The bar for early-stage enterprise sales is much higher than many founders realize. I often get cold emails from founders asking for help—advice, airline intros etc. I want to help, and I do respond to great cold emails—but I am often disappointed at how little effort has been put in. It's common that founders haven't done their homework on me or on the person/company they're asking for an intro to. No, I am not going to forward a generic email to my most important customer, which links to a demo that doesn't apply to their use case and demonstrates zero homework to understand them, their business, and how your product helps. When I pursued Virgin during YC, I'd read Richard Branson's book. I'd studied the history of Virgin Atlantic. I knew what he cared about and what mattered to the airline. I showed up with a model of the Overture airplane beautifully painted in his favorite livery I loved our airplane model so much—it was the only one we had—that I didn't gift it to him. Fortunately, I realized this was dumb, went back, found his EA, and got her to hand deliver it to him. Had I not, probably there would be no Virgin deal during batch and Boom likely would have died long ago. It's a very noisy world out there—particularly with the explosion of AI drivel—and founders need to demonstrate that they've done an exceptional amount of homework when they reach out. End of rant.