A simple hack to grow your investor network

You’re a startup founder, a partner in a fund, or an investor relations professional, and you want to meet investors to raise capital. What you really want to do is to grow your personal network of investors with valuable contacts that not only could invest right now, but bring value over the long term by making introductions or through future investments. The place to do that is LinkedIn. 

The value of increasing your 2nd level LinkedIn connections 

Reaching out to anyone on LinkedIn is much easier and likelier to succeed if that person is your 2nd-level contact on LinkedIn, meaning that you have at least one common 1st-level connection. It is easier not only because people are more likely to accept a connection request from someone who is their 2nd level contact, but also because LinkedIn makes it difficult for you to reach out, repeatedly, to people that have no common ground with you, i.e. 3rd level contacts. So when you are running a search for investors on LinkedIn, the first step is to limit the search to your 2nd-level contacts. 

Having a bigger number of 2nd level contacts means your search results will be larger, and will be able to find a bigger number of high-quality investors, tailored to your needs, that you can reach out to effectively. So a simple way to improve your chances of finding qualified investors and connecting with them is to increase your number of 2nd level contacts, and specifically, 2nd level contacts that are relevant investors. 

How to grow your investor network by adding to your 2nd-level contacts pool on LinkedIn

You can grow the number of your 2nd level investor contacts in two simple ways:
The first is to aim to grow the number of 1st level contacts you have. Even people that seem to be, from a professional perspective, currently irrelevant to your goals, might be connected to investors. So consider accepting all those pending connection requests you received on LinkedIn, even if you know that means you’ll be pitched for something you don’t need right now. Just ignore it, or give a polite “no, thanks.” It’s not so hard to do. 

The second, more effective way, is to actively seek people that have a large number of followers on LinkedIn and seem to interact with investors regularly. Now just send them a connection request. Yes, even just a blank one - if someone has a lot of connections on LinkedIn, it usually means they, too, want to grow their network, do so actively, and will value adding you in as well. 

(BTW - one such person you can connect with is me, Tzakhi - I basically accept everyone, especially founders and investors, into my LinkedIn network, for the reasons mentioned above. I am also personally connected to many investors, angels, VC partners, and more. )

As for the difference between followers and contacts on LinkedIn - don’t worry, a large number of followers almost always comes with a large amount of connections. What we want is more than 5,000 followers, but not more than 25,000 followers (people with such large followings might not accept your connection requests). 

You can find these by running a search on regular LinkedIn (“VC + food-tech”, for example), looking at high-performing posts, and connecting with the people who post them, who usually will have a large, relevant network. 

TLDR - a simple hack to grow your investor network

Connect with a few influencers that are connected to many investors, and then run your search for 2nd level investors, and you’ll have a bigger, more effective pool of potential investors to screen and reach out to.