Emailing the CEO feels like a long shot.
At a 20-person startup it isn't. The CEO is often the person who buys, and they read their own inbox.
The hard part is the address. So here's what I've learned from the contact data behind Adamlead, and seven ways to find a CEO's email, from free to paid.
What our data says about CEO emails
Adamlead tracks startups that raised a round. As of October 26, 2026, it has 2,104 verified emails for founders and CEOs. A few things stand out.
Most of them use their first name. 65% of those 2,104 addresses are just firstname@company.com. Then:
| Format | Example | Share of verified founder emails |
|---|---|---|
| first@ | jane@acme.com | 64.6% |
| first.last@ | jane.doe@acme.com | 11.0% |
| flast@ | jdoe@acme.com | 9.4% |
| Something else | 9.7% | |
| firstlast@ | janedoe@acme.com | 1.7% |
| firstl@ | janed@acme.com | 1.5% |
| last@ | doe@acme.com | 1.0% |
It makes sense. The founder set up the domain on day one, and they took the best address.
Almost every CEO email we hold is verified. Of the 1,158 CEO contacts with an email, 1,109 (96%) are verified. CEO addresses tend to be real and stable, because they're the first ones made and the last ones deleted.
"CEO" is written a dozen different ways. The most common titles on file are "Founder" (374), "Co-Founder" (309), "Chief Executive Officer" (230), "CEO" (222) and "Founder & CEO" (141), then "Co-Founder & CEO", "Founder and CEO", "CEO & Co-Founder", "Founder/CEO" and more. If you search a database for "CEO" only, you miss a lot of them. Search for "founder" too.
7 ways to find a CEO's email
1. Guess the format, then check it
Free, and it works more often than you'd think.
- Find the CEO's name on the company's About page or LinkedIn.
- Try firstname@domain first. Going by the table above, that's right about two times in three at a startup.
- Check it before you send (see the last section). If it fails, try first.last@ and then flast@.
Those three formats cover 85% of the verified founder emails we have.
2. Look at the company's own website
Founders put their email in more places than you'd expect: the contact page, the press page, the footer of a blog post, the privacy policy ("questions? email jane@..."), the security.txt file, or a "careers" note saying "email me directly".
Even if the CEO's address isn't there, someone else's often is. One real address tells you the format for everyone.
3. Read what they've published
Search the founder's name with the domain: "jane doe" "@acme.com". Podcast show notes, conference speaker pages, open source commits, newsletter sign-offs and old press releases often have it.
For technical founders, public code commits sometimes show the email they commit with. Be thoughtful with this one: a personal address found this way isn't an invitation to sell to it.
4. Use the press contact
A funding announcement usually comes with a media contact. At a small startup that's often the founder, or someone who sits next to them. A short, relevant note to that address can get forwarded.
5. Use an email finder
Tools like Hunter, Apollo and Lusha take a name and a domain and return an address, usually with a confidence score. Most have a free tier with a small monthly allowance, which is plenty if you only need a few CEOs a week.
The quality varies by company size. These tools are strongest where lots of people have been seen with the same format, so a 10-person startup with a new domain is harder for them than a big company.
6. Start from a list that already has them
If the CEOs you want share something, like "startups that just raised a Series A", it's faster to start from a list built around that than to look up companies one at a time.
That's what Adamlead does for funded startups: every company comes with its round and its decision-makers, ranked, and the CEO's email with a status and a confidence score. As of October 26, 48% of the companies with contacts on file have a CEO among them, and 46% have a verified CEO email. Not every company, but it's close to half of them done before you start. The latest funded startups are here.
7. Ask someone
Underrated. If you know anyone at the company, or an investor in it, ask for an intro instead of an address. A warm intro beats a perfect cold email every time.
Check the email before you send
A wrong address isn't just a wasted email. Bounces hurt your sender reputation, and enough of them push your next emails to spam for everyone.
Before you send to a guessed address:
- Check the domain takes email. It needs an MX record. Of the 2,823 startup domains we've checked, 99% have one. The 1% that don't will bounce everything.
- Know who hosts it. 72% of those startup domains use Google Workspace and 16% use Microsoft 365. Both accept mail for real addresses, but both are good at spotting bulk senders.
- Run it through a verifier. Our free email verifier checks the format, the domain and the mail server for you. Paid verifiers go further and ask the mail server whether the mailbox exists.
- Send fewer, better emails. Ten emails to CEOs that each say something specific about their company will do better than 200 that don't.
What to write once you have it
CEOs get a lot of email. The ones that get answered are short, about them, and easy to say yes to:
- One line that shows you know what they do (a recent round, a launch, a hire).
- One line on what you do for companies like theirs.
- One small ask. "Worth a 15-minute call next week?" is fine.
No attachments, no "just following up" three days later. One follow-up a week later is plenty.
How do you usually find the CEO's email: guess and check, or a tool?