A lot of people are trying the "don't apply, email the founders" approach right now: watch for startups that just raised or are hiring, then write a short email to the founder. The hard part is the email address.

I checked 80 startups that are hiring right now (mostly Y Combinator companies) and tried to find an address for one founder at each. Here's what actually worked.

1. Most founders have published their email somewhere

For 43 of the 80, I found an address the founder had published themselves. Where it was:

  • Y Combinator pages and Hacker News: 13. YC launch posts often end with "reach out at …", and founders post their address in "Launch HN" and "Who is hiring" threads.
  • The company's own website: about 10. Team page, about page, footer, or the job post itself ("send your CV to …").
  • Everywhere else: press releases about the funding round, Crunchbase, research papers (founders from labs put their email on papers), podcast show notes, personal websites, and old copies of the site on the Wayback Machine.

I didn't need LinkedIn for any of them.

Searches that help:

  • "@company.com" plus the founder's name
  • the company name plus "launch" or "Launch HN"
  • the company name plus "careers" or "hiring", then read the job post to the end

2. If you can't find it, guess firstname@

Of the 43 published addresses, 38 were just the first name (jane@company.com). One was first.last@. The rest used a nickname or initials. At a small startup, firstname@ is the best single guess by a long way.

Before you send to a guess:

  • Check the domain receives mail. On Mac or Linux run nslookup -type=mx company.com (or use any free MX checker). If no mail servers come back, the address can't work.
  • Check which domain they use for email. Some startups have the website on one domain (.ai, .to) and email on another. Any address on their site tells you which one.
  • If it bounces, try first.last@ once, then move on.

3. Pick the right founder

  • CEO for most roles, CTO for engineering roles.
  • Use the team page, and be careful: investors, advisors and customer testimonials ("…says Jane Smith, CEO of SomeOtherCo") sit on the same pages and are easy to mistake for the team.

4. Keep the email short

Five lines is plenty:

Subject: [Role] at [Company] Hi [Name], I saw you're hiring a [role]. I've [one specific, relevant thing you did, with a number]. [One line on why this company: something they built or shipped.] Happy to do a short trial task. My CV: [link] [Your name]

Write it yourself. Short and slightly rough beats polished and generic.

5. If you have a long list

By hand this takes 5–10 minutes per company. I built a tool on Apify that does the first pass for a list: paste the company websites and it reads each site's team and about pages, pulls out the founder names, and gives the likely email with a confidence label ("high" when the address is on their site, "low" when it's a firstname@ guess on a domain that receives mail).

It isn't magic. On 5 startups that launched on YC this week, it found a founder or a founder's own address for 2 of them (on one, its guess matched the address the CEO had posted on his launch page), found nothing for 2, and one site didn't load. I use it to get through the list fast, then spend the manual searching on the companies I care most about.

It's here if useful: Founder Email Finder on Apify. It costs about $1.50 per 1,000 websites, and Apify's free monthly credit covers a few thousand. Disclosure: I built it.

Be decent about it

  • Around 20 emails a day, each one written for that company.
  • One follow-up after a week, then stop.
  • If you're writing to people in Europe or the UK, keep it relevant to their business and stop if they ask.

Good luck with the search.