How Cold Emails Changed My Life and Built a Career
The Cold Email
I attribute three major life changes to cold outreach, from getting into Carnegie Mellon to joining GitHub and owning soccer clubs. While I acknowledge survivor bias and forget the many failed attempts, the successful connections prove that genuine, respectful contact often opens unexpected doors. I encourage others to reach out with sincerity, while promising to always welcome cold emails myself to pay it forward.
You can't win unless you skate to where the puck is going to be buying a lotto ticket.
- tombert
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!
- seanhunter
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 gu […]
- gerdesj
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!
- assimpleaspossi
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.
- m4tthumphrey
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.
- Ozzie_osman
> 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.
- cebert
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.
- mettamage
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!
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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.