In reviewing submitted business plans, what kind of submissions get discarded right away, and which ones get the most attention? — Victor Polyushko

Let me save you a lot of time: Don’t spend your time on a business plan! Thirty-plus page business plans simply aren’t read anymore. My recommendation would be to spend time talking to potential customers and solidifying your product/market fit, rather than conjecturing about a five-year business plan. We usually receive ideas in the form of a tight 5–15 page slide deck and/or a two-page executive summary with key details and vision. You can actually hack together a demo product these days in the time folks used to spend drafting a business plan.

In terms of “submission” of the exec summary , find an entrepreneur we have worked with in the past or a friend that can give you a warm intro to an investor at the firm. Cold emails almost never succeed. Part of it is just the sheer volume we receive, but the other part is that networking is critical for your overall success. If you can’t network into a warm VC intro, then it’ll be hard for you to get warm intros to customer prospects, future employees, etc. Warm intros always go a long way, and we read 100% of quality referrals and meet with most of them. — Bryan Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Ventures