I was just on the receiving end of one of these, but it didn't quite work the same way. The email started out mentioning posts of mine on HN (met the first cri

I was just on the receiving end of one of these, but it didn't quite work the same way. The email started out mentioning posts of mine on HN (met the first criteria, proof-of-work) and how their company was using that technology, which was effective and hooked me into reading the email and not immediately deleting it; but then went into a paragraph describing their company (didn't meet the second, describing what your company does). It did come from their CEO (so, met the third). Up to now, not too bad, although it was a little long and so starts to violate the guideline about length. The difference came at the end of the email, where instead of outreaching for me directly, the CEO was looking for my help in filling two engineering positions they have. It wasn't couched as "we're interested in you and possibly someone else if you know anyone," it was "I'm looking for your help in filling these positions." I had a slight negative reaction to this - why should I help you with your recruiting, when I'm not involved in what you're doing? (I should point out that I'm not really the target audience for the type of person they're looking for, either) I wish this company all the best, but I don't feel like I need to help with their recruiting. I haven't replied back to the guy and probably won't do anything else with it. (although he'll see this post, which I'm obviously ok with) The other wrinkle was (and this is really minor), in the 'proof-of-work' section, he mentioned seeing a post of mine about OCaml. This threw me for a minute, as I haven't written anything on HN specifically about OCaml and I'm not even an OCaml programmer or involved in that community. Closest I could find was a post I made about type theory, on a story about OCaml, where I said "well, this isn't OCaml, but..." It probably impacted my overall feeling about the cold email in a negative way. edit: I will say that I did get a cold email once from a Google recruiter, and he pretty much followed Stripe's guide. He got a positive response from me, including a good follow-up phone conversation. I wasn't willing to move to California though so that ended things pretty quickly, but I did appreciate the guy's effort.