[nbarry]

> Don't explain what your company does. ... Google would never send someone an email saying "I work at Google, a search company in Mountain View which is organizing the world's information".

The Google comparison is a poor one, since Google is extraordinarily well known, and most start-ups aren't. And even they do describe the team each position is on, at least on its job postings.

If I were getting enough cold emails that I wanted to filter some of them out, I'd be likely to avoid emails that made me do work to research what a company does. A brief sentence about what they do, and why the recruiter/CEO/etc. thinks I'm a good match, would go a long way toward getting that coffee date.

[gdb]

There's definitely a tradeoff there — the flip side is that after reading a bunch of company descriptions, they all start to blend together. So counterintuitively, a full description can cause your email to be ignored. In my mind, it's all about creating a (genuine!) connection with the person, and being cautious about consuming their time.

[nbarry]

Hmm, good point. Maybe there's a sweet spot there where you give enough detail to explain what your company does and what you're looking for from the person you're reaching out to, but don't go too long. Like, maybe 1-2 sentences max. "Our company is seeking to disrupt X industry through disintermediation, and I thought you looked like the badass engineer who could help us take our user interface to the next level."