I think this is a pretty good approach to cold emails for a company like Stripe. If your company doesn't have the name recognition of a Stripe, however, the "if

I think this is a pretty good approach to cold emails for a company like Stripe. If your company doesn't have the name recognition of a Stripe, however, the "if you're up for it, I'd love to grab coffee next week to chat" close in an introductory email is probably going to be a lot harder to pull off with most candidates because you almost certainly won't be able to establish that the value of the meeting might reasonably be higher than the cost of the recipient's time. This is why in-person networking is so important for most startups. To make the most of it, everybody in the organization should understand that networking is an opportunity (to meet potential customers, partners and employees) and they should be prepared to articulate a compelling description of what the company does. It's a gentle version of "always be closing." Unfortunately, you don't need to go to many events to discover that a lot of startup founders and employees aren't effective at communicating what their companies do and why the person they're talking to should be interested in learning more. And then they wonder why they have a hard time attracting talent.