SEND ME AN EMAIL

My email address is stig@theinvestorspodcast.com, and I’m on LinkedIn. I strongly prefer email and LinkedIn as a communication method over other services.

• Feel free to send me an email. My rough estimate is that my team and I read approximately 90% of it, and someone on my team or I get back to approximately 50%. (See below for tips on that.)
• I like meeting people at conferences. If I am at a conference as a guest or speaker, my explicit goal is to talk to you. Come up and introduce yourself. Please do not ask me directly or indirectly if you can be a guest on one of our podcasts. I want to speak with you because you are you, not because we should be doing business together.
• I enjoy meeting people in my city. I live in Aarhus, Denmark. Let me know if you’re up for coffee, and please email me an agenda before we meet.

And, for completeness:

• I’m an introvert. If I seem a little overwhelmed when we meet in person, it’s likely because I am. While I enjoy meeting people, it drains my energy, and at times, I can feel anxiety around crowds. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like you. It simply means that my social battery is low lower than many others.
• Please don’t sell me anything. My general rule is to only conduct business with people I know well. If you’re reading this, chances are that we’re not (yet) friends. Also, please don’t befriend me because you want to sell something later.

GENERIC TIPS FOR EMAILING ME

• If I don’t respond, that is probably because of me, not because of you. Trust me, I don’t hate your guts. Do the math: your email – 5 minutes; my life – 1,440 minutes a day. If I don’t write back, the overwhelmingly likely reason is that something in the other 1,435 minutes caused it rather than anything you said or didn’t say or anything about you personally. Maybe I’m working on a project; maybe I’m out with friends and family; maybe I’m buried deep in a book. Feel free to ping me later and ask if I had time to consider the first email! Again, you won’t annoy me. The absolute worst-case scenario is that I’m still busy. But as you might have noticed, I have a lot of free time, and if you catch me in the middle of it, I will probably write back.
• Asking for introductions to people is tricky. I may know some people who would be useful to you. Pretend I have an account of reputational capital with each of them. Introducing anyone to them is a draw on that account. If the introduction goes really, really well, I get the capital back with a bonus. If, on the other hand, I overdraw my account, then they stop reading my email. This means that a) I want to introduce the right people to the right people, but b) I don’t want to introduce someone I don’t know well to anybody—in particular, to anybody who a lot of people are trying to get in contact with.
• Concision is a virtue. Obviously, I’m terrible at it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. The optimum length for a first email is probably about a paragraph, and the optimum number of decisions you ask me to make in an email is one.