Over the weekend I got an email from an entrepreneur wanting to come pitch his startup to USV. He copied my partner Andy on the email.
I immediately thought “I’m going to let Andy reply to this one.” But a couple days later the email still was sitting there in my inbox unreplied to. So then I thought “Andy is probably waiting for me to reply to this.”
Finally I shot Andy an email and we compared notes on it and then I replied to the email.
But it doesn’t always work out like that. I’ve seen a similar situation end with neither partner replying to the email and it goes unresponded to.
I call this situation email hot potato and entrepreneurs should avoid it by sending an email to only one partner at a VC firm, not two or more.
A good alternative is to send an email to one partner and copying an analyst at the firm as well. The analysts are the most diligent people in a VC firm about staying on top of inbound deal flow and they will often step in and reply to an email that a partner has missed or forgotten about.
The important thing here is to avoid confusing who has the responsibility to reply to the email by putting multiple responsible parties on it. While it would seem that it would increase the likelihood of getting a reply, it actually reduces it.
