Practice
Double opt-in intro
A double opt-in intro is an introduction made only after both people have separately agreed to it — so nobody gets an unwanted obligation in their inbox.
The problem the practice solves is the blind intro: an email that connects two people without warning, leaving the more senior or busier party publicly cornered — ignore it and look rude, or engage and donate an hour they never offered. The double opt-in fixes the asymmetry by inserting one step: before connecting anyone, the introducer privately asks the receiving party whether they want the intro at all, usually by forwarding a short blurb the requester wrote. Only after a yes does the actual introduction email go out.
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson named and popularized the convention in a 2009 post on his blog AVC, and it spread from venture circles into general professional etiquette. The insight that made it stick is that an introduction is not a gift to both parties — it's a request made of one of them, and requests deserve the option of a quiet no.
In practice the whole protocol rides on one artifact: the forwardable email. The requester writes a few self-contained lines — who they are, why this specific person, what they're asking for — which the connector forwards with a one-line endorsement. If the answer is no, the requester simply never hears the details, and no feelings are bruised. The friction is two messages instead of one; the payoff is that every intro that does happen starts with a recipient who actively chose it.
Origin: Fred Wilson's 2009 AVC post
Wilson's position as a New York VC put him at the receiving end of a constant stream of intro requests, and his November 2009 post "The Double Opt-In Introduction" codified how he wanted them handled: check with the person being asked, get their consent, and only then connect. The post is short, but it landed because it gave a name and a script to a courtesy many busy people already wished existed. Within a few years the phrase had become standard vocabulary in startup ecosystems — founders learned to write forwardable emails, and "happy to intro, double opt-in as always" became a stock reply. The convention's spread is a nice case study in etiquette-as-protocol: one clearly written rule, adopted because it cheaply protects the scarcest resource in any network — the attention of its most-connected members.
The forwardable email, step by step
Write it as if the target will read it with zero context, in five to eight lines. Line one: who you are, anchored in something verifiable. Lines two and three: why this specific person — show you know their work, not just their title. Lines four and five: the concrete ask, scoped small (a 20-minute call about X beats "would love to pick your brain"). Close by making refusal easy: "and if now's a bad time, absolutely no hard feelings." Send that to your connector with a one-line note: "Would you be comfortable forwarding this to Maria? If not, no worries at all." The connector forwards, adds their endorsement, and waits. Two rules keep you welcome: never follow up more than once on a pending opt-in, and never ask who said no.
Keeping pending intros from falling through
The double opt-in's weakness is operational: with three parties and two consent steps, threads stall silently — the connector forgets to forward, the target's yes arrives while you're traveling, or you get the intro and let it age a week, which quietly insults both other parties. This is bookkeeping, and bookkeeping is what a personal CRM is for. Turn a pending intro into a note on the contact and a reminder a few days out: who you asked, for an intro to whom, and on what date. When the intro lands, a journal entry about how the conversation went becomes the raw material for the loop-closing thank-you to your connector — the small act that determines whether there's ever a next intro. Endearist, our own app, is being built around exactly these notes and reminders; it is not released yet.
System reminders: not publicly available yet. Status: planned for v1.
Frequently asked questions
- Why do investors insist on double opt-in introductions?
- Because their inboxes are the bottleneck of their job. A blind intro forces a public choice between rudeness and an unplanned commitment; the double opt-in lets them decline privately, before anyone is watching. It also acts as a filter: a founder who can produce a crisp forwardable email and navigate the protocol has already demonstrated baseline competence and respect for other people's time.
- What should a forwardable email contain?
- Five to eight self-contained lines: who you are with one verifiable anchor, why this specific person rather than anyone with their job title, and one concrete, small ask — a short call, a specific question, feedback on one document. End with an explicit no-pressure exit. It must work standing alone, because the target reads it before they know anything else about you.
- Is a double opt-in always necessary?
- No. Between peers who'd obviously enjoy meeting, or when someone has standing permission — "send me anyone working on this" — a direct intro is fine and faster. The protocol earns its overhead whenever there's an asymmetry: one side is busier, more senior, or being asked for something. When in doubt, ask first; nobody has ever resented being given the chance to say yes.
Last updated: 2026-09-30
Tend relationships, not records.
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