Cardinal Sin #3: Not Paying Attention

If you look at my contact page, I have 3 simple steps that I require all founders sending me pitches to follow. There’s a problem though: out of the hundreds of email pitches I get every week, I have yet to receive one from someone who followed every single instruction.

You ask for a short pitch but get the National fucking Archive instead.

News flash: adding more words to your email won’t make you or your startup sound any better and it sure as hell won’t help convince me to give you my money.

If anything, I am deeply insulted every time this happens. Why? Because it shows me that you don’t respect my intelligence. It’s almost as if you are saying “my guidelines are obviously better than yours so I’m going to send you this pitch MY WAY and ignore everything you said”.

I am not trying to be some kind of pitch nazi here but there is a good reason why I put these guidelines in place; I get too many emails. Time is a valuable commodity and I rather use it to focus on, oh gee, I dunno, STARTUPS THAT DON’T ACTUALLY SUCK???!

Besides obvious time constraints, the thing that also buggers me is the fact that you don’t care enough to read and listen. If you can’t listen to me, how will you be able to listen to your customers? What about your board? Your inability to listen makes me wonder about your character and how capable you are of being a CEO/leader.