Most failed warm intros die after the connector says yes.

Two minutes to say yes, two weeks to send nothing

A founder you met at a dinner last spring sends a message. They're raising a seed round, and they'd love an intro to the angel you mentioned that night. You reply inside a minute. Happy to, leave it with me.

Two days later you open a new email, put both names on the To line, and stop.

What does the founder's company actually do? You remember the energy and the general shape of the pitch. Something in logistics. Maybe freight software, maybe a marketplace. You know the angel better, but you can't recall which stages they write checks into, or whether they were the one who said they were finished with marketplaces. Your contacts app offers a name, a title, a company and a phone number.

None of that is an introduction.

So the draft sits. A week later the founder follows up, politely. And now an intro you were glad to make carries a whiff of reluctance it never deserved.

The Empty Bridge

Call it the Empty Bridge: a connector who agreed to link two people and holds too little on either of them to make the case.

Most writing about warm intros assumes the weak link is the ask. Was it specific? Did the requester explain why this person? Did they send something forwardable? Those questions matter, and they're well covered. But plenty of intros die with a perfectly good ask sitting in the connector's inbox, because the connector can't vouch for what they don't remember.

The failure gets locked in long before the blank email. It happened at the original meetings, when the conversation was rich and the only record of it was a business card and a vague sense of liking the person. By the time anyone asks for a bridge, the material to build it is gone, or it never got written down.

So this is a capture problem. Writing advice arrives too late to touch it.

How do you write a warm introduction email?

The standard answer is sound. Get double opt-in so nobody's ambushed. Keep it short. Give each person a line on who the other is and a reason the conversation is worth their time. Then step out of the thread.

Every version of that advice quietly assumes you have the raw material. Look at what a good intro has to say: what this person does, in a sentence you'd stand behind; what they're working on right now; why the other person, specifically; and how you know them. A typical contact record covers maybe one of those.

The common workaround is to ask the requester for a forwardable blurb. Do it. But a blurb only covers one side, and it's the requester's own pitch. A warm intro beats a cold email because the connector's judgment rides along with it. Paste someone's self-description under "you two should talk" and you've stripped out the one thing you were asked to contribute.

What a credible intro needs, and what most records hold

Search how to write a warm introduction and you'll find templates and etiquette guides. Nearly all of them are written for the person asking, or for a connector who already knows both people well. Founder threads on r/ycombinator ask how to get warm intros. The connector's side, after the yes, gets far less attention.

The gap is easier to see side by side. Below: what the email has to say, what a scanned card or a contact added in a hurry usually holds, and what you'd have if you'd spent thirty seconds noting the conversation while it was still fresh.

Same request, two connectors

Go back to the founder and the angel from the opening. Call them Dana and Sam.

A connector with an Empty Bridge writes something like: "Sam, meet Dana. Dana's building a startup in logistics and is raising. Thought you two should connect." Sam reads that as a favor being discharged. Nothing in it says the connector holds an opinion.

A connector who captured context at the spring dinner writes: "Sam, Dana's building dispatch software for regional trucking fleets and is raising a seed round. You told me in March you wanted more vertical software and fewer marketplaces. This is the former. Dana was the most specific founder I talked to all night."

Both drafts are plain prose. Neither one shows off. The gap is three facts and a judgment, and every one of them was available at the dinner and gone by summer.

Sam answers the second email. The first gets a polite "happy to chat sometime" that goes nowhere, and Dana never learns why.

If the failure happens at capture, three habits change

First, you stop treating intros as a writing task. Templates help with tone and length. They can't supply facts you didn't keep.

Second, you capture every meeting as if it might turn into a bridge. A useful note answers three questions: what do they do, what are they looking for, and what have they said they're done with. That last one prevents the worst intros, the kind that waste an investor's time on a category they already ruled out.

Third, you get honest at the moment of the yes. If a request comes in and you can't say two specific things about the person, you have two good options. Book a fifteen-minute call to refill the record, or decline. Agreeing and then stalling is worse than either. It costs the asker weeks, and it spends your credibility on silence.

An intro is only as warm as what you remember about both people.

Build the bridge before anyone asks for it

Whether you can write the intro gets decided in the original conversation, often months earlier. That's the moment Met is built for. Scan the card, then add the context in your own words while you're still standing there: what they do, what they want, what they're done with. Event Mode keeps the room captured while you keep talking.

Months later, when the request lands, the record holds the sentence you'd have forgotten. Met's follow-up drafts start from that captured context, so the email you open has something in it besides two names. And your contacts stay in your own iCloud, not on someone else's server, which matters when the notes include your candid read on people.

Say yes to the next intro already knowing what goes in the first line.