That's just really not true. Especially not in a professional setting.
I deal with this personally all the time, as the founder of a national conference series. We reach out to people cold all the time and invite them to prominent speaking roles. Sometimes people are surprised to hear from us or don't think of themselves as public speakers but we're most certainly real and serious.
I get it the other way all the time now too, people reaching out wanting to partner, work together, have us write articles about them, whatever.
These are all super common use cases. There's a lot of business that gets started by an introduction from a random person on the internet.
As is true for most HN posts, I should have prefaced with “In most but not all cases...”
People who do not happen to be conference organizers or frequent recipients of legitimate cold calls should, in most cases, ignore unsolicited messages from strangers.
Yeah, so I have published a few journal articles. Nary a day goes by without receiving multiple emails begging for me to speak at a conference (invariably in China), or submit another article to their particular journal (that I have never heard of before). So, you can understand why cold introduction emails tend to get redirected to /dev/null.
I deal with this personally all the time, as the founder of a national conference series. We reach out to people cold all the time and invite them to prominent speaking roles. Sometimes people are surprised to hear from us or don't think of themselves as public speakers but we're most certainly real and serious.
I get it the other way all the time now too, people reaching out wanting to partner, work together, have us write articles about them, whatever.
These are all super common use cases. There's a lot of business that gets started by an introduction from a random person on the internet.