Inside a VC’s Inbox: Why Some Emails Get Answered, and Most Don’t

Picture a founder with a product that works. Her first customers like it, her numbers are moving in the right direction, and she has spent three weeks polishing a thirty-slide pitch deck. She pulls two hundred investors from a public database, writes a four-paragraph email that opens with the history of the company, and sends it to every name on the list.

Two hundred emails. Three investors reply. All three pass.

She concludes that the market is closed, or that her idea is not big enough. So she adds five slides to the deck, adjusts the email, and sends it to another hundred names. The result is the same. Months pass. The runway gets shorter, and she still has no idea why nobody is saying yes.

Nothing was wrong with her company. What went wrong was everything around it: an email that was too long, a list that was too broad, a deck that was too heavy, and possibly a round that was too early. None of that shows up in the rejection, because the rejection, when it arrives at all, is silence.

Stories like this are the ones Valentine Murzinkou hears every day. He is a Founding Partner of a new VC firm, currently in stealth mode, and has spent about six years on the other side of the table. Last week we asked him what actually happens when a deck lands in an investor’s inbox at Inside the VC Mindset, the fireside chat we hosted at Vector 3 together with Go Global World and Selective VC.

One number he shared sums up the problem:

This article is about why founders get ignored, and how to make it easy for the right investor to say yes. We cover nine mistakes, from believing the product will speak for itself to assuming geography is a wall, with Valentine’s perspective.

Most technical founders quietly believe that a great product is the best pitch. It is the instinct that carried them through their first customers, and it is the first one the venture market corrects.

When I asked Valentine how he evaluates the product, his answer was blunt. Outside of deep tech, product is not the deciding factor at the earliest stages.

What decides is pattern recognition. A previous exit, a top university, years inside a recognized corporation. Those are the patterns investors have learned to trust. A founder without them is not out of the game, but has to compensate.

From the entrepreneurs’ perspective, this means that the competition is fierce. Ideas are commodities. Good companies too. Thus, to gain momentum in fundraising, founders must stand out. As Valentine puts it: “To stand out, to really attract the capital, you need to do something outstanding.”

The second mistake happens before a single email is written. Many founders raise because they believe that is what a startup is supposed to do, not because the business actually needs venture capital.

For a founder with an MVP, a little traction, and no network or brand name, Valentine was direct: pre-seed is close to a closed door, and he called it “really impossible.” Seed is more reachable if you can show exponential growth, but still hard.

The reason is the size of the outcomes funds now chase. “Right now, VCs, especially big VCs, they aim for a trillion-dollar exit, not a billion-dollar exit like it was before.” The test he suggests is simple:

“Can your company get to at least 100 million in revenue?” If the honest answer is no, the venture market will not fund you, and that is fine. “You can still build a successful business that will pay you dividends.” The alternative is worse than most founders admit. Take venture money without a venture-scale business, and you are obligated to grow at a pace you cannot sustain, and “you can still come with $0 earned from your equity.”

I see a version of this with the founders we advise. Capital can cover a weakness in the business model for a few months. It does not fix it.

Founders without a warm network assume cold outreach is a long shot. Valentine does not. “Our main sourcing channel in all of my funds was outbound to founders.” And when he helped startups raise, “cold outreach works perfectly if done well.” The key is in the last four words.

Done well means short. His first rule: “Don’t write novels in the email. Be very, very short.” The perfect message should state in a few lines what the entrepreneur is building, her background, traction, and anything that stands out.

That is the whole message: who you are, what you build, why you, your traction, and a request for a call. Then follow up, but not forever. “One, two follow-ups.” If nothing comes back after that, the silence is the answer, and it is better to accept it and move on than to keep pushing.

This was the part of the conversation where the gap between founders and investors showed up most clearly. Founders see a list of funds. Investors see a thesis, a stage, and a sector, and they notice immediately when yours does not match.

The payoff for doing this work is measurable.

The cost of skipping it is also clear. Valentine told us that ghosting is common in the market, and that he does it himself when a message clearly missed its target. His example was an agriculture startup in Mumbai writing to a fund that invests in AI. “Why are you writing to me? I’m not your ICP.” He added that with a hundred messages a day, prioritizing is the only way to cope, and that many funds, his own included, now use AI tools to manage the inbox and even to run early evaluations. A vague, mass-blast email is the easiest thing in the world for a filter to drop.

Cold email is the simplest first step, not the only one. Valentine was explicit that there is no single playbook. “Just go and do it, and go in all of the channels from cold outreach to events to social media to warm intros, whatever you can get. You just need to be disciplined.”

Visibility matters more than most founders think, because investors are watching for signals long before they read a deck. “All of the investors, they track a lot of signals of the companies. For example, new hires, maybe web traffic growth, and social media activity too, so you need to post a lot.” A post that goes viral is a data point an investor can see without ever opening your email. Add conferences and tech weeks to the mix, and you create the many small touchpoints that turn a stranger into a familiar name.

The reader most founders imagine, someone who will read a thirty-slide deck carefully from start to finish, is not real. Valentine called the pitch deck “the most commoditized thing in venture right now.” His point is that a good one is no longer a competitive advantage. “You can literally just Google how to build a perfect pitch deck, or ask Claude, and it will build you a perfect pitch deck consisting of 10 to 15 slides.”

What he wants to see is short and predictable: problem, solution, market estimation, team, traction, and the details of the round. The slide that matters most is traction. “Every VC is going straight to the traction slide. VCs spend seconds on a pitch deck and most of the time on the traction slide.” So the conclusion is uncomfortable but useful: “No one is reading long pitch decks.” If your strongest evidence is on slide twenty-two, it might as well not exist.

Most founders take a pass personally and walk away. Valentine suggests the opposite. When an investor tells you it is not a fit, whether because of the market, the traction, or something else, the best next move is to ask.

Founders who ask have an edge over the ones who do not. The conversation can develop into feedback, which the founder can then analyze and implement in their companies. Investors can point the founders to a better approach or to someone else worth speaking with. It’s worth mentioning that not every VC behaves this way, though.

A pass is not necessarily final, either. Valentine’s team keeps declined companies in a CRM, and a founder who returns months later with strong new numbers gets a fresh conversation. “Wow, that’s great. Let’s talk.” There is a reason for that openness. He explained that the worst outcome for a VC is not a portfolio company that fails, but a deal passed on that later became hot. A passed deal that raises a big Series A is the one investors remember.

Investors are not only evaluating growth. They are also asking whether they can trust you. The obvious red flags come first. “If he’s not polite, if he’s rude, angry, that’s obviously a red flag.” So does a founder whose story changes once you read the company materials. “He’s telling you one thing. You dig into the company materials, and you see another.”

The less comfortable part is fraud. Valentine said that “ A non-lead investor sees only what the founder chooses to send. That is why track record matters so much. “We’re trying to invest in the founders that have some track record proving that they’re not a fraud.” References from past colleagues and bosses, previous companies, a visible history of doing what you said you would do: these are what lower the investor’s risk before the first call.

An audience member based in India asked whether he should raise in the US, the UK, or somewhere else. Valentine’s answer was that it depends on where you sell and where you are incorporated, but the door is open. “A lot of VCs, they have, let’s say, a global mandate or at least local offices.” The task is to find the funds that actively deploy in your region.

He also pointed to an advantage founders in lower-cost markets often overlook. If your revenue comes from the US, “you have this… arbitrage when you can spend less and earn more.” You hire where talent is cheaper and sell to what he called “the richest customers.”

When I look back at the conversation, every mistake on this list has the same root. Each one makes the investor’s job harder. A long email, a wrong-fit target, a heavy deck, a founder who disappears after a no. They all ask the investor to do work that you should have done for them.

As a founder, how do I make it easy for the right investor to understand, in thirty seconds, why this company is worth a call? That question is hard to answer. It is also the one that gets engagement.

A big thank you to Valentine Murzinkou for his candor, to Danil Kislinskiy and the Go Global World team, to Selective VC, to Alexandr Zlotnikov, and to everyone who joined and asked sharp questions.

Murzinkou, V. (2026, October 29). Inside the VC Mindset. Hosted by Vector 3, co-hosted by Go Global World and Selective VC.