Image Provided by Shutterstock

Eric Friedman, a friend of mine at Union Square Ventures, wrote a post awhile back about domain discrimination. Domain discrimination is the act by which tech snobs judge people based upon email domain. While at first I thought this was merely a funny concept, I now believe that this is a fairly yet prevalent (albeit minor) form of discrimination in the tech community.

To be clear, while Eric goes on to provide insight about numerous considerations for creating a professional email address, in this post I am referring solely to which email service provider you choose to use (e.g., Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail or other). I believe that this is one basis by which members of the tech community form first impressions.

Ultimately, I suspect that this judgment comes from the view that your email domain time stamps the extent to which you are current with the latest technologies. Since many would argue that email service providers have not evolved substantially from their initial offerings, they have become increasingly dated and represent somewhat clear generations in the evolution of email technology. As a result, the logic follows as such: if you’re using an older platform, you’re likely using a service with less functionality and therefore are seen by bleeding edge technology adopters to be behind, outdated and not as technologically savvy.

It is worth noting, however, that email addresses using company or private domains appear to be well respected. The judgment appears to be limited to the decision to use a less technologically advanced service over a more advanced once – especially when they’re both free.

I recognize that for many the choice to stay on one email platform was merely an attempt to avoid the pain of informing all of your contacts about your new email address.  I believe, however, that the perception remains.

I don’t have a good solution for changing this mechanism for forming opinions, but I do think it’s worthwhile to understand. While in the venture capital decision making process this topic receives very little consideration, I suspect that it does inevitably play a very small role in the first impression you make on many technology-focused VCs. When you submit an executive summary from a very outdated email platform, some of these VCs take notice, consciously or not.

As such, you may want to signal your tech savvy by using one of the more modern email platforms. Doing so may or may not help you make a good first impression, but it can’t hurt.