--- title: The Cold Email | daily.dev description: A personal essay reflecting on how cold outreach — emails, DMs, and letters — led to three major life changes: getting off a college waitlist, landing a job at... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-cold-email-c4iw6n7m8 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Cold Email | daily.dev og:description: A personal essay reflecting on how cold outreach — emails, DMs, and letters — led to three major life changes: getting off a college waitlist, landing a job at... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-cold-email-c4iw6n7m8 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/c4iW6n7m8.png og:image:alt: The Cold Email og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Cold Email **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A personal essay reflecting on how cold outreach — emails, DMs, and letters — led to three major life changes: getting off a college waitlist, landing a job at GitHub, and becoming a part-owner of a soccer club. The author acknowledges survivor bias but argues the failed cold outreach attempts are simply forgotten, making the wins feel disproportionate. The core advice: reach out genuinely and with real interest, accept cold outreach from others as a way to pay it forward, and recognize that the roles of sender and recipient are interchangeable over time. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 109 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-30). **TL;DR:** The community is broadly enthusiastic about cold emailing as a career and life tool, sharing many personal success stories, though a recurring concern is that AI-generated emails are rapidly degrading the signal-to-noise ratio and making genuine outreach harder to distinguish from spam. **Sentiment:** 65% positive · 25% mixed · 10% skeptical **The case for** - Genuine, human-written cold emails have historically opened unexpected doors in careers, relationships, and learning. - Tech 'celebrities' are often less famous than people assume and are frequently happy to respond to thoughtful outreach. - Showing authentic interest and enthusiasm — rather than going through formal channels — can be a decisive differentiator. - The concept of 'luck surface area' resonates: cold outreach increases the surface area for positive chance encounters. - Physical letters (typed or handwritten) stand out even more in the current environment. **The pushback** - AI-generated cold emails are now widespread and easy to spot, eroding trust and making recipients more likely to ignore or block all cold outreach. - Volume of cold emails (dozens per day for some) has pushed many people to treat them all as spam regardless of quality. - Tailored, personalized approaches are now sometimes flagged as suspicious or assumed to be AI-generated by HR. - The hiring process has added layers (ATS, LinkedIn, recruiters) that make direct outreach harder to route to decision-makers. - Some recipients simply block all unsolicited email, especially in jurisdictions where spam laws are strict. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Commenters share numerous personal anecdotes of cold emails changing their careers or lives, while also warning that AI-generated outreach is rapidly undermining the effectiveness and goodwill around the practice. **Hottest debate:** Whether AI-generated personalized emails are distinguishable from genuine human outreach, and whether cold email as a concept has effectively become synonymous with spam. **Open questions** - How can recipients reliably authenticate that a cold email is human-written and genuine in the AI era? - Will in-person networking fully replace cold email as AI spam floods inboxes? - Is there a way to preserve the value of cold outreach as a norm when bad actors have industrialized it? **Highlights** > Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous, and as such are generally pretty happy to respond to emails. In ~2014 I sent an email to Joe Armstrong (one of the creators of Erlang) asking some questions about concurrency because I still didn't fully understand why Erlang was supposed to be better for it. I expected him to just point me to an FAQ or simply not respond [1], but instead he wrote a very long, detailed explanation about the rationale of Erlang's design. It was well-written and it made a lot of things "click" in my brain. That simple act by Joe was extremely instrumental in my career, I think for the better. I became very interested in Erlang, but also just concurrency theory and distributed systems, and I would like to think I almost understand it now :) He and I would exchange emails occasionally over the next few years and he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about programming, Erlang, and people using it, and despite me barely knowing the guy, I was genuinely pretty sad when he passed away in 2019. I think about that a lot; if I hadn't sent a dumb cold email my entire life would likely be very different. [1] Which, to be clear, would have been perfectly fine! > — [tombert on hackernews · 8 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104838) > I read a dozen inbound cold emails every day. I used to love it. I don't anymore, because every other single email uses The Sentence. Or, The Paragraph. Whatever model these people use, it always always puts in The Sentence (I don't want to disclose it publicly! I'm running an experiment. I'll write it up when it concludes. :) ). Or, worse, The Paragraph. Please use models to research people and learn about them. But please write the email yourself. It's instantly obvious. And even though I do my best not to hold it against someone, I would be lying if I didn't say that it isn't a bit annoying. Imagine reading endless variations of The Sentence 3,240 to 4,000 times a year. It feels straight out of the Twilight Zone. > — [areoform on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104194) > One thing about this is you never can tell how one thing will lead to another, so even if you don’t get a good response to your cold email, if you do it well, it can still unlock doors later on that you never expected to. To illustrate this I’m going to share a personal anecdote that actually isn’t a cold email, but it’s similar enough that hopefully it demonstrates the point. I made the crucial connection in a meeting, but it could just as well have happened from an email. I was co-head of a startup that built enterprise saas risk software of a highly specialised type and one of our investors convinced me to take a meeting with a very successful and highly-regarded hedge fund. I was expecting a very initial call, but when I got on the phone it was just me, the COO, the chief investment officer, their head of trading and their CTO. So pretty much the top of the house. Now, I could have just gone straight for the big pitch and tried to sell them on our solution but it was super obvious right at the beginning of the call that we were solving a problem they just didn’t have, and there was no pivot we could make that would make our software relevant for them. So I did the high-integrity thing (even though we were pretty desperate for clients) and said that to them, thanked them for their time and ended the call cordially, but early. Years later I got a cold call from a recruiter working for two founders looking for a CTO for a fintech. Turns out she was the wife of one of the guys on the call that day and he had told her about it, said he had been impressed by how I handled the situation, so when the opportunity arose I ended up on the shortlist (and got the gig btw) for a job I would never even have known existed yet alone applied for. The point is sometimes if you just do the thing it may not even work out in the immediate short term in an obvious way, but could have positive long term ramifications that you can’t necessarily know ahead of time, whereas if you do nothing, nothing will happen. > — [seanhunter on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49106865) > My biggest mistake in life was thinking too big and aiming too high. Now I absolutely hate the saying "If you want to reach the moon, aim for the stars." This belief ruined me. The people who were writing desperate emails and bending over to get a wage-slave job are much better off now. Meanwhile I was trying to raise funding for big ideas from big investors; it was a complete waste of time. Reality is "If you want to reach the moon, aim for the clouds." Then you have a better chance of actually achieving something, even if it's not your first preference. At one time I turned down an offer from Plaid in its early days after speaking with the CEO because I didn't want to move to the US. Then turned down an offer from the CEO of early stage AppSumo for the same reason over video chat. Then I had a job offer from Canva when it was worth $40 million USD valuation, again, after meeting both co-founders and their lead investor but I didn't follow up. I was waiting on them to send me an offer. I probably got outcompeted behind the scenes by someone who sent a cold email and got on their knees. I didn't understand how important social connections were. I thought talent and hard work mattered more than it did. > — [jongjong on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49107435) > When something like this was happening to me, I heard people were saying "Oh, he is just lucky". It kinda made me a bit mad because of how much work I've put in a particular thing behind the scenes and in general how unlucky I was with many other things. Then I stumbled upon the concept of "luck surface area" [1] and it's kinda clicked with me. Yes, luck is a factor, but you definitely can increase your chances. Cold emails from the post is one of such instruments. [1] https://umbrex.com/resources/tools-for-thinking/what-is-luck... > — [id00 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49105740) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103089) · 60 points · 109 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Are Tech giants killing cold outreach?](https://daily.dev/posts/are-tech-giants-killing-cold-outreach--nax48ys7m) · The Next Web · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [How I actually get good advice](https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-actually-get-good-advice-rnilcqsqy) · Tech Lead Digest · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why 99% of Cold Emails to CISOs Fail \(And the Surprising Truth About How They Actually Buy\)](https://daily.dev/posts/why-99-of-cold-emails-to-cisos-fail-and-the-surprising-truth-about-how-they-actually-buy--n6oe4vrxq) · Security Boulevard · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#networking](https://daily.dev/tags/networking) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-cold-email-c4iw6n7m8) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Cold Email","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-cold-email-c4iw6n7m8","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-cold-email-c4iw6n7m8"},"datePublished":"2026-07-29T23:12:22.830Z","dateModified":"2026-07-30T09:30:52.659Z","description":"A personal essay reflecting on how cold outreach — emails, DMs, and letters — led to three major life changes: getting off a college waitlist, landing a job at...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/7cba8781385068d0d40cf55885219132?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/7cba8781385068d0d40cf55885219132?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-cold-email-c4iw6n7m8","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"career,networking","timeRequired":"PT6M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"The Cold Email"}]} ```