Perfect letter to investor

Translation of David Cohen's article: cult personality, founder and director of TechStars (one of the best American startup accelerators), venture investor. Describes the most "correct" letter, which he ever received from a startup, looking for advice and money. On the topic of the day Russian startups.

As you can guess, I get a bunch of letters. At the last check, there were more than 500 of them per day and 50 of them from people I do not know. They often ask for advice or want me to pay attention to their startup in order to invest. And that's fine, I try to answer everything. But one day I received a very excellent letter. It did not sound like a “cold bell”, it was carefully thought out and very relevant. And here is its content:

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Hi David,
I have a question for you on the topic of a startup, which, I think, was like it was created for you.
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We are starting the CriticalArc project, whose main goal is to solve the problem of broadcasting status and location in real time. Things like imprisonment and critical events. We develop a very strong back-end to provide mission-critical applications. We have a start page (www.criticalarc.com) and plan to present our first system at a startup event here in Sydney on March 31st. Now we attract customers and program as damned.

I know that you have experience in control systems for working with Pinpoint and I’m interested in your opinion in this case: do we, as a startup looking for investment and a scalable business model, focus better on infrastructure or on solving a specific problem? Or is it better to start shooting with two hands and decide on what exactly to concentrate on a little later?

In other words, ideally, we should be SimpleGeo (but with real-time mode) or should we provide a solution on the type of what you did with RightCad in PinPint?

I will be glad to hear what you think!

As a bonus question: it would be interesting to know how many projects in this area you are now meeting? Geolocation is the same trend theme as Groupon clones, which you probably hear pitches every day? Or do you think that not all the places are occupied here yet? Somewhat hard to judge this from Australia.

Thanks for taking the time to read! I guess you are now falling from your feet from viewing applications for TechStars. Good luck with the summer program!

Respectfully,
Glen Farrant
CEO of CriticalArc

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What I like about this letter:

• He is familiar with my background and formulates the question using the relevant context.
• He understands who I am (TechStars link)
• He understands that I see a million Groupon clones that annoy me, to put it mildly.
• It is clear that he is generally an intelligent guy who knows how to articulate his thoughts clearly and simply.
• He speaks the same language as me. He mentioned Pinpoint and the summer program (despite the fact that he is in Australia, where it is winter). He refers to SimpleGeo - one of my investment projects. And he formulated the question so that I just answer it.

Of course, I try to answer all the letters that I receive, especially if it is from an entrepreneur. But it really was special and made me want to help. Therefore, I decided to share and tell what was the reason.