Vinod Khosla recently dropped a deceptively simple idea that might be the most under-the-radar, highest-leverage move in professional life: learn how to engineer takeaway mails.
He says, a founder’s goal from any presentation to a VC is to engineer the email the VC writes about you after you leave the room.
Your VC sponsor isn’t just evaluating you—they need to sell you internally to other partners. Make their job easy by giving them compelling ammunition for that pitch email.
But this isn’t unique to venture capital. In almost every professional situation, you’re never selling to the person in the room. You’re selling to the room they walk into after you leave.
Your freelance pitch goes from the marketing manager to her VP, who decides on the budget. Your job interview goes from the hiring manager to a Slack thread with her boss. Your software demo goes from your champion to a procurement committee.
The takeaway mail is the artifact that travels when you can’t. So, how do you construct the takeaway mail?
Here’s what Khosla says, expanded to non-VC situations
- Write headlines before you touch a slide. State reasons, not topics. In a Word doc. His test: “I want to invest if this is true.” If that feeling doesn’t form, no deck will rescue it. Works beyond VC. Three reasons someone should hire you, buy from you, or partner with you.
- Decisions are emotional. Logic is retrofit. Investors have two emotions — fear and greed. They build conviction emotionally, then build the rational case after. Always that order. Hiring committees, procurement reviews, partnerships — same wiring. You’re engineering a feeling, then handing them evidence to defend it.
- Open for a kindergartner. Five minutes in, if the investor doesn’t know what you do, you’re done. They’ve heard 30 pitches that month. They won’t work to figure out whether to care. Neither the recruiter nor the VP will skim your proposal.
- Superlatives are not proof. Don’t say “world-class team” when you don’t have one. Khosla’s alternative: “Here’s the team I want to build when we have the funding.”
- Surface objections, or they’ll invent worse ones. Jack Dorsey opened the original Square deck with 140 reasons it might fail. He only talked through two, but the gesture built trust. Hide the gap,s and the other side fills them with their worst assumptions.
- Bullshit meters are finely calibrated. A startup claimed a $500 billion market, when it was probably $10 billion, which would have been more than enough to invest. When challenged, they defended the number instead of conceding. The pitch never recovered. One inflated claim contaminates everything around it.
- One message per slide. Five-second test. Show it to a stranger. Take it away. Ask what they saw. If they cannot tell you the core message, it’s a waste. Slides, proposals, LinkedIn summaries — same rule.
- Seduce before you prove. Khosla once rang an associate a year after backing Square, asking why they’d invested. The reply: “Absolute seduction. There wasn’t enough meat to have really invested, but the seduction seduced us.” Detail belongs in the appendix. First, make them want to get there.
- Give them a floor, not just a ceiling. A fusion startup pitched him: “Even if we fail at fusion, we’ll have the most powerful magnet company, worth billions.”
From my multiple re-readings of Vinod Khosla’s talk: Nail Your Raise: Luring VCs