inbox.
I'd suggest writing by hand as a proof of work, for now at least!
> It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine if message are AI-generated or if a human actually took the time to write them and care.
Could you share some examples? Based on my experience (and other replies here) it's exactly the opposite, and you could easily see if the message was AI-generated.
Look at it from the school's point of view. They already spent time evaluating your credentials and decided you were qualified for the "waitlist" pool of applicants. They aren't going to want to invest a lot more time in further evaluating or stack-ranking those people, so anyone who stays engaged and communicating will probably be favored over those who just passively wait.
Worst case, those applicants are already ranked by whatever metrics they use and they will just pull people from the top of the stack as they need. Your continued efforts won't help in this case, but they also won't hurt. And there's a good chance that many of those people already accepted other offers, so the school might prefer to save time and only deal with people who are obviously still interested.
As to what to write as a "starting point" in a cold email:
It's nice to write nice things about the things that person has done. nice tweet, nice post etc.
But it's nicer to write about things they've created and you paid money for. a book, a course, a software etc.
('nice' in this context means the chance of getting a reply.)
My own cold email story:
I was in a paid telegram group of a fitness guru I followed on Twitter. He once complained about how he's having a hard time managing his many info products, emails, having to write promotional content etc.
I then spent the night collecting all the things he's could do better: dusting off his unused wordpress site to keep as source of content rather than just tweeting bangers and let them be forgotten due to the algorthm after some time, writing better sales copy for his copy instead of just trying to list its merits in every tweet and email, new ebook ideas based on stuff that people in his telegram group are already complaining about (how do I recover better?!) etc.
I didn't expect much out of this. It just felt nice to come up with ideas honestly. but he replied with with 2 sentences: "How can I pay you" and "When can you start?".
That started a 2 year sidegig as a copywriter, a profession I didn't know I was interested in at all before this, lol.
Hmm.. thinking back.. have I learned this lesson myself? I can't think of any other instances where I replied to people's stuff that I purchased. But maybe I forgot. I'm going to think about it though, and write hot cold emails!
And thanks Zach for this. The one thing I remember about you from your early blogging days. That "glue technologies" blog post - where you said about how things like bash, sql, server management etc.. are all not main character skills, but are glue skills that are still important. That term stuck with me, and I do see their importance.
So you were a customer, and this business owner created a job opening, announced the responsibilities to a list of his paying customers, and then he offered one of his existing customers a job while making it seem like it was your idea.
Networking. It's called "Networking".
> created a job opening, announced the responsibilities to a list of his paying customers,
No. he didn't know he needed those tasks done. Once I started, it was mostly me defining my own role and doing the work needed for that role.
And he didn't have to make it seem like it's my idea. He's the type to ask things directly. Has done so many times in his tweets, group and emails.
You'll see such examples of cold emailing in this own hn thread, where the job/role "didn't even exist" until that email.
And yes this is networking. But so is all communication in the context of cold emailing.
I got my first job (an IT traineeship) because after my interview, I rang them every few days to ask how I did and if they were keen to progress further. In the end they said they gave it to me because I was obviously SO keen, what withi the ringing every other day, and I had interviewed well.
Anyway my point is, as the author implies, showing interest is key. I genuinely wanted that job and I showed them that.
Sadly these days (that happened to me in ~1998) it's so, so much harder to stand out. There's a wall of bits and "employment services" between you and the person who'd hire you, and I don't know how the younger generation is going to be able to navigate that easily.
In the late 90s I was a huge Michael Schumacher and Ferrari fan. I found Jean Todt’s (the Ferrari F1 team principal at the time) email address and wrote a passionate email asking if there was any way I could join their team - even if it was sweeping the floor. Never got a reply :(
Previously I worked at Auth0. I joined fairly early, just a couple of years after their founding so the company was still small. I remember one of my collegues who joined around the same time got his job by sending (multiple) cold emails to my manager at the time telling how much he admired the company and wanted to join. Eventually he gave in and gave him the job. The guys stayed on long after I left so it obviously work out well for both parties.
Hold up.... you created good-tutorials in high school? I credit that site with launching one of my first 'hobbies' back in middle school and teaching me a new skill I was able to use to help friends/family for years to come. Thank you!
Cheers! That era of the internet was such a fun chunk of time. All the little design tricks and bite-sized approaches people shared… it was a lot of fun.
This is why I tend to write real letters using my IBM Selectric III and send them via physical mail. I enjoy writing. Writing with purpose is time well spent. 90% of the time I get no response. I’m not actively trying to find the next recipient, it just comes naturally, so I see no reason to stop.
When is the last time you got an actual typed or hand written letter? That’s my advantage.
Weird flex because electronic communications are easier to write, easier to send, and get there faster.
In answer to your question, it was probably junk mail from a realtor. And they only hand wrote the address.
One key turning point in my life was approaching Red Whittaker, the head of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon. I knew who he was and had met him briefly before, but this was pretty much a “cold call” even if happened to be in person. I was finishing up my degree at CMU and felt like if was going to stay in Pittsburgh, I wanted to work somewhere that was working on really cool projects. My degree was a BFA in sculpture, but I guess my enthusiasm and interest in novel mechanisms was enough for him to take a chance and make a position for me. I learned a lot from (and with) the team of PhD students and staff. The job had me starting to use parametric CAD at very early point (Pro/E 6.0). After a few years I moved on and eventually left Pittsburgh for SF, but without taking that chance, I really don’t know what path my life would have taken.
I was rejected from a job interview a few years ago - wow 13 years ago now - and was honestly shocked after how well the interview went.
I decided to write a letter (email) to the HR department implying they'd made a huge mistake (the head of HR was in the interview too). She (as much as I knew at the time) overruled my would-be boss and the rest is history.
Best email I ever sent.
Bold move, and it clearly worked out for you! I do think it's a risky strategy, though. A respectful follow-up asking for feedback or reiterating your interest can leave a great impression, but telling a company they made a mistake could easily backfire with a different hiring team. Every situation is different, so I'd be cautious about recommending it as general advice.
I was simplifying my HN comment for brevity, I didn't just go "you've made a mistake by not hiring me, gimme the job" in the letter.
I was in a similar situation and probably sent a cringy, emotional email because when I read it back now after all these years, I am embarrassed at how desperate my tone was. It all worked out well, though; I learnt to handle rejections better, and in fact ended up with way better gig in merely 3 weeks after that.
Yeah people replied to cold emails back when they received one once every 3 months. Now we get dozens a day. Straight into the garbage.
Almost all of them are salespeople, sometimes finding my phone number and calling me on my personal number, even early in the morning. Insane stuff. That's 90% of cold calls. 8% are recruiters (also salespeople) telling me they either know a genius candidate or they can get me. 2%, that's probably the topic of this thread.
Yup. I get lots of cold emails from salespeople whose products I couldn't possibly give less of a shit about. But I agree, those aren't what this thread is talking about.
I got my first job in the U.S by emailing the local PHP user group introducing myself. The CEO of a dev agency was on the list, and 2 weeks later I had a job offer.
Moving to a new country not knowing anyone and with barely any money, fair to say that one email changed my life.
You joined a special interest technical group which is specifically for professional networking and informal meetups and you sent a general email to the entire group which led to a hiring process. Nothing about that is “cold calling” or “cold email”.
Likewise, the posted article describes a Tweet from someone who announced they were hiring specific skilled professionals for an open position, and the author privately responded to that informal job posting. That is not a “cold call” or “cold email” just because you didn’t go through Indeed dot com.
But if you do send actual cold emails, then you undoubtedly have the prerogative to post and say that “<Company> Ghosted Me During the Hiring Process!!1” /s
Sending an unsolicited email to a person or a group is a cold email. There's nothing to bikeshed here.
I think the point is, that sending a join message to an open mail list, is not unsolicited.
I got a cold email recently and was happy to engage, but I warned them upfront that LLMs change the game, and asked for more info about their background (to authenticate them as a human). They replied with another unnecessarily long email that was light on details and reeked of AI Voice, so I ghosted at that point, unconvinced they were acting in good faith.
Demonstrating authenticity and effort are super important in this space.
That's been my biggest annoyance lately. Everyone's trying to AI these sorts of things, but for people who get a lot of these frequently, it's pretty easy to spot. Talk like a human and you can go pretty far, though.
You can also try a reply like "please send back a photo of yourself with a shoe balanced on top of your head" and see how they reply. The replies from a human who is going "wtf?" will be very different from an LLM.
I once called the phone number on a website for an obscure local event, and it happened to be a local business magnate's personal cell phone number, and he helped me out with my request, so that was awesome.
I cold emailed a researcher in Japan about gut bacteria e. Americana for cancer treatment and registering my dad for clinical trials as and when they happen. And hell yea - professor replied :)
So yes — just do it!
Things evolve though. Early 2000, I received a lot of reactions to cold emails (eg when organising events), but these days, it's rather rare. Even people I know might ignore my mails! One explanation I got is that there are a lot more phishing mails these days, and people have learnt to be suspicious.
Is human-like cold emails (with stuff like :D) better or worse than professionally written formal emails? Im a student and would like some tips. I know it depends on the situation but what would you rather see? And based on your experience, what would you respond to more?
Definitely short and informal. You should have a legitimate reason to email (like, tell the person genuinely why you respect them or what about them you like), and a clear ask if there is one (asking for help, looking for a job, etc).
Don't talk about yourself, except if it's directly relevant to them.
I can easily tell when someone wrote 100 of them generically, vs when it's genuine, and I'll always respond to the genuine ones.
(And to be clear, I'm referring to the type of cold emails Zach is... people wanting a genuine connection. This doesn't apply to trying to sell something.)
Best emails I've gotten are terse (nice subject line getting to the point) and a no-nonsense body.
I think trying to make a "playful" personality turns off some people and is more work than just getting to the point. Opening with "here's the thing I want/what I'm reaching out for". then reasons. Then close out with a thank you.
Added bonus: short emails tend to get replies more often in my experience.
You need to provide the reason in the first sentence. Sure, once in a while a do read some cold emails but most of the time if the one-line snippet in the list of all other messages doesn't provide a reason - it goes to the trash.
The most important thing is that you are really, truly engaged in trying to connect with the person. I've had great success with cold emails, but only because I write to people that I seriously want to get to know, even beyond just quick networking.
I’d rather see neither but if I must choose, formal it is.
I ignore cold emails anyway.
Fuck it, I feel the hype. Time to cold email some people a couple of tokens of appreciation. I don't expect anything, but they need to know the positive impact they've had.
Thanks once again HN, this is gonna be fun.
Also, feel free to reach out to me ;-)
On average it currently happens once per month (or every 2 months?) so I have the bandwidth atm, haha.
The most fun conversation was when I met a fairly good Haskell or Erlang programmer (I forgot) and we were talking about dating and I think, I made it click for him a bit. It probably only helped slightly but it helped and that felt good.
For people with dating problems, I've had them too. If I can help engineers to find their dream partners, even if it's just a little bit, that'll probably the most productive thing I'd do in my life anyway.
I've been out of the game for the past 4 years already, happily married nowadays, kinda made a mini science out of it, haha.
Also open to other topics, I love to learn about everything.
Now, I'm going to cold email a couple of people!
--
Edit: damn this is getting me emotional. It really presses the question who has had such a positive impact on my life that I feel the need for them to know that.
I'm literally writing mails now with stuff like "in 2006 you had a talk and it really helped me build the foundation of my current life. Thank you."
Epic.
My closest friendships and two relationships started with a cold email. I love when strangers write to me and I give them my full attention. I also write words of praise to bloggers. A simple heartfelt email goes a long way. An LLM-authored email goes right to spam.
I struggle to apply this openness to real life, where the rejection is a lot more instantaneous and awkward. All the data shows that it works and that failure won’t kill me, but my whole being is trying to stop me.
Any advice?
Do it despite the suck. At some point you grow indifferent to it. The point is not to avoid the discomfort but to make "rejection" feel like a meaningless prick. Like walking on grass with bare feet: yes, sometimes you step on a tiny stick or whatever, but walking in shoes instead would be such a waste of a pleasant experience. :)
That's in line with all the wisdom I've received. A rejection is not a measure of your worth, just the cost of doing business. After all I reject a lot of perfectly fine people for various reasons.
I met Zach wayyy back in 2016 via a code email to him! (hey Zach!)
See, it all worked out!
When something like this was happening to me, I heard people were saying "Oh, he is just lucky". It kinda made me a bit mad because of how much work I've put in a particular thing behind the scenes and in general how unlucky I was with many other things.
Then I stumbled upon the concept of "luck surface area" [1] and it's kinda clicked with me. Yes, luck is a factor, but you definitely can increase your chances. Cold emails from the post is one of such instruments.
[1] https://umbrex.com/resources/tools-for-thinking/what-is-luck...
Nice to see Zach still posting.
I have had reasonable success with cold emails. My favorite genre is every so often I email a musician or author whose works I tremendously enjoyed asking for a signed copy, an opinion, or simply to say thank you for having a profound influence on me. Some are very well known. But almost all reply with enthusiasm.
Here's my cold email story.
In the Netflix series The Good Place, there is an AI character named Janet, who helps assist people who have gone to that place where you go after you die.
One quirk when you're in the Good Place: you can't use swear words. If you try to say "fuck" it comes out "fork".
Janet is portrayed brilliantly by D'Arcy Carden. Her dad is Dennis Erokan, who published MicroTimes and BAM (Bay Area Music) Magazine and produced the Bammies award festival. MicroTimes was one of those big thick magazines like Computer Shopper, full of interesting ads and a few articles.
After I discovered this, I found Dennis' email and wrote to him:
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Hi Dennis!
Yes, I know it's usually D'Arcy who gets the autograph requests.
My friend Ro and I recently finished watching The Good Place. What a wonderful series!
I always enjoy learning about the people who worked to create a great show like this.
After a bit of research I was like "What the fork? Janet's real life dad is the MicroTimes guy!"
So I checked my archival drawer and found one of my old MicroTimes from 1996.
Ro lived in New York in the late 1980s, and she flew to SF a few of those years just to go to the Bammies.
Her secret hope was to somehow get acquainted with Steve Perry. But she did see Ted Nugent staring at her in a bookstore. So that was at least a consolation prize.
Ro's birthday is coming up later this month. I stealthily searched eBay and got the 1986 and 1988 BAM Magazines with the Bammies Scrapbooks.
I wonder if you could autograph these? I would be more than happy to take you out for lunch or dinner at any of your favorite places up in your neck of the woods. Or I could just bring them to your office or any location you want if that's more convenient for you.
And if we can work out a time when Ro could join us (probably easier on a weekend), she would be delighted to meet you!
---
Dennis was quite tickled by this. We took him to lunch at his favorite restaurant, he signed our MicroTimes and BAM magazines, and we all had a great time sharing stories about some of the people we knew.
It's the lottery, you can only win if you play
Cold outreach is great when it's personal.
SPAM isn't: I don't want automated cold outreach. I don't want something trying to fake making it look personal.
I wish that we could turn off email / phone where anyone can reach out to anyone, and instead make it so that you have to work through your network; and your network acts as the first filter. (And if some bozo in your network passes too much SPAM to you, you can block them.)
I once got a job by sending a cold email. I was overqualified and took a pay cut of more than 50%.
It was a stepping stone. I would rather have done it in my 20s than in my 50s, but I had been unemployed for a year.
When I had an academic job I used to receive cold emails from students in Asian countries. They uniformly came across as desperate.
No other way to initiate a conversation has a higher chance of being completely ignored.
I read a dozen inbound cold emails every day. I used to love it. I don't anymore, because every other single email uses The Sentence. Or, The Paragraph.
Whatever model these people use, it always always puts in The Sentence (I don't want to disclose it publicly! I'm running an experiment. I'll write it up when it concludes. :) ). Or, worse, The Paragraph.
Please use models to research people and learn about them. But please write the email yourself.
It's instantly obvious. And even though I do my best not to hold it against someone, I would be lying if I didn't say that it isn't a bit annoying.
Imagine reading endless variations of The Sentence 3,240 to 4,000 times a year. It feels straight out of the Twilight Zone.
There’s such an opportunity, it has never been easier to differentiate oneself now, all you have to do is ignore whatever online advice or LLMs say and do your own thing, it’s sad that almost nobody does it.
This makes me think of an email support request I got at a job a long time ago that began with the words "Fucking cunts how fucking dare you", before gradually cooling down and gesturing broadly at what the problem was, without ever reaching for the crutch of punctuation. I printed it out and stuck it on the wall.
HN reader, now you too know what it takes to make a powerful human impression via email.
"without ever reaching for the crutch of punctuation" how delightful
Hey areoform,
I just read your post on hacker news about people using The Sentence, and couldn't agree more!
Hmm...
do you have a blog or newsletter to read about this experiment once it concludes?
[dead]
My biggest mistake in life was thinking too big and aiming too high. Now I absolutely hate the saying "If you want to reach the moon, aim for the stars." This belief ruined me.
The people who were writing desperate emails and bending over to get a wage-slave job are much better off now.
Meanwhile I was trying to raise funding for big ideas from big investors; it was a complete waste of time.
Reality is "If you want to reach the moon, aim for the clouds." Then you have a better chance of actually achieving something, even if it's not your first preference.
Do you find this to be true in romance as well?
Makes me think. I can't be as confident there as I got lucky in that respect so my perception is distorted towards "it's easy". Based on what I observe from other people, I would think so as well.
I think relationships are heavily based on who you are and what you project and it's extremely nuanced. Some trivial physical or personality feature that you have can radically shape people's perception of you and there's often nothing you can do about that.
Sometimes a (perceived) flaw that you have can actually work in your favor as the other person may see it as a benefit. Relationships are as much about attracting the right people as they are about repelling the wrong people.
I hired someone when we were contemplating a Linux version of our product. The unsolicited email I received just radiated passion and interest. Easiest decision ever.
when I started my vidalia onion project, I cold called the vidalia onion committee, explained my domain purchase and rough plan, and asked if I could stop by their office to say hello & see if there were ways i could serve that industry. They said 'sure', so I did, and then I began selling onions on the internet.
<script>alert(2)</script>
I agree wholeheartedly with this article and this is something I'm struggling with my daughter about: the worst thing anybody can say is no and in some cases, they already said no. If you ask (or ask again), you might get a really good answer or more.
Build up with small challenges. Not sure how old your daughter is, but, for example, our 7 year got a gift card. They wanted to know how much it was worth -- so they were the ones who had to go up to the counter to ask the employee. Just practicing going into uncomfortable or unfamiliar situations is valuable, and leads to confidence for the bigger stuff.
My parents did this exact thing to me growing up and I hated it at the time. I now see how valuable it was and will doing the same with my kids.
Zach is good people. I still can’t believe I met him at a random meetup in SF once and he walked up to me to say hi and I didn’t connect the dots until many hours later that he’s the Zach whose blog I’ve been reading on and off my whole career and is one of the inspirations that got me to Silicon Valley.
Zach if you’re reading this, thanks
These little stories, though not my original intention with the post, are very lovely to read!
I thought the post will be about writing cold emails :)
> You can’t win unless you skate to where the puck is going to be buying a lotto ticket.
As a teen and in my early 20s I was a pretty skeptical / negative dude. I probably would be on team "not worth it, don't bother" when it comes to cold email.
I was also kinda bad in school (not really trying and not doing well) and so on.
Buddy who worked outsourced tech support with me while he took school seriously and I did not graduated (while I did not) and got a job. They had a referral bonus at his company and he convinced to "just apply". I hadn't graduated and really wasn't making much progress or very impressive, but I did it just for the interview experience.
I got the job, the guy who hired me later said "you seemed honest". My whole tech career took off from there, good money, I got lucky and worked with good people. Later after age 40 after a layoff I decided to try a coding bootcamp when folks were downplaying those programs. Some rando small company took a chance on me and didn't pay much but it was a job and I took a chance on them.
Nearly 10 years later I'm happy with my work, doing good financially, all because I took a couple shots.
The local university has a coach who is big on "failure is progress" and other cute slogans, and in my collage years I would have been cynical brushed it off as "just words". But it was also just words when the guy told "just apply".
I watch that coach's team and there are kids out there failing, I think they're some of the bravest guys. They daring to bust their ass year round and maybe just fail in front of tens of thousands people. I wouldn't have done it at their age, but they're taking their shot.
It took me a long time to understand the value (and low cost) of taking a shot, and what "just words" really represents.
though - I'm not as successful as Zach, but damn cold emails & cold phone calls have helped me a ton.
Thanks to the strangers that helped me out while not owing me anything.
it's the same reason - I try respond to every cold email.
If you don’t run for the bus, you won’t catch it!
The bus runs so I don't have to
Also known as spam.
First email, then phone. Always works for me.
I think another aspect of this is that the author experienced positive feedback from this approach early on. Rejection is tough to deal with, but having an instance that turned out well in mind is a huge benefit.
The author is doing his article a disservice by calling this cold email. He just sent a few one-off emails to strangers. That's quite different than the BDR team at Startup Du Jour scraping LinkedIn and blasting out an enless stream of "hope this message finds you well" slop.
I'd wager that the majority of us do not differentiate between cold email and spam, especially in the AI era.
No, it isn't different. What you're describing is a cold email that some people might not feel is spam, and one that everyone agrees is spam.
"Cold email" - I hate this term. Call it what it is. Spam.
And no, personalizing your spam doesn't make it any less spam, especially with AI these days, but this is a hot take for a VC forum whose companies survive on spam.
Shame to send cold emails to strangers.
Send me a "cold email" or any other sort of spam, and I will never see anything more from you, as your address will be blocked. Spamming is against the law here in EU, and for a good reason.
And for the record, it's fine for people to set their boundaries wherever they want. All the author loses in this case is a bit of time writing one email
Are you a gatekeeper behind which any fantastic opportunities lie?
No, just a retired programmer, and sick and tired of all the spam I keep receiving. Don't have "fantastic opportunities" and am not looking for any.