Talk to anyone

Work emails are public, but:

- Often delegated to secretaries or assistants

- Use filters

- Bombarded with hundreds of emails

There are a few things you can do.

Easiest is to use a email searching extension. Clearbit Connect is the extension of choice for me, but there are plenty of alternatives and it is never bad to try different competitors.

If they are a current USC student,

Use USC Student Directory:

Find the school email, major, and school of any USC student

https://uscdirectory.usc.edu/web/directory/student/

Other schools should have a similar service.

To find a current founder’s email, they are usually name@companysite.com just so it’s easy to remember for others. Fortunately, this makes it easy to guess. You can use this spreadsheet to find permutations of these emails.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jqpUDJeo3E0M2OIXhYe_FCn4QphDs-Yh/view?usp=sharing

To find out the one you want, you can use services like hunter.io to have a server verify it is a legitimate email. Hunter.io can also list all emails based off a website.

hunter.io

Another way is crawling through the WHOIS of their personal website. This is user data from their website domain, even if there is no website up. Again, guess with their name for the domain or look it up online/on their social media.

WHOIS.com

Still nothing?

Check username patterns. Often times, their instagram, facebook username, twitter are the same. Sometimes, their LinkedIn profile may have their email in a button called see contact info.

Inputting the email into gmail, you can often wait for a thumbnail of their profile picture and cross reference it.

Of course, after this, you can truly verify by sending the email