Brooklyn VC says enough with the intros, just email me

For those looking for funding for their startup, just getting the ear of a venture capitalist, let alone a meeting, can be an enormous hurdle. Entrepreneurs go through Rolodexes and LinkedIn profiles trying to find someone who could shoot the potential investor a note introducing them (fawningly, inevitably.)
But one VC is saying it shouldn’t be so hard. Just email him.
“Since LinkedIn treats everyone the same, regardless of strength of connection, you’ll likely wind up asking for an intro from someone really really random — someone who I generally wouldn’t trust to vet my deals for me anyway,” Brooklyn Bridge Ventures’ Charlie O’Donnell wrote in a blog post this weekend. “There’s maybe five or ten people on the face of the earth I’d take a blind intro from. Everyone else doesn’t really increase my interest in a deal.”
O’Donnell has been around in New York tech circles for 15 years. Just about anyone has some level of connection to him.
“You could try and hide your e-mail, make people jump through hoops to get it, but at some point, everyone’s got it again,” he wrote. “Even if not, by making it difficult to contact you, except through trusted introductions, you’re implicitly saying ‘I think my next best deal is going to come from in my circle, as opposed to from outside of it.'”
And that is a big deal. As people like Di-Ann Eisnor of the Brownsville Start Fund said in an interview with Technical.ly Brooklyn, tech funding is consolidated so hard in Manhattan and Silicon Valley because that’s where the on-ramps are. But there is no monopoly on good ideas. Lowering the barriers to entry will inevitably result in ideas that look at the world in a different way, and increase diversity in the field.
“Entrepreneurship is really supposed to be about scarcity and solving problems,” she said. “There are different kinds of entrepreneurs and we have to get back to solving problems. And there are plenty of people who have already identified problems but they don’t have a way to do anything with that.”
So, email O’Donnell. It’s charlie@brooklynbridge.vc. He’d love to hear from you. Or even if he wouldn’t love it, he’ll read it.