June 30, 2026
Cold Emails, Hot Mess
Show HN: I made a heatmap of 3400 VCs who are open to cold emails
A map of investors ready for cold emails sparked confusion, suspicion, and roast-level nitpicks
TLDR: A maker launched a map of 3,400 investors said to be open to cold emails, aiming to help founders find funding leads. But commenters fixated on broken links, misplaced map points, and doubts about where the data came from, turning the launch into a credibility debate.
A founder posted a Hacker News project claiming to show a live heatmap of 3,400 venture capital investors who are supposedly open to cold emails — basically, money people you can contact even if they don’t know you. Sounds like startup catnip. But the community reaction? Instant chaos.
Instead of celebrating a treasure map to funding, commenters turned into a jury. One person bluntly reported, “Link does not work,” which is already brutal when your whole project is… a link. Then came the geography detectives: multiple users said the map looked plain wrong, with Boston apparently drifting off to some mystery location and datapoints shifted miles away. That kicked off the biggest mood of the thread: is this useful, or just a flashy-looking mess?
Others were not here for the drama-heavy presentation at all. One commenter said they’d rather just get a simple list than stare into what they memorably called an “ominous heatmap.” That phrase basically stole the show. And then the trust questions arrived: where did this data even come from? Was it carefully gathered, or just scraped together for attention? In other words, the comments turned a startup tool launch into a classic internet pile-on: part bug report, part credibility check, part comedy roast. The map was supposed to point founders toward investors — but the real action was the crowd asking whether the map itself had any idea where it was.
Key Points
- •The post presents a live heatmap.
- •The heatmap covers 3,400 VC contacts.
- •The contacts are described as open to cold emails.
- •The visualization shows density of contacts and hubs geographically.
- •Users can zoom in to view individual firm points.