How do you handle cold email in EU countries where commercial emails need prior consent — think Germany, Spain, etc.? Do you skip email and use LinkedIn ads, calls, or is there a compliant way to follow your playbook?

How do you handle cold email in the EU? It's really not all that difficult. One, and I'm not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice, but when's the last time you jaywalked? Congratulations, you have essentially contravened a law or a rule or a regulation. Cold email is a lot like jaywalking. If you're good at what you do, if you look left and look right and there's no cars oncoming, nobody's really going to care. These laws are also written in such a vague way that if you take their definitions at their vaguest, you're basically always going to be at the behest or at the whims of the legislators. And so if you send really high-quality customized cold emails that provide value to the people reading them, and they don't come across as spam and don't seem like a big issue, you're almost certainly going to be fine. And what's interesting is Germany, Spain, a lot of these other EU countries are starved for cold email right now. If you take the same campaign you're running in the United States, then localize it a little bit — the language is quite similar, but still respect cultural norms of deference and so on — and then run it in Germany, you'll get like a four to five x reply rate. Same thing in Spain, same thing in the Netherlands. These are all places where people are starved for this sort of outreach, and they want to connect and grow their businesses and network. They just don't currently have a way to, because regulation has a stranglehold on a lot of what previously would have been serendipitous. It's unfortunate that the EU has strangleholded people to that degree, but they definitely have. People now are so afraid to even send an email to somebody that they don't know, because they think SWAT teams are going to break in through their windows and get on the floor — 'this is the guy that sent the cold email, loser, I hate people like you.' Obviously that's ridiculous.