I’m a biz-dev-minded CEO. That’s what I learned how to do in my time at Benzinga and that’s what I spend most of my time on at Fetchnotes — reaching out to people for advice, PR, investment (though that always comes through referrals), etc. Consequently, I find myself emailing people I don’t know on a daily basis. Recently, I learned about a neat hack you can use to find anyone’s email address.

Rapportive is a plug-in for gmail that gives you social data on the people you email. So when I type in “alex.schiff1128@gmail.com” it shows my photo, recent tweets, LinkedIN profile, etc. It would be nice if I used gmail’s web interface, but I need a desktop client to stay productive. It looks like this:

The best part? If it doesn’t recognize the email address as real, it shows a ? and no data. That means that you can just guess email addresses until the right person shows up in the sidebar. Again, I’ll use myself as an example. First you try alex.schiff@fetchnotes.com, and see this:

Since nothing shows up, you try again with alex@fetchnotes.com:

Bingo! Now you know that’s the right email address and you can reach out to me about investing $10 million in my company Fetchnotes at a $100M valuation. I have yet to find a person for whom this doesn’t work. Remember, use this power for good and not evil. Or if you decide to use it for evil, just don’t tell anyone you learned it from me.

Note: Special thanks to Cecilia Haig from Box for showing me this hack!