STQCap Growth Panel
Outbound · Round 2

The Engineers Play

Skip the swamped CEOs. Go after early and senior engineers at Series B+ US tech companies heading toward IPO, where the equity is real, the concentration risk is real, and the inbox is not a war zone. Round 2 starts LinkedIn-only and manual: connect with no note, then one warm human message, then value, then a call. Email layers in as phase 2 once the ball is rolling. The wedge stays the same: liquidity and diversification without selling.

STQ
19engineer leads
8companies
19/19US-located
~90more in pipeline
24credits used
Section 1
Companies — who we are going for
The target is the person, not the logo. At a Series B to D company that just repriced upward, the first ~100 engineers hold the most equity per head and the sharpest concentration problem: most of their net worth is becoming one illiquid stock, with a tax bill forming underneath it for the day they can sell. They are senior enough to have real money at stake and junior enough that no wealth manager is in their inbox yet. That is the opening the CEOs do not give us.

We picked engineer-dense companies (AI infrastructure, fintech, deep tech, defense, energy) and pulled real, current engineering staff. Biotech was deprioritised because it skews to scientists over software. Every company below is verified by its LinkedIn company ID, so we never send "congrats on your equity" to the wrong firm.
Section 2
The flow — LinkedIn only, three personal messages per lead
Day 0

Visit + connect

Profile visit, connection request with NO note. The messages do the work after they accept.

Day 1–2 after accept

M1 · the human one

Warm, zero ask, zero finance. A checkable fact from THEIR profile tied to the company mission. Written per person from their real LinkedIn data.

Day 4–5

M2 · the value turn

"Different topic, feel free to ignore." Their specific equity situation, the wedge in one idea, one small ask: want me to walk you through it?

Day 9–10

M3 · the call

Honest filter (who this is NOT for), then the ask: 15 minutes with a fiduciary before the first liquidity window. Junior leads get "you don't need me yet."

Any moment

Reply = stop

Any reply kills the script and starts a real conversation. Akiva takes over. Nothing automated lands after a human speaks.

Every lead below carries their own M1, M2, and M3 in the amber strip under their row, each with a copy button. The mold for M1 is a real message that got a reply: "Aaron, as someone who earns almost exclusively in stablecoins I long for the day when every merchant in the world is using Silo." A fact plus a mission, no ask. Akiva: read each message aloud before sending; if a line is not something you would say, tweak it. The facts underneath are real. The same 19 sequences as a lemlist-ready file: download the CSV ↓

Name Role (headline) Company Sector Location Trigger LinkedIn

Sourced live from LinkedIn via LinkdAPI (current-employee filter on the verified company ID). Real profiles, not search guesses. Titles are their own headlines. ~90 more engineers matched across these eight companies, available on request. Sequences written 2026-07-05 from full profiles (career path, education, recent posts): nothing generic, Daniel Parker's M2 knows he holds SpaceX paper from seven years there, Ben Geist's knows he can price a collar himself from DRW. Flags for Akiva: two M1s reference your PIMCO past (Ed Shrager, Ben Geist), confirm you want that used; the junior leads (Aaryam, Chandra, Karan) get an honest "you don't need me yet" M3 on purpose, that honesty is the brand. (Sunny Kudum was dropped 2026-07-05: intern, likely no equity.) Full profile digests: stqcap/preipo-outbound-v1/profile-digests.md.

Section 3
Rollout — three phases

Manual first, automate what proves itself, add channels last. Each phase starts only when the previous one earns it.

$0 · now

Phase 1 — Manual send

  • 15-20 connection requests per day from Akiva's profile, no note, working down the leads table by company.
  • On accept: copy M1 from the lead's amber strip, send. M2 on Day 4-5, M3 on Day 9-10. Any reply ends the script and starts a conversation.
  • Track in Wealthbox: sent, accepted, replied, call booked. Acceptance under ~30% means fix targeting, not volume.
  • Akiva keeps posting organically 2-3x a week; a warm profile lifts acceptance more than any tool.
~$99/mo

Phase 2 — lemlist, LinkedIn only (when replies prove the copy and volume outgrows manual)

  • Import the CSV. The campaign is four steps built once: invite (no note) → {{m1}}{{m2}}{{m3}}. Every lead's row carries their whole sequence; lemlist pauses a lead on any reply.
  • Same caps as manual: ~20 invites/day, working hours, no second automation tool on the account.
  • Eyes open: all LinkedIn automation violates LinkedIn's terms of service. Managed risk, never zero, and the account at stake is Akiva's. That is why this phase waits for proof.
  • Next ~90 leads: same pipeline (LinkdAPI profiles → digests → personal sequences → human skim → CSV).
~+$100/mo

Phase 3 — Add email

  • Email sequence already written and parked in stqcap/lemlist-outbound-v2/ (the mirror → the math → the house → closing the file).
  • Infrastructure first: separate sending domain (never stqcap.com), SPF/DKIM/DMARC, 2-3 weeks of lemwarm warm-up. Start the domain the day Phase 3 is decided; the warm-up is the clock.
  • Enrich emails into the same CSV (Apollo, verify, drop risky), 20-40 sends/day per mailbox, plain text.
  • Same lemlist campaign grows email steps alongside the LinkedIn ones; replies anywhere pause everything.
WIP

Footnote — Round 3 sourcing: the Form D sweep (2026-07-05)

While Round 2 waits on approval, we built the discovery engine for the next target list. Every US private raise must file a Form D with the SEC within 15 days, whether or not the press covers it. We swept the last 45 days of filings: 4,722 Form Ds → dropped 2,785 pooled investment funds → dropped everything under $10M and non-US → 529 real companies that just raised, of which 104 are tech by the SEC's own industry field. Sanity check: the sweep independently rediscovered Baseten ($1.1B sold, filed June 30) and Ramp ($782M, June 17), the companies this page already targets. It also surfaced raises almost nobody is covering: Supabase $440M, Kraken (as "Payward") $354M, CesiumAstro $271M, Generalist AI $364M.

  • The full candidate list (104 tech + 425 maybe) — each with amount sold vs offered, state, SEC filing link, and a one-click search link.
  • Why this matters: a fresh raise means repriced equity and employees whose paper just got heavier: the exact trigger this whole page is built on, at companies with no wealth manager in their inbox.
  • Next steps (not started): qualify the 104 via LinkedIn (headcount, engineer density, US) into a ranked shortlist; top names go into Liquidity Watch tracking; the best fresh-raise names become outbound Round 3 companies through the same pipeline as this page (profiles → digests → personal sequences). Then add the event-driven news sweep and the Forge/EquityZen secondary-market check.
  • Free and repeatable: the sweep costs $0 (SEC data), runs weekly in ~2 minutes, and the script lives at stqcap/liquidity-watch/formd-sweep.js.