Week 1: Why Cold Email Works
The three cold emails that worked, and the constraint the semester builds on.
8 February 2027
Most cold email gets deleted unread. This lecture looks at three cases where it didn’t: a stranger read a cold email, believed it, and acted on it. The rest of the course is built on the question those three cases answer.
Before the lecture
This is just to get a quick understanding before the lecture. The examples and the rest are in the lecture, so it’s advisable you attend.
In brief#
The failure mode this week sets up isn’t in this week. It’s the baseline every later week’s failure violates: can a reader who owes you nothing decide what to do with your email in a few seconds? Ghulati, Janoch and Field all cleared that bar, and none of them did it with charm. Every failure named from week 2 onward is a specific way of losing those few seconds instead.
Outline#
- why cold email still gets used at all, despite most of it going unread
- Ghulati → Cuban: a plain problem statement and a sizeable ask, no charm
- Janoch → investors: why the second, longer email outperformed the first
- Field’s early Figma outreach: cold email as user acquisition, not just fundraising
- what the three have in common: the reader is given enough to decide with
- how the next eleven weeks are organised: individual failures, then the reader’s economics, then genre confusion, then the ethical edge
Before next week: read the assessment overview. All three assessments draw on the taxonomy this course builds week by week, so it helps to know what you’re building toward from the start.