The Cold Email
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Cold outreach, despite low odds, can create career-altering opportunities, illustrated by the author's own successes.
Zach Holman attributes three major life changes partly to cold emails or DMs: getting off Carnegie Mellon's waitlist, landing a job at GitHub via a tweet reply, and co-owning a soccer club from a Twitter DM. He acknowledges survivor bias and admits he cannot recall failed cold outreach. He argues the key is to act genuinely, be interested in the recipient, and expect nothing. He also commits to accepting cold emails himself as a way to pay it forward, noting that recipients of cold outreach may one day send their own.
What commenters are saying
Commenters broadly agree that genuine, human-written cold outreach works, but many note the landscape has changed. Several warn that AI-generated cold emails are now obvious and off-putting, with one commenter receiving thousands of identical "Sentence" variants yearly. Practical advice includes being terse, getting to the point in the first sentence, and demonstrating authentic interest. A thread also notes that many supposed "cold" emails are actually responses to public hiring signals (e.g., a tweet or a mailing list post), not truly unsolicited messages. Some express frustration that spam from salespeople and recruiters has made them ignore all cold emails.