Investors reading this: do you think cold emails and referrals are equivalent in terms of deal origination, or do you stick to referrals only? Please also mention your geography.
For VC funds almost all deal origination is referral or outbound, virtually none is cold inbound.
For seed accelerators the majority is cold inbound.
500Startups sits in a slightly odd category between those two so it's behaviour is likely to be unusual in any case.
But she makes a good point about the quality of referrer as well, who gives you the referral to a fund makes a huge difference to how much attention you'll get. As a fund if you treat all referrers as equivalent then you're inevitably going to get a lot of junk (anyone who works in VC has a huge network).
Some funds go so far as having formal categorisation of referrers (platinum, gold, etc.) based upon the quality of their dealflow and rewarding them based upon that.