Interview, Fireside Chat
How To Engage With An Investor with Level CEO Sam Corcos
- Founders are expected to extract less value than desired from investor networks due to the scarcity of those who actively do so.
- Failure is predicted for founders who assume investors possess their level of business context or can read their minds.
- Passive criticism of investor engagement without proactive efforts to engage will likely result in unmet value expectations.
- Responses to investor offers of help with "I don't know" indicate a failure to identify specific team needs, reducing the likelihood of assistance.
- Investors may filter out and ignore requests that contain excessive noise rather than focused signal.
- Investors may facilitate connections with specific individuals only if the request identifies the target contact or potential for conversion.
- Highly targeted requests are expected to yield higher conversion rates compared to broad, vague asks.
- Specific, concrete requests are projected to generate immediate responses, whereas vague asks may result in a 0% conversion rate.
- Creating easy-to-execute requests is expected to increase conversion rates significantly due to cognitive "chunking bias."
- Sending more than 3,000 specific investor asks in outreach is expected to result in a conversion rate of approximately 50% from that group.
- Sending five requests per year is predicted to yield a hit rate lower than average while generating significantly more value.
- Sharing a Google Sheet with specific hyperlinks to desired contacts is expected to create a social competition dynamic, increasing invitations to future rounds.
- Listing names alongside contacts on shared sheets is projected to prompt other investors to include the founder in more rounds due to perceived dedication.
- Researching mutual connections on LinkedIn and requesting outreach to specific one-degree-of-separation contacts is expected to increase the likelihood of delivery.
- Founders performing the most work for their investors are predicted to have a higher likelihood of investor delivery on requests.
- Setting clear early expectations regarding investor engagement and email response rates is expected to help identify incompatible investor matches.